Posted on by Abe Austin

Coming to God Through Others

The Order of Love)

1 John 4:20 states: If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?

This is an interesting claim. It doesn’t just seem to be saying that hate of a brother gets in the way of our love for God, it seems to be setting an order of progression, where love of brother comes before love of God. It says that we have to learn what we can see, before we can have any hope of loving what we cannot.

And at first this seemed backwards when compared to my personal experience. I would have said that I always loved God, and growing closer to Him was fundamental to increasing my love for others. But as I thought more about it, I wouldn’t say that I always loved God, I would say that I always loved my idea of Him.

But God is not just an idea, He is an actual being, who has to be known as He really is before you can love Him as He really is. And coming to know and love the real Him, in my personal life, did come only after getting to know and love a group of brothers. It occurred as I attended 12-step groups for the first time. There, I started to have real conversations with other men and developed a real appreciation for each one of them. Then, and only then, I started to see the reflection of the real God in their eyes and started to love Him, too.

And yes, loving God did increase my ability to love my fellow man, so there is a positive feedback loop here, but it all started with coming to know and love those around me first.

Avatars of the Almighty)

Unfortunately, many of our interactions with our fellow man are shallow. Too many of them are neutral at best, with many of them being downright negative. We all-too-rarely get close enough to see the spark of the divine in another person and fall in love with that inner soul. We see too many of God’s children as an obstacle in our lives, not as the avatar for the Almighty. But that’s what they really are.

We are told in the very first chapter of the Bible, “So God created man in his own image,” (Genesis 1:27). Mankind, flawed as it might be, are the closest any of us will ever come in this life to seeing the face of God. The best representation of God is not our ideas of Him, not His commandments and principles, and not the churches that profess His name. The best representation of God is the people who hold His light aloft. All the other things are good, and point us part of the way, but it is in people that we actually start to meet Him.

So, let us ask ourselves, do I know and love Godly people in that personal and intimate way? Do I look for the spark of the divine, even in those who are flawed and oppose me? If our answer is no, then we’ve never really known and loved the real God either. If our answer is yes, then we have already had glimpses of God, and can continue to pursue Him further in all the rest of our brothers and sisters.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Scriptural Analysis- Exodus 20:22-23

22 And the Lord said unto Moses, Thus thou shalt say unto the children of Israel, Ye have seen that I have talked with you from heaven.

23 Ye shall not make with me gods of silver, neither shall ye make unto you gods of gold.

God had commanded the people that they were not to make any graven images. In today’s verses He goes further to say that they must not make idols even of Him. Yes, He is their God, but they are not to try and recreate Him in any physical fashion.

One obvious reason for this is so that the idol would not become a distraction from the actual God. By pouring their devotion into a figure, they might compromise their relationship with the actual, living Lord. We do something similar when we obsess over a particular interpretation of the gospel, and hold to it at the expense of all other parts. We are more devoted to the image in our head of God, than to God Himself.

Another reason for not creating any idols of God is because God would create His own image. It would be a living, walking, talking image, even a man in the flesh, Jesus Christ. All the worshippers of Horus and Ra and Baal and Ashtaroth made images that were static, mute, and dead, just as the gods they represented were dead. Only God could create a living image, because only God was truly alive.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Give Thanks- Technology and Memories

I am grateful for technology that makes it so easy to relive fond memories. The effort to preserve the images and sounds of loved ones goes back for centuries, but historically it has been greatly limited by cost, inconvenience, and physical constraints.

Today it is a very different story. I can ready a smartphone’s camera and speaker in a matter of seconds. I can preserve literally millions of digital imprints in terabytes of cloud storage. I can filter that mass by date, media type, and even faces that are recognized by ai algorithms.

Almost every day I call up at least one image or video of my children, and have a perfectly clear recollection of what they were like at each stage of their development.

#givethanks