Red Letter Revolution

I have a confession to make: I have been effected too greatly by Greek philosophical ideas. Being a Westerner and tending to think of the world and even God from within a logical philosophical framework, I have inadvertently suppressed with disgusting regularity a foundational idea of the Hebrew Bible: God is personal. By this I am not referring to God revealing to us the nature of the three persons of the Trinity, but rather the nature of how God relates to us. God relates to us personally. He is present and available to us. This idea is often squashed beneath the view of God as (with booming voice) THE UNMOVABLE MOVER, and to the detriment of us who forget that God was a living God before such notions of him were formed. This concept of the Living and Present God is demonstrated in the Pentateuch repeatedly through God’s provisions for the sins of Israel and the establishment of the Priesthood, but it is also demonstrated through the comparison of Yahweh to the false deities as is done in Isaiah. There is a rather humorous section of Isaiah where the prophet offers devastating critique of the idols: If they are greater than Yahweh, why is it you must carve your gods from wood or stone or cast them in metal? Are they not powerful enough to do this themselves? Why must you also clothe and feed these “gods”? The fact is that these idols are simply pieces of rock and wood and metal. They have no life, and certainly no breath. They are utterly unlike Yahweh, who is not only living and has breath, but is in fact the life-breather of all things in existence. In essence, Yahweh is life, is existence itself. He is both the Creator and also the Sustainer. In every infinitesimal second, Yahweh is engaging in Cosmic CPR. If Yahweh were to cease to be, so would all that he had created. He is the linchpin of the universe, and one day, having taken human flesh, he died. That is the great joy of our faith, that God loves us so much, that he took flesh and the one who breathed life into this world, bowed his head and breathed his last. This is the great σκανδαλον of our faith, that the sustainer would die so that we might live.