The Personal God

On Amalek and the Israel Palestine War

A disclaimer: This post was hard to finish, both because of the sensitive nature of the subject matter and because of the difficulty in accurately articulating what I’m trying to say. The idea on offer here exists in my head as a mere vision and I have here done my best, and failed, to flesh it out in words. In the process I have said and described things which might seem to imply I am saying something about God which sounds heretical or even nonsensical. This is true but there was no way around it. There are some things about God which it is almost impossible to say without falling into such traps. Language fails, but I have done my best. I ask you to try and take the feeling that this post gives you, and not so much the technical meaning behind every word. I am walking the circle to try and understand the center. It’s messy.

Smashing Babies. Like Smashing Pumpkins, but Biblical.

“Now go and smite Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and spare them not; but slay both man and woman, infant and suckling, ox and sheep, camel and ass.” — Bible, 1 Samuel 15:3

Christianity is one of the more difficult religions because occasionally you have to ask yourself if God was just wrong.

You have to argue with him. Challenge him. Bring up your dispute with him and make your case. Job did it, as did Abraham. The psalmists routinely question God’s providence and challenge his actions. The apostles grapple with his teachings. When people came to Jesus and asked him to settle a dispute between them, Jesus bizarrely rebuked them, rejecting even the premise of such a request. “Who made me judge between you?” he asked, and then, after a long interlude, “why do you not decide for yourselves what is right?” In my opinion, one of the most scandalous things about the Bible is that in it God embraces us as moral authorities. We are told that we will judge angels. We got to judge God. We looked at him and decided he was unworthy and sentenced him to death with the full power of the state and he accepted our judgement as right and valid.

Strange god.

A scary one.

One that makes us… uncomfortable. To say the least.

The truth is that authority is a scary thing and most people don’t want it. People enjoy being told what to do, having their lives planned out for them, having someone over them who can assure them that they are doing right and doing good and who can issue them correction if they ever stray from the righteous path. Half the pull of Catholicism is that. You have a Church, an authority, and all you have to do to know that you’re in good graces is follow the Church’s really rather lax rules. It’s all laid out for you, clean and simple. X is good. Y is bad. If you should do wrong then here are the steps you need to take to correct it. Comfy. Someone else is watching over you. You don’t need to think and you don’t need to suffer. Just, “Follow rule.” Just do that and you can live with the certainty that you are okay.

In the West we’ve inherited a conception of God which is, shall we say, detached. We’re liable to think of God as utterly Holy, transcendent, “Other”, above all the petty concerns of Man and fulfilled in himself and of himself and standing in need of no other. He is perfect. He is simple. He is a grand impartial deity who can do no wrong and who is working everything out according to his vast unsearchable plans. To question such a Being, let alone to argue with him, is not only blasphemous it is the height of folly. It is a sin! Because, after all, who are we to question The Almighty? God is like The Church or The Government, he makes rules and your only job is to follow them. We find this idea of God comfortable. Understandable. God is God and we are not and if we just shut up and do what he says we will make it to Heaven.

We’ll be the Good people.

We’ll be Right.

But let me ask you…

Is that what God wants?

You know Christians, American Christians in particular, like to say that God is “a personal god”, but I have found that they are actually profoundly uncomfortable with what that means. For a personal God implies of course that God is a person, possessed with a personality and…

Well… personalities can cause problems.

Personalities aren’t safe.

Most of us would rather that God were something more like Gravity or Electricity. Some kind of all-pervasive cosmic force guiding the universe towards some ill-defined utopian end that we’re all going to arrive at whether we like it or not. A God which is steady. Constant. Dependable. How terrifying is it to think of God having mood swings? How impossible a burden to bear if God has opinions about our lives? The revealed preference of most people, even if they say otherwise, is actually for an impersonal god. A Divine Set of Rules that we can follow towards a guaranteed outcome, in the same way that we can follow the laws of physics and be certain that the bridge we build will stand up. We would not like God to be fickle. To decide one thing on Tuesday but decide he feels differently by the weekend. We want him to be personal when it comes to loving us sure but…

None of the other stuff please.

We want to truncate God’s personality.

To allow him only to have the parts of personhood which we consider “nice.”

The other stuff? Too scary.

So much so that talk of God’s “Wrath” or his “Jealousy” or even of his grief and sorrow, despite all being mentioned time and again in the Bible, is almost today verboten in church.

It’s too much.

You know, “Hey God… You’re getting a little too personal. Okay? Chill. We aren’t that close.”

And that’s just it isn’t it. We aren’t that close. Moreover, we kinda sorta don’t want to be. We want God kept at arms distance. Safely… *gestures vaguely*… over there. We don’t really want to go in for the hug. For the kiss. We don’t want to feel the force of this person in its fullness. The raging hot swings of passion and anger and jealousy and hate and love.

No.

No thank you.

“God please just… stay over there. A little bit away, so that I can pretend you’re only the things I’m comfortable with you being. Be impersonal. Truncate your personhood. Don’t hit me with the full force of your emotions and in return I’ll obey your rules and be your servant.”

God reaches out fully. Man slightly pulls his hand away.

“I no longer call you servants, but friends.” — Jesus to those which knew him best.

See, being in a relationship with God is actually pretty scary. Full of all the ups and downs and drama and fire of any other relationship we might have with any other person, friend, family, or lover. And relationships aren’t about following rules, are they? They aren’t about treating the other person as though they are a dictator. The scandalous thing… the truly scandalous thing… is that our relationship with God is supposed to be just like our relationship with anyone else.

A thing of give of take.

Of Back and forth.

Something involving dialogue and compromise.

In some sense this implies seeing yourself as God’s equal, able to stand and confront him directly, face-to-face.

Perhaps to say such a thing makes you uneasy but I ask you…

How else could there be Love?

Anything less than that, anything less than standing on your tip-toes and seeing God eye-to-eye would be at best only the relationship between a master and his dog. But God has called us Children, has he not? And to have a full relationship with their parents, children must eventually grow up.

So I don’t believe God just wants rule followers, people that treat him like a distant cosmic force for good whom they’re supposed to just obey. I think instead he wants friends. Friends who will accept the whole of him. Friends who will love him for everything that he is.

Plato’s God

I know a man whose theology used to keep him from praying.

He’d spent most of his early life as an atheist but as a young man a personal tragedy left him searching for more and drove him to take up the study of religion. When I tell you he read just about everything on the subject please know I’m not exaggerating. This fellow could talk your ear off all day about the finer points of Hinduism, the various branches of Sikhism, the tenants of Islam, or the hundred plus flavors of Christianity. He took classes. He sat down and talked with priests. He watched maybe a thousand religious debates on YouTube and stacked his shelves with the full compendium of books on mythology and comparative religion. And then of course, as anyone who begins down such a path must, after a while he came to the reading of Aquinas and The Scholastics and Saint Augustine and the strength of the arguments in those tomes was enough at last to persuade him to be a Christian.

Paradoxically though, at the same time they deposed him completely of any desire to pray.

The reasoning was simple enough. So simple I’m sure than many of my readers will at times have felt the same. If God was indeed all the things the great philosophers and theologians said he was, then, quite simply, prayer didn’t make sense. After all, God is supposed to be all-knowing, all-powerful, everywhere-present, and all good. Logically then, whatever situation you might think to pray about, God already knows better than you do. If he’s controlling everything, and everything is working for his good purposes, then of course whatever we’re experiencing must also be part of that, and so why would God change it? Some particular part of his plan might feel distressing or uncomfortable to us in the moment, true, but it must by definition be the best thing that can possibly be happening, even if, right now, we don’t understand why.

So why pray?

I mean, God’s not going to change his mind, right? You’re not going to give him a new perspective he hasn’t considered, or bring up an issue he hasn’t already thought of. You’re not going to know better than him, or be a better judge of how much suffering is too much, or how many blessings you or anyone else really deserves.

So my friend never prayed, even though he really wanted to.

Oh he would sit and try to pray, yes. All the time. But nothing would ever happen because it felt so stupid. How was he going to sit there and ask God to change his perfect, all-knowing, all-good Mind? Jesus talked about prayer frequently though, and so therefore as a new Christian he felt it important to do but… how? What was that even supposed to mean? He came to feel himself to be a fatalist, more so than he ever had before he’d dared believe in God. This deity had the peculiar habit of making Reality far more set-in-stone, and therefore far less alive, than his previous Atheistic Universe had ever felt. At least in his old universe there was randomness! Something unexpected might happen, even if that something could never be supposed to have been intelligent. This God though… this Divine Watch Maker who controlled everything, was really something of a tyrant. One who made Free Will even more impossible than someone like Sam Harris would have you believe.

A conundrum. No?

In part such disconnects come from the fact that it’s fairly clear that early on in the Scriptures, God, or Yahweh, is thought of as more of a local, regional deity rather than some omnipresent God of the cosmos. If our modern conception of God seems too big to be personal, then in ancient times it was just opposite. One could connect with the gods in part because they were so small. The Romans and Jupiter, the Germans had Thor, the Canaanites had El, and the Israelites of the ancient Levant had Yahweh, a warrior storm god sitting atop their local tribal pantheon. See, they were not special. The Ancient Israelites were not unique. They related to their god just like everybody else did, offering him sacrifices of animals upon an alter, pouring out libations, and having priests sing prayers. Yahweh was smaller back then. Someone sizable enough to have a conversation with. By forging this relationship with him, they, like all the other tribes around them, hoped their god would be pleased and help them win in battle and bring them good harvests and give them abundant children.

Sometimes he wouldn’t come through for them though…

Sometimes the ritual and worship didn’t seem to do any good, and the Israelites would instead find themselves conquered by gods like Ra or Osiris or Assur. Who knew why. The psalmists asked if maybe Yahweh was off sleeping, or if he was mad at them, or if he was distracted by other things, or if maybe, perhaps, he was simply not strong enough to save the day. For better or worse this god was like Odin or Thor. He was a person. Like all the myths surrounding the misadventures of Zeus or Athena, God was relatable precisely because he seemed imperfect. See, Paganism is the second Old Testament. To understand Humanity, you really have to try and feel it in your bones.

To my mind, though everyone called them by different names, the gods of the ancient world were all more or less the same things. The same Entities if you like, or the same Concepts, if the word “entity” is a bother to you. Zeus is Indra is Thor is Perun just as Aphrodite is Isis is Freyja Is Haumea. Ra is Apollo and Cupid is Rati, right down to the detail that both of them use love arrows. The fact that other tribes did not know the name of Abraham’s God does not therefore mean that they were out of touch with Him. For Yahweh was a Sky Father, and I think it probable that anyone, anywhere on earth, offering sacrifices to that same idea was probably seen and heard by that deity, regardless of what they called him. As Paul said when he preached in Athens, the people offering prayers to “the unknown god” were offering them to Jesus, even if they didn’t know his name.

We got away from all that though.

As time went on, well… we began to get a little embarrassed.

A Pagan Altar from Another Time

All these gods and goddesses and spirits and so on. Wasn’t it a bit much? Shouldn’t The Divine be… I don’t know… simpler than that. Hera having an argument with her husband Zeus about how much sex they were having just felt… too human maybe? Too much like we were just projecting our petty concerns up to Heaven rather than letting Heaven project its concerns down to us. Slowly, very slowly in fact, ideas of Monotheism began to emerge, and with them thoughts of God’s otherness. The Old Testament documents this messy transition very clearly, the Israelites constantly going back and forth between having one god and having many, constantly arguing if Yahweh is all-powerful or if they in fact need to seek out help from other spirits now and again… just to be sure. By the first century however, the Jews have firmly settled on there being only one God, with all the others being fictitious, or possibly demons in disguise.

Saying “the Jews” here makes it sound like a small, minority opinion on the world stage. Not so. You must remember that during the time of Christ ethnic Jews and Jewish converts made up somewhere near ten percent of the Roman empire… hardly a population number to sneeze at. Together with Zoroastrians and the Greek Philosophical Tradition from Thales to Aristotle, the idea of “One God” or “One Principle” was certainly coming into its own. Even the polytheistic religions had by then trended towards the focus on one or two deities, in some cases almost to the exclusion of all the others, Zeus becoming almost “Yahweh-like” in his domination over the other Olympians by this time. The raw, bloody, passionate back and forth before the altar between a bronze age devotee and his god starts to become less and less plausible as we draw nearer to classical antiquity. To be sure, god, or “the gods” were still there, and people still interacted with them, but there was a definite trend towards seeing them as “Other.” As, “not like us.” Whereas the old gods had been just humans writ larger, filled with all the same pettiness and lust and jealousy that we are, the new conceptions of deity were… cleaner. More pure. Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover. Plato’s Demiurge.

And then Jesus.

Right in the middle of this great intellectual transition Christ appears, throwing a wrench into the whole thing. Personally, I suspect that is part of why people killed him. He was threatening to drag us back you see, to undo all our progress as a species. We’d come too far out of the dark ages to go back to the sort of god who spends his days drinking wine and cavorting with prostitutes. Losing his temper and throwing insults. If a god was going to show up then they wanted (as perhaps we want still) for him to be a detached guru. A Buddha. An enlightened Bodhisattva always just on the verge of floating away into a golden mist due to his total indifference to the passions of our physical world.

And yet instead Jesus was a person. A god with a personality in all its fullness.

And there we were again. Right back to square one. Back again in that horrible, awful place with gods who get angry and jealous and have to be appeased. I mean, for goodness sakes, Christ’s life ends in human sacrifice.

Hard to get more pagan than that.

If anything Jesus is the radical re-affirmation of the personal God over and against those who want to “Other” him. He is the God that has issues. The God that has problems. He comes telling us, yes, we are right to think that God is One… but… Do not think that means he does not feel. That he does not love. That he does not hate. Frankly, when people say that they see Christ as somehow radically different from the God of the Old Testament I must confess that I cannot sympathize. The Old Testament God is actually very like Jesus in that he gets mad, expresses sorrow, is occasionally bewildered and surprised, and that he loves very, very deeply.

Sometimes to an almost terrifying degree.

“Cosmic Force” God is somehow a lot more comforting than “God who gets feelings.”

In fact I find it far easier to claim, on the contrary, that Christ is very much an embodiment of Yahweh, and not at all an incarnation of the detached, omnipresent and impersonal “Force” that we inherited from the philosophers.

Maybe that’s scary.

Maybe it feels… less refined?

A detached, cool, calm and collected deity who never experiences any ups or downs might seem like the enlightened god to go with. The god of educated people, if they are to have one. Something more akin to The Force in Star Wars seems, what? Progressive maybe. More cultured. More elegant and genteel. But you know I’ve thought about it a long time and I don’t think The Force sort of god can love you. To me, personality seems like a package deal. The same capacities that allow your dog to love you also allow it to hate the veterinarian. The sweet, platonic love of a grandmother is only possible by someone who, at least once or twice earlier, was also possessed by the heights of lustful desire.

You don’t get to have just part of a person.

You have to take the whole thing.

When God Gets it Wrong

Remember, O Lord, against the Edomites
    the day of Jerusalem,
how they said, “Lay it bare, lay it bare,
    down to its foundations!”
O daughter of Babylon, doomed to be destroyed,
    blessed shall he be who repays you
    with what you have done to us!
Blessed shall he be who takes your little ones
    and dashes them against the rock! — Bible, Psalm 137: 7-9

A Rabbi on the streets of Brooklyn was once asked about this passage.

Difficult piece.

It’s a passage in which the scriptures, God’s holy word, seems to be glorifying infanticide in the one of the most horrific ways imaginable. The interlocutor who posed the question to the Rabbi was expecting a dodge. Expecting the man to engage in that kind of limber mental gymnastics to justify the inexcusable that religious people are all too capable of. He was expecting the Rabbi to try and explain the passage away or explain how it didn’t really mean what it seemed to mean or to say something that began with the words, “Well, in context…”

But the Rabbi didn’t do that.

“Oh,” the Rabbi said with a shrug. “Go was wrong there. He gets it wrong sometimes.”

Taken aback, after a pause the questioner followed up by asking how the man could worship a god he thought as fallible or capable of doing evil.

The Rabbi shrugged again. “Love by definition makes us make mistakes. Drives us to insanity. To anger. Jacob wrestled with God. So we all must.”

And so…

So, recently there was an attack on Israel.

And subsequently a counter-attack on Gaza.

If you’ve ever read the scriptures and asked yourself how God could tell people to engage in the wholesale slaughter of innocents, to commit genocide, to wipe a group of men, women, and children off the face of the earth… perhaps now you understand why. The emotions people feel now, today, on either side of the conflict, are emotions that God himself is capable of feeling. Wrath beyond bound, anger that can not be satisfied. Imagine seeing a child slaughtered in cold blood and not feeling such feelings. Could you even be human? Could you even truthfully claim to Love?

Make no mistake. Massacres are carried out far more often out of love than out of hatred. We fear what people have done to us and we fear what they might in the future do again. We look at our loved ones and we think, “No.” “No. That’s not happening. I’ll do anything to make sure nobody ever touches them again.” And of course, that’s how parents are supposed to feel. That’s sometimes how God feels. That is how the Israelis who lost loved ones felt on October 7th and it’s how Palestinians who lost loved ones in the days since feel now. In times like this we are all prone to look to our faith, our religion, our scriptures, and find justification for all the worst things that we want to do to satisfy such feelings and maybe justification is even there. Maybe we can point to places in our holy books where God says to act exactly how we want to act in our moments of rage and anger.

The destruction of Sodom.

And yet, like the Rabbi said, maybe God was wrong when he did such a thing.

Maybe we are too.

I understand the potentially blasphemous consequences of saying such a thing, yes, but will any of us actually stand up and say that it is ever good to dash babies against the rocks? To kill infants by smashing their bodies across the hard unyielding surfaces of boulders? I hope not. At least, not when we are not currently blinded by rage or blood lust from a recent atrocity. And if God is a person, if he does care for his children the way we care for ours, might he not also be blinded? Might his emotions not overpower him and cause him to do that which he might regret? Read your psalms again if you think the ancients did not think likewise, or if you say that I am here unbiblical. Perhaps if we are to be God’s friends and not merely his servants, then we must accept that we are to occasionally check him. To ask him to stop…to ask him to think.

Abraham did that.

The father of my faith, and the faith of the Muslims, and the faith of the Jews.

When God saw the evils of the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, how they defrauded the poor, neglected the widow, waged war on the helpless, and indeed, tried to gang rape innocent men who simply came to visit their city… he was rightly angered and driven to wrath as Abraham knew he would be. And so before God investigated the cities, Abraham bargained with him. He tried to cool The Almighty’s heels. He reminded God that it would be unjust to destroy the city if innocents remained within it, despite how wicked the majority of the men and women inside might be. Slowly he talks God down. He asks him if it is right to destroy the city if there are fifty good people within it, then he does the same for forty, then for thirty, all the way down to ten. Abraham knew his friend well, and knew that his rage would overcome him at the disgusting evils he would find in Sodom…

So, he reached out. Abraham, if I may be so bold, tried to correct God. In that moment, perhaps a man was more merciful than Heaven, and perhaps that is partly why that man was chosen.

Because he was brazen enough to do that.

Because he accepted God for who he was and didn’t try to make God into something more comfortable. Something easier. Something, therefore, more imaginary.

So I tell you that it is wrong to slay the innocent along with the wicked.

You know that and so do I.

Believe me, I am not a pacificist. I understand that violence and war are sometimes exactly what love requires.

But you cannot be overcome the bloodlust. You cannot let it blind you to the moral compass inside your soul. And these past weeks, as I have watched pundits and politicians in America claim, without a hint of introspection, that there are no innocent Palestinians, or that they are all somehow collectively guilty for the actions of Hamas, a terrorist group that has held them hostage and not allowed elections for nearly twenty years (and those original elections held under considerable duress), I am disgusted. I am repulsed. When I see Benjamin Netanyahu get on television and compare the Gazans to Amalek, knowing full well that he is thinking of the scripture from Samuel that I started this article with, I know that he is in the wrong. When I hear the president of Israel declare that there is no such thing as an innocent civilian in Palestine, I know that he has strayed. Abraham their father knew it, and he talked God down out of his wrath and bloodlust, and it is incumbent upon us to do the same and not to use the scriptures to justify further atrocities, as so many in Israel and the United States are currently doing.

Yes. Yes I know that you can quote chapter and verse at me all day to justify your warpath. I can do the same at you in the opposite direction. We can both do that because God is not a static, unchanging, impersonal force operating at a distance. He’s a person. A person who like us is possessed at various times and under various circumstances by various moods and feelings and who has therefore said different and contradictory things. He’s a God who loves like we love. A God who hates like we hate.

And if we are his friend… if we are to be more than simply dispassionate followers of rules and actually have a back-and-forth relationship with him… Then I think that means standing on our own moral ground. I think it means, as Jesus said, judging for ourselves what is right…

And I don’t think “right” includes indiscriminately blowing up kids.

The anger is understandable. Absolutely, and of course Jews have a right to defend themselves against attack. Yes. I understand those feelings and God does too, he and I both also have them.

But…

You know what’s right. You do. And your blind following of the scriptures currently calling to you, using them as justification for all your worst impulses, is not only not what it means to be in a relationship with God, it is precisely what someone who does not want such a relationship would do.

Abraham would’ve reminded God that they ought not genocide Amalek.

Perhaps begrudgingly, God would have agreed.

That’s what it means to walk with God.

Or…

Something like that.

Remember my disclaimer. I don’t exactly know what I am doing.

Amor Vincit Omnia.