How do you reconcile the idea of an all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving God with the reality of natural disasters? I hear friends trying to work this out each time there is a catastrophy like last week’s earthquake in Haiti. If you start with this concept of God and work out its logical conclusion, you may end up believing — along with the likes of Pat Robertson — in a wrathful and vengeful god.
We’re better off examining and re-envisioning our concept of God. The “all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-loving” idea is an anthropomorphized God — a God made in our own image. This big human-like God is busy doing all kinds of powerful things, is acting lovingly in much the same way we do, and is really smart because after all God knows so much. But consider this:
Is God loving? Or is God LOVE?
If God is LOVE, then God is the love and caring within each of us, the source of all the help and concern that arises within us in the face of calamity. This is not a human-like God out there, that we watch like spectators. This is God within us from which love emerges. Second, consider this:
God does not do. God IS.
In a January 2005 podcast entitled “Whose God Did This?” I focused on the idea of being rather than doing. God is not out there doing everything — God is in here being the living breathing life that is within each of us. And finally consider this:
Does God know? Or is God KNOWN?
Think about it: if you believe in God, where does this faith come from? We find this deep knowing within us. Probably the initial idea came from someone else, or from something we read, but the believing is something that arises from within, a wisdom beyond reason that has always been there, an unaccountable knowledge that — at some point in our lives — we discovered within our selves.
Tags: Being, beliefs, believing, breathing, faith, friends, God, love, Nature, Philosophy, reason, self
