What and Where is God? A Human Answer to the Deep Religious Cry of the Modern SoulSwain, Richard La Rue
Religion
What and Where is God? A Human Answer to the Deep Religious Cry of the Modern Soul
Swain, Richard La Rue
Christianity; God (Christianity)
"I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh," and "Is not my dwelling with
the humble in heart?" But even here the divine Spirit was only _upon_
them or _with_ them. Never, so far as I could discover, did He dwell
_in_ them. In some twenty-four hundred verses, God was represented as
sustaining many beautiful and terrible relations to men. This
relationship was symbolized by birds, beasts, and natural elements, to
the very limit of the imagination. After the most solemn warnings and
attractive promises, God would depart from His people for a season and
then return with rewards and punishments according to their
faithfulness. He scrutinized their inmost thoughts; in fact, He did
everything except enter their lives.
On turning to the New Testament, however, I found a startling contrast.
God dwelt not only in the hearts but in the bodies of men. "For know ye
not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth
in you? Yea, ye are the temple of the living God." "Know ye not that
your bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit?" "Walk in the Spirit and ye
shall not fulfill the lusts of the flesh." Jesus said, "He that hath
seen me hath seen the Father; how sayest thou, show us the Father?
Believest thou not that I am in the Father, and the Father in me?" "The
Father abiding in me doeth His works." "In that day ye shall know that I
am in the Father and ye in me, and I in you." "If a man love me he will
keep my word: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him,
and make our abode with him."
As a prospector seeks for gold, I sought in the Old Testament for God in
the life of man and did not find Him; but no sooner had I reached the
New Testament than all was changed. Here was a new country. The
prospector was in the midst of that for which he sought. No mountain was
ever as rich in gold as the human heart, according to the New Testament,
was rich with the indwelling God.
The religion of Jesus in contrast with that of the prophets is like a
tree, which Luther Burbank has transformed into a new variety bearing
strange and luscious fruit. I wondered that I had overlooked for so long
a time the complete cleavage between the two parts of our Bible on this
subject. Jesus was truly a Jewish reformer, but to a much greater degree
He was a Jewish fulfiller. In revealing God's true oneness with man He
completed the prophet's imperfect religious vision, and best of all,
made the vision a fact in His own experience. At the same time He began
making it a reality in the experience of His disciples.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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