A word from heaven.

<$BlogDateHeaderDate$>

How tangible can an invisible God really be? -Part 1

Introduction:

As this is a huge topic, i'll run this part in a few parts over the next week or so. Hope that it will help trigger some thoughts in you.

Have you ever prayed half way and wondered who you are actually praying to?
Have you ever tried to force yourself to imagine God's presence?
Have people ever told you that they feel God's presence but all you feel is the air-conditioning?
Have you ever wondered how can God meet our emotional needs when we can't even see Him?
So how tangible can an invisible God really be?
How can we love someone we've not even seen before?

Some philosophers concluded that this God thing is a man-made thing that poor people created to give them hope. I said this before and i'll say it again here that the fact that they sound logical does not make their arguments right. It just means they have presented their ideas in a coherent and "make sense" manner.

So can God really be tangible or is it really something we imagine out of our need for something bigger than life to embrace us.

I'll try to tackle this issue as best as i can today.

To start off, let's examine the validity of this statement made by a friend beside you - "I feel God today."
With regard to the 4 realms, physical, mental, emotional and spiritual, how valid is this statement?

It cannot be literally physically right? If its physical, me being with this friend would have seen God as well. ok, let's strike physical off. So God cannot actually be physically tangible in front of you if we go by the definition of God being a body there for you to see if you talk about our context now. At least not until Jesus comes back. The last recorded incident of people seeing God happened around 2000 years ago anyway.

However, if we are to stop here and conclude that because we can't touch God physically, because we can't see Him, and when we pray to Him, he doesn't exactly speak to us back literally (not most of the time at least), and because we are separated from Him physically, that God is intangible, we are missing out a large part of the argument.

You see, the fact that i can't see my mom now because I'm in school does not make me love her less. Although seeing the person makes something a bit more tangible, we have to realise that by nature, love is not meant to be only in the physical realm. Tangibility of love is not meant to be only shown in the physical realm. In the same way, being tangible physically does not make someone more tangible emotionally. You can sit beside someone on the bus for 1 hour and not know who he or she is. That is being intangible emotionally i would argue. I love my mom and that love does not change with physical separation but is based on the 3 other realms that we will talk about in a little while.

Let's say i have a blind man in front of me and there is a transparent glass panel separating us. He can't see me, he can't touch me, he can't hear me directly. Does it mean that i don't exist? (i'll come back to this example again) The fact that we can't see God does not mean that God doesn't exist. The fact that physically we can't be together with God does not make God's love for us any less. The fact that we choose to turn away from God in the first place is of no fault to God. so how can something wrong we did become God's fault that he is intangible?

So today we've established the fact that God is not any less real because of our spiritual blindness or because we can see him in a tangible manner. If we are going to think in such a manner, we are proving the philosophers right, that God is something we created. But since the God we are talking about here is one who does not change, who have been in existence ever since the beginning of time, he has to be no less tangible then if we were to see him physically.

So how do we overcome this "physical handicap" and relate with a God whom we cannot relate to in exactly in the same manner we relate to someone sitting opposite us. In fact the question should be how did God, because of His love, provide a way for us to overcome this physical handicap.

We'll explore that in the next few sessions.

Regards,

jie hui

Labels: Apologetics

The kingdom of heaven has been forcefully advancing, and forceful men lay hold of it.

0 Comments

Friday, September 26, 2008