Who Is God??
I stumbled on an article “Who Is God?” in the WATCHTOWER magazine of February 1, 2009 and read it with rapt attention because I needed to know who God really is. Every religion has a founder and every founder has emphasized a different aspect of God. I needed to know whether God truly exists and if He does, how does He exist? The article says God (well, Jehovah God, that is) is a person. It went on to explain that the notion that God is a spirit does not imply that God has no physical form of some sort or a definite place of his habitation.
How audacious! Outrageous as this may seem, is not what we call God really a person with likes and dislikes, even feelings, who is always on the look out to punish those who offend him and reward those who pay him homage with songs of praise and offerings? Throughout history mankind has never been without a religion, however crude and primitive, but a religion nonetheless with a notion of God they believe or are accustomed to believe.
The fact that the religious instinct naturally developed in mankind all over the world must mean that the idea about God is innate in man, but the nature and character of HIM, not being a fact of universal experience, is manmade. Man conceives of a God, his own, and this to him is the Almighty God. Every nation has a God of its own and every nation has a name for God.
From the Christian Bible we read that God created the Heavens and the Earth, and then on the Earth, life appeared spontaneously or, if you like, was created in a succession of days that followed a fish, amphibian, reptilian and mammalian sequence. But man never was created as a human being. Man was made out of created material by those of whom it was said: “Let us make man in our image after our own likeness”, and then cloned to produce the human race.
(Genesis. 1, 27; 2, 21-23). The position of man at the top of a homologous series of vertebrates clearly indicates that man originated from a primitive form of a mammalian ancestor. And it came to pass when men began to multiply upon the surface of the Earth, and daughters were born to them, that the “sons of God” saw the daughters of men, that they were fair, and invaded the Earth to marry them and have children by them. (Genesis. 6, 1-4). Now, can a cow beget a horse and not be a horse? Might not God be a person after all, and might not man have been made to provide a surrogate body into which the sons of God could reincarnate onto the Earth plane?
And if the sons of God have devolved into human beings, what became of their father? Could not the Father God too have moved on in His evolutionary journey as well, and hence can neither hear anybody nor help anybody however much we pray to Him, serve Him or worship Him? The continuous failure of various religions to assuage the thirst of the earnest seekers of God must mean that God is not known and will remain probably unknowable.
Prayer is naive. And praying is agonizingly monotonous; constant variation of the same theme. The ranting and wailing and other forms of frenzied activity man calls prayer affect man. They do not affect something or someone outside of man.
Prayer may change man, which is good, but prayer does not change the will of God in creation. Arguably, replacing metaphysical speculation with empirically verifiable facts is more relevant than paying homage to a hypothetical God we know nothing about. Man pays homage to God not by prayer but in the perfection of the individual. We are guests in the Lord’s vineyard with equal rights and privileges to partake in the banquet provided we observe all the rules and regulations governing our participation in that banquet. It is not necessary to invoke the Lawmaker.
Matthew A. Oriahi,
Writes From Agbor