God exists but is unknown. The more time we give Him, the more He becomes known to us. We must take the time to study the science of knowing God. We search for God, or rather, we seek to deepen our relationship with Him, a relationship that begins with simple faith and superficial knowledge. It then progresses as we begin and discover at every moment of our life that God loved us much more than we thought at that moment. The more we know God, the more we realize how ignorant He was of us. Knowledge of God increases, and with it the peace and grace He gives, and the thirst for Him increases. What we discover in our relationship with God is that we were always ignorant of how much He was by our side, and the more we know Him, the more grateful we become to Him and the more indebted we feel. This increases the value of His love for us and our love for Him increases.
The nature of life, in terms of how and what we are born of, and how and when we die, confirms that man is a “visitor” to this earth and not of it. The Bible says more, not that we are not of the earth but that we are not entirely of it. What the Bible tells us is that man was formed from two elements, from clay, which is from this earth and this created universe, and from the spirit of God, that is, from an uncreated dimension, from something that makes him similar not only to the elements of this universe but also more similar to God, in “His image and likeness.”
The reader of the Holy Bible is faced with two basic existential questions in life. The first is, what must I achieve in life in order to give my life meaning? The second is what is the image of God in me, or rather how truly am I in the image of God and how do I actually fulfill it? After a short period, this pilgrim, if he walks in the paths of the Lord, discovers that the second question is the answer to the first. Because that is the true answer to the deep human thirst.
In the book, man is not just a passing phenomenon, existing, growing and withering, born to die. He is a visitor in the sense of a tourist or a seeker and researcher. Where is he going or what is he looking for? The answer in the book is not “nothingness” or “zero” or “nothing”, but “the Kingdom of God” or “everything”. Man begins from “nothing” to reach “everything”. God brought us from nothingness and completed all the plan for us and raised us to the heavens, that is, to everything. The book is the opposite of philosophies, the latter consider that man came “from something” – and with many interpretations, but he is walking “to nothingness – nothingness”. But God brings to the immortal life. What is outside of God sees that life was and appears to end. We are not nomads to the land of nothingness, we are progressive on the path of existence. This is the life that God created and gives and we are called to its perfection, that is, to live it to the full and not just its appearance. Human logic does not accept that, because after years of self-realization and building relationships, and after the labor of 60 or 70 years to know the “I” and the “You,” our destiny is that there is no “I” and no “You.”
The biblical solution is the real one because it knows that after here there is there, and that life does not go to nothingness, but that God’s power brings from nothingness to life. This solution is real because it gives meaning to life, no matter how small or large its circumstances are, great or humble, nothing is more important or greater than life itself, and nothing of its circumstances is above life. The philosophical solution in analyzing existence makes hope (in nothingness) foolish. The book considers despair the greatest sin or loss. If life were to return to nothingness, then what harm would poverty, disease, injustice, suffering, ignorance, or…? Because the end is more hideous than all of the above. But since life goes to existence, this makes every obstacle, no matter how small, a cause of great loss. That is why the tragedy of sin in the book is greater and more horrific than the event itself, and its responsibility is greater than its value, because its effects remain on its great fruits and not on its small reality. For the same reason, the toils, even the trivial and simple ones, are of much greater value than their size. Because what we are accustomed to reading in religious language as the eternal “crowns” is more important than the present mother.
Research in philosophy generates anxiety, and at best, man appears as a wandering traveler searching for God. However, in the book, there is a surprise that man is gradually receiving God because he realizes that before he searched for God, God was searching for him. “I knew you because you searched for me.” In philosophy, there is research in the sense of confusion, in the sense of expectation or betting! How does the mind prove and demonstrate what is beyond (intangible)? God is proven by logic, not numbers.
But the real tragedy occurs when the religious solution turns into a philosophy, a philosophy in terms of its structure and not in terms of its subject matter. The difference between philosophy and Christianity does not lie at all and only in a specific determination, such as the existence of an afterlife or not, the deeper difference lies in the way of thinking.
Imagine an unbelieving person of an adult age who discovers the Bible and becomes acquainted with its truths. Do we think that he is a believer? Or is he religious? He is now faced with two philosophies, one religious and the other that believes in “no religion.” The former says that God does not exist, so it philosophizes about God, and the latter says that He exists in its philosophy about Him. We can classify the two philosophies, the religious one and the atheist one, as religious issues. Or, on the contrary, we can say that both ideas about the existence of God are merely philosophies and not religion in the Christian biblical sense of the word. “Believed” in the Bible never means “convinced,” that is, he believed in the existence of God logically, or to clarify more, he was convinced of the second philosophical issue instead of the first, that is, his mind tended to consider that God exists and not that He does not exist. “Believed,” in the Bible, means “met,” “encountered,” “saw” God in his life’s path. It was my life path and way that brought me to God and to meet Him. How many people have logically acknowledged the existence of God but never actually met Him. “Believed,” in the language of the Bible, means “his heart settled in God,” he came to rely on Him and God’s presence in his life became his life, or part of it now.
It is a mistake, after reading the Bible, to consider ourselves “seekers” of God, but rather we are receivers of God – receptive to God, who seeks us. Sin in the Bible is not ignorance (when we seek wrongly) but rejection (when we prevent God from meeting us).
We cannot meet God in ways other than His own. He may not take our own paths. Yes, knowing God draws us to take the paths we find Him on. This is the meaning of our “search,” to deliberately walk the paths we have heard He seeks us on.
God’s search for us is not blind, forced or selfish. God is always searching for us and leaves us in his acceptance of our freedom. He expects us to walk the paths of his Gospel as an expression of our freedom to come to the paths on which we await him. Because there he walks and there he awaits us. This is the meaning of the phrase we repeat: “Blessed are you, O Lord; teach me your laws” or “your ways.”
Amen