October 22, 2014
If You Like Your …
A current television commercial
is selling dental insurance and their unfortunate choice of words, “If you like
your dentist you can keep your dentist,” only serves to remind consumers of the
false promises of Obamacare. On the spiritual level we hear the same message
from new age folks who purport that all religions lead to God, “If you like your
god you can keep your god.” Many people forget that our God is a jealous God, “I
am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery.
You shall have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:2-3 NIV).
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Gail;
-----“I AM THAT I AM” reveals how easy it is to have other gods before Him. It is easy to think that we know things. We deal with them every day. And we address God every day. And we must interrelate the things we deal with and the God we address (who actually deals with us.) How we perceive God relates to something becomes an aspect of the mental image of God our minds are building. And as we live and try to draw closer to God, we develop more and more aspects into our mental images of Him. And we think we are right because we read His Word for clues and information about how He relates to things. And we really, really want to know Him.
-----But it is easy to overlook how ingrown are any individual’s own perceptions. Before we have even attained the age of reason we have been cast in attitudes and habits and beliefs which transcend any moment of thought. So the chain of thought is forged, link by link, in a rather subjective context bending each link subtly towards the image of reality the self has developed. We think we are so smart because we’ve experienced so much. We think we are so objective because we’ve allowed those experiences to "shape us". Yet the first thing noticeable by any good psychological test is how faulty are the perceptions formed from our senses. And the more complex the sense, such as that of sight, the more subjectively altered are our perceptions arising from it.
-----It somewhat baffles me that people go around speculating the possibility of a sixth sense with their sixth sense. The senses listed in ascending order of the amount and complexity of information sent to the brain is: touch, taste, smell, hearing, sight, and thought and emotion. What? Thought and emotion is a sense? Yes. What do they sense? First, what is it to sense? Merriam-Webster suggests: a specialized function or mechanism (as sight, hearing, smell, taste, or touch) by which an animal receives and responds to external or internal stimuli. The first five senses bring stimuli (or information) about your surroundings to the brain. Each sense brings only a certain type of information: cold, bitter, smelly, silent, green. But the object being sensed has a distinct being and nature that is the interrelationship of all its aspects plus a meaning which is its interrelationship with the objects around it, and in a subtler way, with everything that exists. The brain is a neural network sensing being and meaning from all of the interrelationships of information brought through the other five senses. By it we perceive cold, bitter, smelly, silent, and green to be a pickle from the refrigerator. Without it there is only cold. Bitter. Smelly. Silence. Green.
-----We can test the accuracy of our sixth sense by eating the pickle. Does it act in your stomach like a pickle? Or like last 4th of July’s hot dog? Interacting with our surroundings keeps our sixth sense sharp enough to do really dangerous things like driving cars and filing tax returns. From the certainty of our interactions testing good, we confidently pronounce our perceptions to be reality.
-----Then we make the mistake of pronouncing our perceptions of God, which our sixth sense has merely assembled from His Word, to be reality. We’ve failed to realize how inaccurate that sixth sense is, being the most complex of all senses, so complex that it has not even been recognized as a sense. It’s inaccuracy is subtler than the accuracy it takes to keep you alive from not having mistaken a green hot-dog for a pickle. What God told Moses is that what He is is real, not what Moses or anyone else could possibly perceive Him to be. Our perceptions of Him are not accurate just because He's Him, and are even less so because I am me. So, when we’ve decided God is our perception of Him, we’ve just placed a god before the I AM. Thinking about God is far more dangerous than a green hot-dog, because He is far more subtle than its cold, bitter, smelly, silent, and green.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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