Month: June 2023

For many, the most challenging part of faith is belief in a personal God. Membership in a local church usually requires “a profession of faith.” Often, this is little more than mental consent that there is a God. That same consent to God’s existence usually assumes that the individual intends to place themselves under God’s authority. Yet, what is often present in that “profession” is a sincere desire to know God personally, to experience a relationship with God in such a manner that in those hours of deepest need, we may personally address God and feel that we are heard and cared for. Harry Emerson Fosdick is helpful here, “No one achieves a vital, personal, Christian experience without a profound sense of need.”[1] But the question presses, is belief in a personal God possible?

One difficulty in experiencing a personal God today is the tendency of impersonal thinking and living. Anything sensory is found to be inferior to reason and intelligence. During my ministry in Texas a number of years ago, one individual criticized my preaching as too personal and too emotional. He was a medical doctor and sought sermons that would stretch his thinking, not move his heart. He was suspicious of preaching that stirred emotions. To think of God in personal terms, he argued, was unsophisticated. I suspect that the Sunday morning pews are filled with people who are in agreement.

But look at what Jesus does here for his disciples: Jesus takes the qualities of human parenting as a clue to understanding God; asks that we address God as Father. God is not an impersonal force that moves through the universe. God is a living being that knows us, loves us, and has a divine desire for our lives. Jesus draws from what is the best in our hearts to show us its higher ideal in God. Certainly, it is true that God has given us minds and expects that we should be growing in knowledge. But we cannot pursue God and fully know God without the heart. One of the basic convictions of our Christian faith is that a loving purpose directs the universe.

Moments confront each of us that demand more than a mere belief in the existence of God. They are moments of such great personal need that more study—more knowledge about God—fails to satisfy. A calm strength in the midst of life’s storms is possible only as God is known personally. The Christian lives not by a higher knowledge of God. The Christian lives by faith, prayer, love, and communion with God. When the soul cries out for a personal God, Jesus shows us the way. It is so simple we doubt its power. Get down on your knees, patiently silence all the voices in your mind, and then say, “Our Father, who is in Heaven.”

Joy,

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[1] Harry Emerson Fosdick, Riverside Sermons, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1958, 168.

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This mediation is from Dr. Doug Hood’s upcoming book, A Month of Prayer: Five-Minute Meditations for a Deeper Experience of Prayer, featuring prayers by Dr. Leo S. Thorne.

The following mediation was written by Nathanael Cameron Hood, MA, New York University; MDiv, Princeton Theological Seminary

When I first went to grad school at New York University in the early 2010s, I became friends with an aspiring PhD student who didn’t have much regard for organized religion. He was a good man—a genius student and doting father with whom I could talk for hours about politics and art. But whenever the subject of faith arose, his entire mood would change. On good days he’d become tight-lipped and dismissive—on bad ones, he could become outright belligerent. Few such memories stick in my mind quite like one morning when he told me that he’d finished rereading the Book of Job and had decided that the God depicted within was one of the greatest villains in literary history. He snarled that he couldn’t believe anyone could worship a God who would inflict such suffering on such a good man, give him no satisfactory explanation why, and only restore his fortunes once he apologized for complaining.

Over a decade later, I still think about this conversation all the time—not because he offended me, but because I often find myself agreeing with him. The Book of Job is one of the most challenging texts in the entire Bible, inspiring passionate, puzzled, furious debate for literal millennia. Some scholars suggest it began life as an Israelite folk tale that tried to rationalize the existence of evil in God’s creation. As the centuries went by, bits and pieces were Frankensteined into the text until it resembled its current, seemingly chaotic form. One of their key bits of evidence is the book’s epilogue in the forty-second chapter where—after Job repents for rebuking God—God turns around and chastises Job’s assembled friends who’d spent dozens of chapters defending God’s goodness, declaring that Job was the only righteous one among them. The only way to explain such an abrupt 180° reversal, these scholars declare, was that different writers had meddled with the original story to help Job—and God—save face.

One would think my recent time in the scholarly trenches of seminary would see me agreeing with these arguments. But curiously, I’ve found the opposite to be true. I wonder if these researchers are missing the forest for the trees, failing to grasp that within the larger biblical story of God revealing Godself to humanity it really was Job who proved himself the most faithful because of his willingness to challenge God. Consider Job’s friends—the quick-witted Eliphaz, the accusatory Bildad, the cutting Zophar, the impetuous Elihu. In their rush to defend God from Job they ended up reducing God into a static set of rules to be blindly followed. Ah, but our God is much more than this! Though God desires our obedience, what God wants more than anything else is a personal relationship with each of us. This is why God came to earth as a human being—to live with us, to celebrate with us, to cry and suffer and ultimately die with us.

All throughout the Bible we see righteous men and women struggle with God, refusing to be silent in the face of perceived injustice and evil: Jeremiah cursing God for dooming Jerusalem, the Psalmist despairing of God’s absence, the writer of Ecclesiastes dismissing all creation as meaningless. Even Jesus challenged God at Gethsemane, begging his father to save him from the suffering that was to come on the cross. In a way, it takes more faith to assume that God will hear and respond to our complaints and petitions than to blindly accept our suffering and misfortunes as God’s will. To think otherwise would diminish God, just as Job’s friends did in the strange, infuriating, and ultimately beautiful Book of Job.

Joy,

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To read more meditations by Dr. Doug Hood and Nathanael Cameron Hood, you can purchase Nurture Faith: Five Minute Meditations to Strengthen Your Walk with Christ from your favorite book seller.

Any royalties received support the ministry and mission of First Presbyterian Church of Delray Beach.

The following mediation was written by Nathanael Cameron Hood, MA, New York University; MDiv, Princeton Theological Seminary

It was a hot summer day in July 2006 when U.S. Air Force military chaplain Lt. Col. Brian Bohlman first reported for duty at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center (LRMC) in Germany. As the largest American hospital outside the United States, it became the epicenter for treating American, NATO, and other allied soldiers critically wounded during the War on Terror. Though tired and slightly jetlagged, Chaplain Bohlman was immediately thrown into the deep end of military chaplaincy when, during his initial tour of the hospital, he was alerted that a bus of wounded soldiers would be arriving at the ER in half an hour. Many were in critical condition after receiving catastrophic “blast and burn injuries” from IEDs. Indeed, Chaplain Bohlman recounts how some arrived attached to life-support equipment that literally weighed hundreds of pounds. Though separated by an ocean from active combat zones, right then, Chaplain Bohlman found himself face-to-face with the very worst realities of war.

Military chaplains have served as part of the United States Armed Forces since the Revolutionary War, and though their duties have evolved over the years, they’ve traditionally had certain privileges unique to them. It was on that hot day in July that Chaplain Bohlman discovered one such exception to standard military etiquette when he was informed by his superior that upon arrival, each patient would be introduced to him in turn not by their rank and last name, but by their first name—just their first name. He recalls meeting his first patient and being told by an attending sergeant that his name was John. Looking down on the stretcher, the scared, scarred soldier grabbed his hand and wouldn’t let go. “John, welcome to Germany,” Chaplain Bohlman soothed, “you’re safe now, and we’re here to take good care of you.” In that moment, the two were no longer chaplain and soldier—they were just Brian and John, two human beings under the care of God.[1]

There’s a simple power in names, one reflected all throughout the Bible. In the Ancient Near East where the Hebrew Bible was first written and compiled, names were more than just labels—they were “symbols, magical keys…to the nature and essence of the given being or thing.”[2] Put simply, your name wasn’t just what people called you—your name was who and what you were. Many of the most dramatic moments in Scripture are moments of naming and re-naming as they mark some of the most intimate encounters between humanity and the divine: Abram becoming Abraham, the father of nations; Saul becoming Paul, the great evangelist; the Annunciation when Gabriel told Mary that she would bear a son named Immanuel, meaning “God is with us.”

The forty-third chapter of Isaiah contains another such example of the power of names. Written during a time when Jerusalem had been destroyed, and its people carried off to exile in Babylon, many of the survivors were given new names by their conquerors. Ah! But in this first verse God strikes down these new names, reminding them who created and formed them, that “I have called you by name; you are mine!” I wonder how many people in our modern society in the millennia after Isaiah was written similarly labor under false names: immigrants forced to adopt easy-to-pronounce English names for fear of ostracization; workaholics who disappear into their jobs and job titles; persecuted minorities debased by racial and ethnic slurs. How wonderful, then, that ours is a God who sees through these things and calls us by our names. Our true names that reflect our true, inner selves. The ones given to us at our birth, the ones no foreign power like Babylon, the ones no military pretension or IEDs, can change or take from us. Praise be to our God and the names God has named us! Israel. Emmanuel. Brian. John.

Joy,

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[1] Bohlman, Brian. “Voices from the Field: Ready on the Ground: A Military Chaplain’s Reflection on Wounded Warrior Ministry at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, Germany.” Essay. In Chaplaincy and Spiritual Care in the Twenty-First Century: An Introduction, edited by Wendy Cadge and Shelly Rambo. Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2022, 62-64.

[2] Speiser, E. A. The Anchor Bible – Genesis. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1964, 16.

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To read more meditations by Dr. Doug Hood and Nathanael Cameron Hood, you can purchase Nurture Faith: Five Minute Meditations to Strengthen Your Walk with Christ from your favorite book seller.

Any royalties received support the ministry and mission of First Presbyterian Church of Delray Beach.