Tuesday, August 11, 2009

God-Seeker

"...let the heart of them rejoice that seek the Lord. Seek the Lord and His strength; seek His face evermore." Ps. 105:3b-4

The rest of the Psalm gives the grounds for "why" we should seek Him. Like Ps. 78, we are given a mini-history of Israel. Its purpose is stated at the beginning: "Remember the the marvelous works that He hath done." Know this God: see His activities, that they are good; know His character, that He is holy; and then seek Him out, for it is who He is that drives us to Him. The heart of the God-seeker rejoices because this God is worthy to be sought, the only thing worth seeking. He has proven Himself to be the one and only hope, the one and only God, the highest and the greatest, the beginning and the end, the First Cause and the Ultimate Purpose. Taste and see that the Lord is good, and you will desire Him like wine for the soul.
It must be stated, however, that God is to be sought for Himself and not for the mere sake of seeking. Many people (through time and esp. today) are seekers for seeking's sake, and many others additionally believe that they can somehow properly seek God without any established concepts of Him. They stress subjective experience above objective truth(s).
God is a person, and therefore is to be known in an experiential subjective dynamic. However, God is not a person like we are a person. He is holy, i.e., absolutely perfect and complete, and thus has no changes. Therefore, there are definite and certain things about God, things that without knowledge of we will never truly seek Him: we will fall into every ditch and lurch into every side eddy imaginable. God is a person about which there are definite and certain things, things that He has graciously revealed to us through His word, things that He is to be sought for. The true God-seeker understands this: their subjective experience(s) must necessarily be bound to an objective reality or else it will wander aimlessly in the dark.

-Jon Vowell

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