Tuesday, May 11, 2021

Concept of God Affects Personal Experience of God

How do we know God through personal experience? Generally, we have some concept of God, and we find that some of our experience fits that concept, and we call that the voice of God.

This God known through personal experience is usually on our side, and approaching God through personal experience has the virtue of allowing us to always be right about him. A person who's seeing what appears to be a yellow rose shouldn't believe anyone who tells them they are not seeing what appears to be a yellow rose, and no one has a truth-based right to contradict the yellow-rose-seer. So if we see God as we experience him, we definitely see God as we experience him.

The danger is that our concepts of God, the ones that form our concept of what "God" can mean and thus which of our experiences are from God, may not be in line with the God who actually exists. We may fail to have receptors for sides of his character that we don't believe in, and thus fail to find those to be of him through personal experience. We know that God is love, but we think of love in human terms. So, though it threatens to be wearying and confusing (but it isn't always), we need to either study the "outside view" to our experiences of God for ourselves (find the truth of God found in the holistic relationship of truths, including revelation), or somehow figure out which teachers of the truth we can listen to -- but a good teacher should make it so that we see the truth for ourselves. In this way we will not be misled by a version of God that fits what is convenient or culturally acceptable but which is actually risky and untrue to God.

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