Finding and Understanding who God is!

Finding and Understanding who God is!

Understanding who God is requires an Infinite mind which is impossible for man.  However, there are possibilities to at least penetrate what is available to man’s finite mind without substituting make-believe theories that man sometimes uses in his efforts to crash the mysteries of God.

“Let the hearts of those who seek the Lord rejoice.”   Although man can forget or reject him, He never ceases to call every man to seek him, he never ceases to call every man to seek him, so as to find happiness.   But this search for God demands of man every effort of intellect, a sound will, “an upright heart,” as well as the witness of others who teach him to seek God.  (CCC 30).

Now the point in Christianity which gives us the greatest shock is the statement that by attaching ourselves to Christ, we can become Sons of God.  One asks, “Aren’t we Sons of God already?  Surely the fatherhood of God is one of the main Christian ideas?  Well, in a sense, no doubt we are sons of God already.  I mean, God has brought us into existence and loves us and looks after us, and in that way is like a father.  But the bible talks of our becoming Sons of God, obviously it must mean something different.  And that brings us up against the very center of Theology.  (Mere Christianity; C.S. Lewis Chapter 1 - Making and Begetting)

When we recite the Creeds, (Apostles or Nicene) we speak of God in the three persons of the Trinity with just an overview of their particular functions, but as far as the particular depth of who they are is still a mystery.  For us to delve deeper into the who of God would require an infinite mind, which is impossible for man.  We would need to use the mind of God , but since we are limited to a finite mind our task of understanding who God is creates a rampart that we may never climb over.

In revealing his mysterious name, Yhwh (“I AM He Who Is,” I Am who Am” or I Am who I Am”), God says who he is  and by what name he is to be called.  This divine name is mysterious just as God is mystery.  It is at once a name revealed and something like the refusal of a name , and hence it better expresses God as what he is - infinitely above everything that we can understand or say:  he is the “hidden God,” his name is ineffable, and he is the God who makes himself close to men.  (CCC 206).

The revelation of the ineffable name “I Am who Am” contains then the truth that God alone IS.  The Greek Septuagint translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, and following it is the Church’s Tradition, understood the divine name in this sense:  God is the fullness of Being and of every perfection, without origin and without end.  All creatures receive all that they are and have from him; but he alone is his very being, and he is of himself everything that he is.  (CCC 213).

Some people think that after this life, or perhaps after several lives, human souls will be absorbed into God.  But when they try to explain what they mean, they seem to be thinking of our being absorbed into God as one material thing is absorbed into another.  They say it is like a drop of water slipping into the sea.  But of course that is the end of the drop.  If that is what happens to us, then being absorbed is the same as ceasing to exist.  The whole purpose for which we exist is to be thus taken into the life of God.  (Mere Christianity; C.S. Lewis Chapter 2, The Three-Personal God). 

To encapsulate the question of finding and understanding who God is the truth that the Catechism places before us.  We can do more than accept the words of the Church in total.

Ralph B. Hathaway