The God presented for worship in the Old Testament simply does not match Jesus’ revelation of Divinity in the Gospel. The difference is the difference between the religion of Militarism and the spirituality of Jesus. One assurance of our evolution beyond Militarism’s religion and toward Jesus’ spirituality is the difference between a warrior and an advocate.
The Old Testament image of God is constructed by warriors in control. Even if it is claimed the Hebrew people were slaves of the Egyptians it is still the warrior priest Moses and eventually Joshua, David and other warriors who imagine their God into existence. And how do they imagine their God? They imagine Yahweh as slaughtering Egyptian children in the tenth plague. They imagine him as ordering the conquest of foreigners whose land they covet. They imagine Yahweh as waging war upon war upon war. God is consistently imagined as a warrior executing a sentence of death. Jesus’ revelation of God as an Advocate, an abiding Spirit, is a paradigm shift in humanity’s experience of Divinity. We see in Jesus’ life witness as an advocate a new image of Divinity. God relates not as a commander ordering us to kill but as a commoner teaching us how to live. God’s essence is not that of a wrathful warrior in search of conquest but of a loving advocate accompanying us through life. God acts not as a soldier set to destroy but as a creative power able to heal.
It is because people who call themselves Christian worship an image of God from the past that Jesus’ abiding Spirit for the future is hindered from transforming the world.
Prayer: Dear Spirit, move us from remembering the past to creating the future.
Question: Do I have an image of an external God or might I be a human being in whom a powerful Spirit abides?
May 25, 2014 Gospel John 14:15-21 Sixth Sunday of Easter