Meet the True God: Meeting God as One - Deuteronomy 6: 4-9; I Timothy 2: 1-7 - May

6, 2007 - Cicero United Methodist Church - Everett J. Bassett

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What is your name? What do you do? Where do you live? Those are three questions you might want to find out about someone you are meeting for the first time. My last two sermons have been dealing with meeting the true God of the Bible, and have dealt with the first two of those questions. "What is your name?" Moses asked of God. And God said, "Yahweh", or "I am." The second question, "What do you do?" is answered in the very first words of the Bible: what God does is create. And God is still creating today.

The third question - "Where do you live?" - is a little trickier to answer for God. If we asked that question to the little children, they might give one of two answers. One answer might be, "God lives in heaven." And that certainly is a correct thought about where God lives, but not quite complete. (Incidentally, I am not counting the answer given by the little boy in the old joke: "God lives in our upstairs bathroom." His Sunday School teacher asked, "Why on earth would you think that?" And he said, "Because lots of times my Dad stands outside the door and says, 'My God, are you still in there?"')

The other thing that a child might say if you ask where God lives is, "God lives everywhere. And that is maybe the best answer to give to the question. It is the answer that is uniquely central to meeting the true God of the Bible. To fully appreciate that, we need to go back to the mindset of a person in the Near East maybe 2500 or 3000 years ago, when the faith of the Bible was being formed and written down. If you lived back in those Old Testament times, you most likely believed that there were many gods. And each one of them lived someplace. If you traveled to Egypt, you dealt with the god who lived in Egypt. If you traveled to Moab, you dealt with the god of the Moabites. Gods were attached to the land of the people who worshipped them.

Something very unusual happened to the Hebrew people when they left the land of

Egypt, freed from their slavery, and wandered for the next forty years in the wilderness. That was a terrible time - wandering without a home in the wilderness for forty years. Who wants to do that? And yet, it was during that time that they learned something pretty amazing - that is, God traveled with them! In the Near Eastern mind, that was not possible. They had no land, so that would mean that they had no god. And yet, there in the middle of the wilderness, God gave them food every day! God brought them water out of a rock! God led them with a pillar of cloud by day, and a pillar of fire by night. God led them to victory in battle. And God talked to them through their leader Moses.

And something very profound came to dawn on the Hebrew people: God was not tied down to a particular place. God was with them everywhere they went. And that new knowledge went hand in hand with another profound understanding about God. And that was, that if God was not tied down to this land or that land, then maybe the truth was that there weren't really thousands of gods, each residing somewhere. In truth, if God could be with them wherever they traveled, then surely there was only one God, who resided everywhere. The people of the Old Testament were not the first monotheists in the world; there had been a few rare cases before them. But they were the first to grasp the understanding of One God as a whole people, and to build their whole faith and culture around this amazing truth that they had grasped.

That's why, the way the story is told in the Book of Deuteronomy in our scripture lesson for this morning, when the Hebrew people came to the end of that wilderness journey, and were about to enter the Promised Land, their leader Moses reminded them of what they had learned: "Hear, O Israel," said Moses. "The Lord our God is one. You shall love Yahweh your God with all your heart, and all your soul, and all your might. Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates."

In other words, when you move into the Promised Land and settle down, don't lose the lesson you learned about God in the wilderness. But sure enough, when the Hebrew people began to settle down in Canaan, the old thinking returned - we are in Canaan, now we will worship Baal, the god of the Canaanites. And God kept sending prophets to teach them again and again, "No. There is only one God. Worship Yahweh, the Creator and Sustainer of the world, the one true God."

Now, we are products of centuries of Judeo-Christian teaching, and so we don't hear a lot of people today going around claiming that there are multiple deities out there somewhere. And yet I believe that the threat to the integrity of the One true God is just as real today as it was in those biblical times. Here's what it might look~ like today:

First of all, there is the rise of atheism. It seems to me that even in the last year, atheism has stepped up in America. There have been two best-selling books by atheists vigorously attacking the Christian faith. There is a new site on the Internet specifically asking young people to post atheistic statements. There is the first member of Congress to outwardly declare that he has no belief in a higher being. On the surface, this looks different than what we see in the Bible. In the Bible, the issue was not No God. The issue was Which God? Everybody believed in something; there were no atheists.

But truthfully, I'm not sure it's so different. An atheist would shudder at this statement, but I believe that even an atheist has a god - it's human intelligence. It's one thing to be an agnostic, which means that you just don't know what to believe. It's something else to be an atheist, and actively conclude that there can be no God. An atheist says that he or she believes more in his own mental elimination of God than he does in all that reveals God in this world. And it takes a lot of faith in human intellect to do that. I personally don't see a lot of evidence that human intelligence merits that kind of worship. But atheists put great faith in their intellectual God.

The second threat to the integrity of God is the fascination people have with supernatural things and with other religions. Check out the bestseller list, or the occult/religion section of the bookstore and you'll see that people today are deeply interested in spiritual topics. They are reading New Age material, they are believing ghost stories, trying to communicate with the dead, worshipping Satan, checking out all kinds of folk faiths, combining many religions together into what works for them.

A lot of this is innocent fun and curiosity. I love a good spooky story; I am not frightened, as some Christians are, to see young people dress up for Halloween; and I

gain a lot by learning about other spiritual paths. I agree with people who say that there are many paths to God, and I respect those who follow those paths seriously and respectfully. But that, to me, is the key statement. Seriously and respectfully. A lot of people are just dabbling here and there, wherever it's most fun and least demanding and makes them feel the best. Quite often, there's a good deal of rebellion against some bad experiences they've had in the church they were raised in. Sometimes I don't blame them. But the question is, When do they meet God? It's not enough to say, Well, the church falls short, so I'm going to go every which direction. When do they truly sit down and reckon with the God described in scriptures, who merits a response that involves your heart and your soul and your mind and your strength? Whatever the path to Him, sooner or later, if your spiritual life is to have integrity, you have to meet the real God.

And then the third threat to the integrity of God - our idols. I don't have to say much here; the fact is, sermons attacking our idols are just about the easiest ones to prepare. We can spot false gods everywhere: we worship money and possessions; we worship fame and celebrities; we worship military power and nations; we worship church forms and traditions; we worship romance and family. And so on. In the right context, any of these are good and even noble things. But they can become gods that we worship, if we are not careful. And when God says, "You shall have no other gods before me," He no doubt means you shall not worship all these other idols.

So even though we don't live in the same kind of polytheistic atmosphere as the people of the Bible did, there are still plenty of false gods around. Their genius was that in chaotic spiritual times, they met the one true God, and, though they slipped back many times, over the course of time, they worshipped Him, and followed Him. From our Christian perspective, the rest of the picture was drawn when Jesus arrived. Jesus taught, "I and my Father are one." And through Jesus - his life, his death, his Resurrection- God was introducing Himself in the most personal and loving way He could. The writer of I Timothy put it this way: "... there is one God; there is also one mediator between God and humankind, Christ Jesus, himself human, who gave himself a ransom for all."

So, where do you meet God today? Is it in the beauty of the world He's created? Is it in the symbols of His Son's Body and blood, which we share this morning? Is it in the example of Golden Christians, who have walked so faithfully and so long with our Lord?

All these are great paths. All of them point to a very personal and powerful answer to that question, "Where does God live?" That answer is, "He lives in my heart. And there is no other god beside Him there. And I serve him with my heart and soul and mind and strength. And that is my path to endless joy and peace."

Have you met the true God? Can you make that declaration of faith today?