THE OLD TESTAMENT EVIDENCE OF GOD PERSONIFICATION – A brief Look at the Book of Exodus!
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I have come to realise that a lot of the youths and young people today are being brainwashed into thinking there is no God. They are barely exposed to the word and so I am gonna kick this off by the old testament evidence of our God and His power.
Forgive me if I get a lil deep here and may even be tough…but if I don’t share it how it is how can I be of help. So no cover up….
By the way scrap that image of God the Judge looking at you with a stern eye all the time judging your every action. The scales are weighed more heavily on Humans judging or you judging yourself more harshly, For the God I worship is a Loving, Caring, Giving God!
The Old Testament Evidence presents God as a Harsh Judge…Is HE?
I begin my exploration of Christian theology properly with the concept of God: who God is and what it is that we can say about him. As always, l will attempt to do so in the light of the biblical evidence. The doctrinal significance of the Bible, as we have claimed, is that it witnesses to and becomes, in its own way, a part of God’s disclosure or revelation of himself. The preliminary revelation was given to Israel, and it is Yahweh, the Lord of Israel, who discloses himself ultimately in Jesus Christ, the risen Lord. This, of course, is a Christian contention, and one which is axiomatic for the church. The contemporary American theologian Robert Jenson writes:
“We will follow the one biblical narrative to identify the one biblical God, only as we read the Bible by the purpose by which the church assembled this book in the first place, to be in its entirety and all its parts witness to Jesus’ resurrection and so to a particular God”.
It is this story which constitutes the biblical narrative and it is this continued revelation which forms the unity of both testaments within the Christian Bible.
The most obvious characteristics of God in the Old Testament narrative are those of person-hood and transcendence. All God’s different attributes might, power and glory; grace; love, faithfulness and the rest-are shown to be the personal attributes of a transcendent God. One key passage which illustrates this is to be found towards the beginning of the book of Exodus 3:1-4
God is depicted as an all consuming Fire so strong one cant get close…Moses and the burning bush!
God here is more than an influence, an impersonal power: God possesses person-hood. God observes Moses, acts in response to Moses’s curiosity, God addresses Moses and will soon call him, as representative with himself. Although God makes this disclosure through the elements of nature, through the flame in the bush, the author of the story is very careful to maintain that God and nature are not one. God is not an aspect of his own creation; God is no idol. Indeed, the absolute nature is emphasized to Moses later on in the story, when he is addressed by God on Mount Sinai.
“You shall have no other gods before me”. You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. You shall not bow down to them or worship them; for l the Lord your God am a jealous God.( Exod.20:3-5)
This God cannot be trapped within the confines of creation. He is God, the Lord, the exclusive or particular God, and as such possesses otherness and exists apart from everything else. This otherness is mysterious and unnerving. The fire, although alight, did not exhaust itself; the bush burned but was not consumed. (Exod.3:5-7)
God, then, is revealed here as both personal being – I am the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob and a holy, transcendent and numerous being: (Exod. 3:14), his transcendence, even if it unnerving, is never an abstraction: (Isa.42:8) whose intentions reflect his innermost nature and reveal who he is:
A Loving & Compassionate God!
Then the Lord said, ‘I have observed the misery of my people who are in Egypt; I have heard their cry on account of their taskmaster. Indeed, I know their sufferings, and l have come down to deliver them from the Egyptians, and to bring them up out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey. (Exod. 3:7-8)
In our Modern Mind this God is the same as Jesus and the image below is an image of a beautiful Personification of Jesus to the modern eye!
This God is a loving God who chooses to care for his people, who deigns to respond to their need and who promises, by his might, to release them from the thrall of their enemies. God does this because he is God. This God, the God who has revealed himself as the Holy One of Israel. His holiness is not something which exist apart from his mercy and his intention to dwell among humankind but is, in fact, a reflection of it.
God’s holiness is his otherness, his sheer difference from everything else. It expresses itself boldly in a rejection of all that is unworthy to come into his presence, more positively in his establishing of the goodness of the creature that is other than he. Exod. 4:22-23, Isa. 63:16, Jer. 31:20, Hos. 11:1-8, Ps.103:
As we ponder God How about Praising and Worshiping him as we are created to Lets Join Michael Whitaker in doing so in this beautiful song…
I encourage you to Read the above scriptures to understand The God that I do and even you may believe in. And as you do Be blessed by the blessings of Psalm 23.
If you have had an epiphany 🙂 by all means do Like, Share & Comment below. Please do join or Facebook Community. Be blessed as you do.
And may the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the Love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit Be us all now and ever more! Amen.
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