Understanding God (1 of a series)

Modern humans have a number of barriers toward understanding God. As a result many have lost their belief, or believe incorrect attributes of God. The only way to really remedy this is to rebuild from the foundation up, which is to provide easy to understand building block pieces to understanding God. Here is the first quick tutorial.

Nowadays the greatest barrier to understanding God is that humans, both individually and as a group, have really forgotten how to be humble. Much of this is because of the "fifteen seconds of fame" syndrome, where due to electronic media, people feel much more in control and much more inflated in their importance than people did in the time before phones, TV, and employee performance reviews. When nearly everyone worked the earth, trying to eke out a living for themselves and their family, it was actually easier for them to understand God from a basis of genuine humility. It is not a coincidence that many people nowadays say they feel "close" to the "spiritual" when they gaze at a mountain. But what do many of them do next? Climb the mountain. Humans, due to their advancement in technology and their perception of themselves as being modern, intellectual, sophisticated, and even "jaded" have developed an eye that "cuts God down to size," whether they mean to do so or not. In other words, they refuse to envision God from a stance of humility, where they understand that God truly is very high above them, that God is beyond complete or even partial comprehension, and that God truly has "capabilities" beyond human understanding.

For example, humans admire super computers, sophisticated games and graphics, intelligent weaponry, grand vistas of nature (especially if they can fly over them or otherwise "conquer" them). Yet many who are lukewarm believers in God reduce God to being "a spirit of connectedness." Huh? You admire creations of human minds and hands for their complexity, yet you do not understand that God's complexity of reality is infinitely greater than those objects? Here is an example that will help you to remedy that mindset problem. I've mentioned it before but will provide it again with more detail.

What does it mean when believers acknowledge that God is all knowing? Too many reduce in their minds that to meaning God "knows when people sin" or "knows when they do a good deed." That is such a human-centric way of viewing God. Because God is all knowing, here is what it means. God knows individually every atom and every subatomic particle that exists in the universe and furthermore, God knows every atom and every subatomic particle and its movement throughout all of history, and God knows where every atom and every subatomic particle will be moving at every point into the infinite future.

So let us suppose you are a man or a woman who committed a sin one day (let's say that you lied about someone and caused them harm) but you also worked generously in a soup kitchen the next day. When you think about God being all-knowing, you tend to think, "Well, God knows I did that sin, and he knows how sorry I am. But he also knows I genuinely care about the people to whom I dedicated my time in the soup kitchen." So as a self centered modern human, you think of God's "all knowing" as being aware of two of your activities, and your thoughts about them.

But here is what many people do not realize. God not only knows those two deeds and your thoughts, but he knows these things, just to provide a very short list. He knows the resulting consequences of that lie that you told into the future, in all its implications. He also knows the resulting implications of your charity into the future. For example, he knows that the person you fed goes on to have children, do this in life, do that in life, and what their children will do, and what their children will do, and what the generations to the end of time will do in that "family tree." This is not to give some huge numinous meaning to the person's lie or his or her good deed. God knows that about everyone, all the way into the past, and all the way into the future, of every deed, action, thought and feeling by humans.

Furthermore, when the man or woman told the lie, just for example of an activity, God knew what every subatomic particle in the universe was doing in space and time all simultaneously. As your lips moved and heat is generated, God knew the motion and position of every electron, of every particle in your mind and body, as you exist. Further, God knows every subatomic particle and what it is doing in the carpet under your feet, into the ground and through the earth, and he knows every particle that ever existed in that place where you stand. For example, God knows every plant, every wind that blew, every grain of soil, every animal that passed in the several billion years that the earth existed, and could tell you that information for any point in time.

Suppose the soup kitchen served a stew with a chopped up carrot in it. God could tell you every subatomic particle in the carrot, the soup, the bowl, the humans, the room, the building, the continent, the world. God could tell you which particles from the sun bombarded the carrot and caused it to grow when it was still a vegetable in the ground. He could tell you how the subatomic particles of carrot will be digested, used in the body, pass out of the body, and where they meander until the end of time.

While that person is lying, or serving the soup to the poor, there are uncountable galaxies with innumerable stars in the rest of the universe. Well, God not only knows how many there are, and what they are "doing" while our example person lies, or serves the poor, but God is aware of every subatomic particle in every feature of the universe, not only where they are now but where they were and where they are going to. For example, as our own earth's sun gives off a ray of light, God knows where every subatomic particle in that ray came from, where it is going, what it will do, and what will become of that particle to the end of time. (And of course God knows what will happen after the end of time, but I use that in my definition of his all knowing because at the end of time, matter and energy all cease their existing form, and obviously God knows what his will is going to be regarding future life structures, if any).

God can look at your tongue, whether it is speaking ill, or saying good things, and not only know why and how all that you say and do, but he knows where every bit of muscle and skin came from, the genetic and subatomic heritage back to the beginning of time, and he knows what will happen to the bead of moisture that moves from one side of your mouth to the other, if it evaporates, where will the subatomic particles go? God knows every bead of sweat that evaporates, where its component particles go, and what will happen to them, all the way to the end of time. God simultaneously and continually knows where the smallest unit of matter or energy came from, where it is going and he also knows the "spaces in between," the vacuum of space, or the uncountable number of individual subatomic particles where they move around in the universe.

Of all the believers of the one true God, the Muslims are the closest to being continually in awareness that God is truly all knowing at the level that I have just described, and of being mindful of the vast gulf between human comprehension of God, and the greatness of God's all knowing. This is one reason that God's attribute of all knowing is constantly referenced in the Qur'an, as a reminder of the gulf between human attempts to understand how wise and all knowing that God is, and that reality.

It is a fatal mistake for modern humans to equate God's all knowing to being either 1) aware of just some set of human activities or 2) being some amorphous spirit of good intentions. God is highly specific all knowing of everything that it is possible or even imaginable to know, at the smallest scale and at the largest scale, at all points in time and in the realm of God that is outside of time. This is why older generations of humans would ponder questions such as "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" These believing traditional humans pondered these questions as acknowledgement that God, not man, knows everything there is to know, even the highly theoretical and silly.

Jesus Christ was a great gift from God to humans, the greatest that ever was, and the greatest that there ever will be. God gave Jesus Christ to humans so that they could have a face to touch, and words to understand. But it is a fatal mistake, one that moderns have fallen into, to conclude that the dimensions of the values and teachings and deeds of Jesus are the dimensions of God. To conclude that the lessons that Jesus taught and the examples that he provided are now the outline of the sketch of God's fullness of being is incredible foolishness. Jesus taught humans how to come to know God, and how to behave. Jesus fulfilled the first Covenant, and brought the New Covenant. Jesus provided the way to salvation. But there is no way that the goodness of the teachings of Jesus translates into humans assuming that they can understand God as being "a spirit that means that we are 'all connected' and should have 'personal values.'"

I am frankly dumbfounded whenever I read babble of that nature, and so I am dumbfounded a lot because moderns are saturated with diminishing God to some amorphous spirit of good will so that humans can cut God down to size and relate God to their own limited inflated attributes. God is not some amorphous spirit of human self actualization that has "values" and realizes that humans are "all connected!" God is the Creator of all that is and ever was or will be, and God is the very real and very aware personage of all of life and also all that is not living. It is precisely because God is so impossible for mere humans to understand that God has sent prophets and also Jesus Christ, his declared Son, in order to prove a pathway to him.

But remember that a pathway to a destination is not the destination. That is like saying that if an astronaut is on a spaceship to visit another galaxy, that the spaceship is the galaxy.

This is why it is essential that as a mental exercise that modern humans regularly remember and contemplate this picture I have shown you of how God knows the past, present and future of every smallest particle of space, matter and time continually, and that is part of what is meant by his "all-knowing-ness."

I hope that you find this helpful.