God, Image and Reality

Many people think they believe in God but often it is not the true God in whom they believe but a personalised image of him. That's because they see God in their terms rather than his. When you acknowledge God you must have some idea what he is and what his laws are and you must keep, or at least try to keep, these laws as God and his laws are one. You must fit yourself to him not try to fit him to you but this is just what many religious people at the present time try to do.

How can you have any idea what God is? Obviously, the first port of call would be religion and revelation but nowadays the unfolding nature of human spiritual development means we have to supplement that with our own intuition. Intuition is the knowing faculty in man and it is never wrong. It cannot be wrong because it is a direct link to reality. However, in the case of humans as we are at this stage of our spiritual development the intuition is often mixed in with the thinking and feeling faculties and so errors can be made.

A case in point is same sex marriage. This is promoted on the grounds of love but love cannot ignore the claims of truth, and the truth is that the complementarity of masculine and feminine is a basic law of creation. Laws of creation are not like human laws. They are sacred and inviolable. To break them is blasphemy, unpleasant as it may be for the human ego to hear that.

Those promoting a same sex agenda mistake human happiness for spiritual fulfilment. If they are religious their religion is a worldly religion for it seeks happiness and validation in this world. They fail to understand that seeking self-gratification and self-expression is not the work of love because love, spiritually understood, has to do with the forgetting of self not its satisfaction. This is a difficult truth and no one is worthier of respect than a person born with homosexual tendencies who does not deny this in him or herself but does not excuse or justify it either. In God's eyes there is no difference between a homosexual or a heterosexual person. He loves both. But that does not mean that the physical expression of homosexuality is in line with divine truth. It is a mischanneling of the creative energy for egotistic purposes. I repeat, homosexuality in itself is not a sin any more than any tendency is. It is the succumbing to a tendency that is the sin and, more, the denial of its sinfulness.

An image of God is one based on human thoughts, desires, emotions and fears. It can easily become an idol. Christians can have idols just as much as pagans for what many do is adjust the reality of God and Christ to fit their prejudices. One of the most important tasks of the spiritual aspirant is to learn to discriminate between true intuition and what we might call wishful thinking. Only when you start to do this can you make any progress towards the goal of knowing God, and you cannot become one with God until you start to know him as he is. Otherwise what are you becoming one with?