Relating to an Invisible God, Part II

I've been thinking about this issue of relating to an invisible God for the last week or so. This whole thought process was spawned a week ago yesterday, as I sat at a round table in a meeting to discuss forming small groups at church.

I'm mildly interested in participating in a small church group of other people around my age, but I was mostly there for the pizza. At one point, we had an "exercise" with the other people at the table, and one of the questions was "How has your relationship with God grown over the years."

Well, I couldn't answer that question. I can't say it's "grown" at all. I'm still confused about how this is supposed to be a "relationship" as I understand the term. I'm honest in my reply. I've got nothing to hide.

As I think about this issue more, it occurs to me that I may have missed something here. (Stay with me as I work this out.)

Because God is infinite, he is not bound by a physical form...he's entirely "not physical." I'm avoiding the use of the word "spiritual" here, because my mind can't wrap itself around what exactly that means. The word "spiritual" has taken on many connotations. Maybe "not physical" is the simplest and best definition of the word "spiritual" and we should just leave it at that.

So because God is not in physical form, then if we were to have a relationship with Him, it would have to be fundamentally different from the kind of relationships we're used to having with physical people.

There would be no audible voice. No physical manifestation. It would be entirely "not physical."

I'm not saying God is not capable of producing an audible voice, or some kind of avatar, but it would certainly be out of the norm, as our experiences tell us--although the Bible does relate certain instances where this happened. But if I were to hear of a particular occurrence, I would be extremely skeptical...

Ockham's razor: a simpler explanation is that someone is making it up, imagining it, is mentally ill, or suffering a hallucination or wishful thinking. All such reports would have to be taken with a grain of salt because they are unprovable and unverifiable.

Therefore, I must immediately reject any claim of "God spoke to me, and...blah, blah, blah," unless the statement contained information that the speaker could not possibly know and that information was verifiable.

So...without an audible voice, or a physical manifestation, how would you know if God were trying to speak to you? (Does God even need to speak to us? Do we necessarily need God to speak to us--other than what's already in the Bible?)

So accepting that a relationship with God would be fundamentally different from anything we've known based on our physical experience, then I imagine it would be a pretty difficult and nebulous thing to define what exactly that relationship would be like.

Our experience is purely physical. God is "not physical." What does "not physical" mean? How can I relate to someone that is "not physical," since I am a physical being and all of my experiences are in the physical world?"

So again, I've circled back to the original problem: how do you relate to a "not physical" God? Certainly God would not be God if he were bound by a physical form. Yet because he is God, there is an immense gap between our experiences and His...between what we know and what He knows...between our senses and His.

In fact, in order to communicate with a "not physical" being, we would need an extra sense. Our five senses are tuned into the physical world. We would need a "sixth sense" that is tuned to a "not physical" world.

Even if God were to attempt to speak to us using the physical world, I would imagine that we would still need the "sixth sense" to recognize that it is, in fact, God trying to speak to us. Otherwise, we may not even recognize it--or we may attribute it to something else.

In any case, I've been reminded that prayer is certainly biblical. Jesus even gave us a blueprint for it in the form of the Lord's prayer. So that means we should pray, even if there is no "return message."