Title: Who is Today's God?
God is also understood as a convenient conceptual tool that can easily explain difficult problems in life. All unresolved problems can be returned to God as God's work. All things that are not well understood are attributed to God, and that is God's providence, that is God's will, that is God's ordained... In this way, we turn everything to God, and God is only a convenient way to temporarily solve the problem. . Primitive people saw all difficult phenomena as divine harmony.
Even people today tend to think of God this way. But as science advances and human reason advances, these gods are increasingly pushed back. If this God still exists within us, it is because we are less evolved and less awakened mentally. However, it can be said that such a God is in an unknown realm. This is the idea that there is no need for God to exist in such areas as we can do everything autonomously in the areas we know, and only in areas we are not aware of. In this way, as science and knowledge develop, the unknown area is reduced, so God is infinitely reduced.
Then, does God really not exist in the realm we know well? Does God exist and appear only in areas we are not familiar with at any particular time? Doesn't seem like it. We should see God as being active and in the central area of our lives that we know best and care about the most. God is not like a demon that haunts only at night, but He is the One who moves through history in broad daylight and works under a bright lamp. Bonhoeffer once said that God does not exist in the most marginal areas of human life, such as the fear of death and disease, but God is at the center of man's most active life. I'm quoting what he said.
“I want to speak of a God who is not at the borders of life, but at the center of life, not in weakness but in strength, and therefore not in human suffering and death, but in human life and prosperity. It seems to me that it is better to remain silent and leave the matter unresolved. God must be found at the center of life. Not only in death, but in life, not only in pain, but in health and vigor, in sin It has to be found in activities.”
Today's God is the one who is related to the center of our lives, and this God was confessed by Moses and the Israelites who left Egypt. If we look at the Ten Commandments we read today, we can see that the God mentioned here is being confessed as a being who exerts power in the midst of the lives of the people of Israel.
First of all, these words appear in the introduction to the Ten Commandments. “I am the God who brought you out of the land of slavery in Egypt.” The central problem in the lives of the Israelites in Egypt was slavery. For the Israelites at that time, liberation from this slavery was the central task. God was involved in this liberation, which was the most important issue for the people of Israel, and was the source of the power that caused that liberation.
God is not someone else, but the ultimate source that brings the best solution to the problems entangled in our history and society, and as if He invited the Hebrews who were suffering in Egypt to liberation, we It is the being who invites you. Therefore, the subject of history is human beings, we are. God is the being who invites and waits to become the subject of history. History will retreat if we do not respond to that invitation, and history will move forward when we do our best to respond to the invitation. God is the One who invites us to move forward and is the source of eschatological hope. Today we are examining the understanding of God of a heroic believer like Moses. For Moses, God is not at the fringes of life, but the source of creation and power to be with us in the most tangled and tangled realms of our lives and “guide” us to live courageous and creative lives. God is the source and spirit of freedom and liberation.
The first of the Ten Commandments is "You shall have no other gods." At first glance, this seems to be a denial of other religions. It seems to deny the other gods of Hinduism, the gods of Islam. And it seems to deny those who believe in such a god. The city-states that surrounded Israel were unequal societies with monarchy at their peak, and they had gods and religions that supported them, a commandment that warns the Israelites not to be deceived by such a god. This commandment is radical monotheism, where all beings are equal under God, so monotheism can be an ideology for a society where there is no king or ruling class. If the Exodus was a struggle for freedom, then that freedom must now be combined with equality. As such, this first commandment not to worship other gods can be understood as a human rights declaration that all human beings are equal under one God.