who?
Who is your god? Whom do we worship? To whom do we pray?
What is God like? What is our god’s name?
Who our god is is important. It’s something we need to think about. It’s a question with which we need to grapple. How we worship, how we pray – the way we conduct our conversations with God and maintain our relationship with the Divine – depends upon the nature of God.
So what is the nature of God? How can we possibly know? I think it was C.S. Lewis who once said that we are not big enough or crazy enough to understand God. But we do know some things. And how? Because God has been revealing Herself to us throughout history, and we have the narrative of the Bible to give us examples. this isn’t only a book of stories or myths to be believed in by faith: this is the ongoing story of God’s relationship with His people, and al of the ways that God has revealed Herself to us. God has declared Herself through word and through deed, allowing tiny insights into His inconceivable immensity.
When we read through the Bible we see that there are literally dozens of names used for God. Some are names declared to us by God Himself, and others are names that people have used for Her. In the first chapters of Genesis there are two names used for God, which suggests there were at least two writers to the telling of the story of the beginning of all things. The first writer calls The Creator “Yahweh” which means LORD, and the second writer calls The Creator “Elohim” which means simply “god”.
But these are just the first two names. When God makes His covenant with Abraham – then Abram – He introduces Himself as “El Shaddai, which translates as “God Almighty” or according to one rather circuitous translation, “God of the Mountain”.
And there are still others used: El Elyon – God Most High; Adonai – My Lord, My Master; El Roi – God who sees.
But it’s when God calls to Moses from the burning bush that we get the most interesting name. Moses asks “Whom shall I say has sent me?” And the voice replies: “I AM WHO I AM.”
Sometimes I like to stop and imagine what characters in Bible stories might have been thinking. it’s easy to impose our own knowledge – gained through thousands of years of hindsight – onto these deeply historical figures. We know that God will lead the Israelites out of Egypt, that He will maintain them in the desert, give them victory over their foes and deliver them into the promised land. But Moses didn’t. So what might Moses have thought when God said to him: “I AM WHO I AM. Tell them “I AM” has sent you”?
I think there is the distinct possibility that Moses was rather dissatisfied with that answer. It doesn’t really sound much like a name. There were lots of gods being worshipped int he countryside and the Egyptians by whom Moses had been raised worshipped a pantheon of gods. They all had names and the names all meant something. But “I AM”?? That’s terribly vague.
But there are still other names used by people, by the writers who recorded the stories of the Bible, to describe God. Jehovah – another pronunciation of the word Yahweh – is paired with many words to make names for God. And each of these is used and applied in response to the ways God had revealed Herself to Her people:
Jehovah Ezer – The LORD our helper
Jehovah Jireh – The LORD will provide
Jehovah Roi – The LORD is my shepherd
Jehovah Sabaoth – The LORD of the armies
Jehovah Mekeddeshem – The LORD who sanctifies
Jehovah Shalom – The LORD our peace
And we have God’s own words, declaring Herself to us, to guide us into a glimpse of who She is. On the top of Mount Sinai, God tells Moses and reveals to all humankind: “I am a jealous god.” The prophet Hosea picks up this theme when he talks about God being like a spurned lover, a betrayed spouse. So we know God wants us to be faithful; He cares if we turn away from Him. But through Hosea we also learn that God is patient and forgiving to His people. Through Hosea, God tells us:
My heart is changed within me;
all my compassion is aroused.
For I am God and not man -
the Holy One among you.
I will not come in wrath.
We see this even in the story of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Abraham negotiates with God, talking Him down to smaller and smaller demands. In the end, the god who planned to destroy the cities outright is eventually convinced to spare everyone – no matter how terrible they are – if only ten righteous souls can be found. God is a lenient judge, with a considerate heart.
And then we have Jesus Christ. It is through Jesus Christ that we get to know God the Mother on a new level, in a new way. All of the insights, the glimpses, the nuances of God revealed through the thousands of years of narrative in the Old Testament come to fruition: they are literally fleshed out in Jesus Christ.
Who God is and what God is like is important. So when the disciples say to Jesus, “teach us to pray” the model Jesus gives us is not merely words He wants us to say, but a keen insight into who God is, and how we are to relate to Him.
Through Jesus words we lean that God Almighty is not only our Divine Creator but our Heavenly Parent, and also that we should relate to Him as a child to a mother or father, not, as Paul puts it in his letter to the Romans, as a slave to a master. God has a deep and abiding love for us, and it informs Her relationship with us, and ours with Her.
In our worship and in our prayer we must never restrict or limit God. She is boundless and immeasurable, infinite and inconceivable, and we have knowledge of only a tiny portion of Her. We must not fall victim to the habit of fixing the Divine to a singular point, a singular purpose, a singular face, a singular identity. I AM WHO I AM. Indefinable and infinite. One name, one face, one attribute, one pronoun, is utterly insufficient for God.
Embrace the many facets of God, the multitude of ways that God is. Revel in the knowledge that She is your judge and your counsellor, the lion and our mother hen, our shepherd and the lamb, our Creator and our partner, our father and our brother. Let that knowledge inform your relationship with God. And rejoice that so mighty and glorious a God holds you – every day – in the palm of Her hand.
