Church of the Holy City

Approaching God

Approaching God
Rev. Dr. David J. Fekete
January 18, 2009

Isaiah 40:1-11 Matthew 11:25-30

Most of us know the familiar passage from Isaiah we heard this morning. We hear it every Christmas season about Jesus’ advent. In fact that passage is quoted by John the Baptist in the Gospel of John. Yet this is a passage about the coming of Jehovah, or more properly pronounced, Yahweh. The reason why we don’t associate this passage with Jehovah is because of an ancient Jewish custom. God’s name, Yahweh, or Jehovah in the King James translation, was considered too holy to pronounce. So instead of saying Yahweh, the ancient Jews would say Adonai, which means “Lord.” So what the King James translators did, and most every English translation did after it, was to put LORD in all capitol letters to stand for Yahweh, or Jehovah. So at Christmas time we read about the coming of the LORD, which is easy to associate with Jesus, since we call Jesus Lord.
But how does that familiar Isaiah passage sound when we put in God’s name? How does it sound, when we realize that in Isaiah, the prophet is talking about the coming of Jehovah, or Yahweh? In Handel’s Messiah, we hear the words from this Isaiah passage, “And the glory of the LORD will be revealed” (Is. 40:5). But what we should be hearing is, “And the glory of Jehovah will be revealed.” How do we reconcile the coming of Jehovah with the coming of Jesus?
The answer to these questions is simple. But it is also radical. Swedenobrg says it in one sentence: “Jehovah God the Creator of the universe descended and assumed the Human that He might redeem and save men” (TCR 82). The birth of Jesus is the Old Testament God taking on a human form. Yahweh, or Jehovah, is Jesus’ soul and Jesus is Yahweh’s body. This idea runs throughout the Isaiah passage. We read, “A voice of one calling: In the desert prepare the way for Yahweh;” “make straight in the wilderness a highway for our God;” “You who bring good tidings to Zion . . . say to the towns of Judah, ‘Here is your God!’”; “See, the Sovereign Yahweh comes with power, . . . He tends his flock like a shepherd” (Is. 40: 3, 9, 10, 11). We naturally associate the shepherd tending his flock with Jesus, but here in Isaiah, it is clearly Yahweh who is tending the flock. The only way to reconcile the Isaiah passage is to acknowledge that the coming of Jesus is one and the same with the coming of Yahweh. Yahweh is the soul of Jesus. The birth of Jesus is Yahweh coming into the world in human form as baby Jesus.
And Isaiah 40 is not the only passage in the prophets where we have taken the coming of Yahweh with the coming of Jesus. The Revised Common Lectionary, used by the Anglican Church and many other Christian denominations, give the following Isaiah prophesies for the Advent season: Isaiah 2, 7, 9, 11, 35, 52, 62. You have probably heard most of these prophesies and I will spare you the tedium of quoting them now. All these Advent prophesies are about the coming of Yahweh, and Christians take them to be the coming of Jesus. We are left with the conclusion that the coming of Jesus is one and the same with the coming of Yahweh foretold by the prophets. It is a simple conclusion. And it is a radical conclusion.
There are multiple reasons why God incarnated in the form of Jesus Christ. Of course we all know He came to redeem and save the human race. But God also took on human form so that we can relate more fully to God. With God seen as the human Jesus, we can form a personal relationship with God. “. . . the one God who is invisible came into the world and assumed a Human, not only that He might redeem men, but also that He might become visible, and thus capable of conjunction” (TCR 786).
We cannot form a personal relationship with an invisible God. Our finite minds cannot grasp infinity. We can know it is there, but we can only form a finite idea about infinity. And God known only as infinity cannot enter our minds and become a part of our consciousness. But a Human God can enter our consciousness and can become a part of our personality. Seeing God as the risen and glorified Christ is what makes the New Church predicted by John different from all the churches that preceded it.
This New Church is the crown of all the churches that have hitherto existed on the earth, because it will worship one visible God in whom is the invisible, like the soul in the body. Thus and not otherwise can there be conjunction of God with man, because man is natural and hence thinks naturally, and the conjunction must be in his thought and thus in his love’s affection, which is the case when he thinks of God as a man. Conjunction with an invisible God is like that of the eye’s vision with the expanse of the universe, of which it sees no end; it is also like mid-ocean, which falls upon air and sea and is lost. But conjunction with a visible God, on the other hand, is like seeing a man in the air on the sea spreading forth his hands and inviting to his arms (TCR 787).
A human God can embrace His children and with His Divine hand wipe away every tear from every eye.
There are refinements and elaborations in Swedenborg concerning how to picture God. There are places where Swedenborg says that God is inside the brilliant sun of heaven which is His Divine power shining forth from His human. So when angels see God in human form it is an image, but not God Himself.
When, however, the Lord appears in heaven, which often occurs, He does not appear encompassed with a sun, but in the form of an angel, yet distinguished from angels by the Divine shining through from His face, since He is not there in person, for in person the Lord is constantly encompassed by the sun . . . (HH 121).
Then, apparently, sometimes God appears in a fiery form. “I have also seen the Lord . . . once in the midst of angels as a flame-like radiance” (HH 121). To some people, the image of a fiery radiance is a more comfortable image for God, since they think a Divine-Man is too limiting for God’s infinity. But how does this fit with Swedenborg’s claim that the New Church will see God as the Divine-Human embodying the invisible infinite God?
Yet seeing God as the risen Jesus Christ is not the whole story. What really matters are the qualities that Jesus embodies. When we enter into friendships, it is the personality traits that attract or repel us to others. So we pick friends who are compassionate, or smart, or caring, or funny. We pick friends according to their personality traits, not just their person. It is the same way with God. When we think of God, or when we pray to God, we pray to God’s essential attributes. “. . . Loving the Lord does not mean loving Him as to person, but loving good that is from Him; and loving good is willing and doing it from love (HH 15). Loving God is loving what is good and doing what is good. Loving God means every time we have the opportunity to do good we do it. So love for God is a very active process. It isn’t just imagining Jesus and projecting love onto that image. Since everything truly good is from God, every time we are involved in a good deed we are loving God.
. . . good proceeding from the Lord is a likeness of Him, since He is in it; and that they become likenesses of Him and are conjoined to Him who make good and truth to be of their life, by willing and doing them. To will is also to love to do (HH 16).
So we can say that our image of God is also seeing what is good and doing what is good. We approach God by being good. We see God when we see good and love.
For me, the only way I can conceive of God is as the loving Jesus I read about in the Gospels. Now risen, Christ is with me always—in my heart and beside me. So I approach God as both the human form of the risen Jesus Christ, and in the qualities of infinite love that shines forth from what Walt Whitman calls “the gentle God.” This is how I understand Christ’s words, “No one comes to the Father except through me” (John14:6). And that is how I take Swedenborg when he writes,
This New Church is the crown of all the churches that have hitherto existed on the earth, because it will worship one visible God in whom is the invisible, like the soul in the body. Thus and not otherwise can there be conjunction of God with man, because man is natural and hence thinks naturally, and the conjunction must be in his thought and thus in his love’s affection, which is the case when he thinks of God as a man (TCR 787).