sarkakaiaima

I am quite a fan of the movies and television series based on the original Star Trek television series. There is one fictional character from the series Star Trek Voyager who I think gives a powerful metaphor for understanding God’s purpose for human maturation and what that process requires and leads to. Follow me here as I explain why I think it is so helpful.  In the television series Voyager (season 4) a new character is introduced who becomes part of the crew of this space ship. This character is part of the Borg “collective” and gets severed from her grouping of “Borg.” The “Borg” are individuals who have been assimilated, through a process of having advanced technology implanted into their bodies, into one collective consciousness. They become drones who serve only the tyrannical will of the “Borg Collective” (the “Hive Mind”) in its drive to assimilate, utilize and in the process destroy all individuality from the organic life forms they encounter. This character lear...

What is God’s own self-presentation to us? Multiple word pictures and metaphors from human life and relationships are employed in Scripture to instruct us about God. In all of them the emphasis is on the character and the personal nature of God. Taken together, this diversity of metaphor and word pictures reinforce that God is like us in that he is a personal Being but unlike us in his essential nature as God. God is ultimately incomprehensible in his nature and we will never for all eternity be able to ever know God in this way. However, God does make himself known through things and relationships which are very familiar to us.  Looking at Scripture, one finds God described primarily as masculine and couched in terms of the ancient cultures in which the writers lived. This should not be a surprise to anyone as it was written by real human beings who lived long ago. But since we believe that it is holy Scripture we need to pay attention to the particulars of how God is described...

We need God to be a Father to us—for our most basic conceptions about God, relationships, moral teaching, skills for living day to day, ability to relate to people in intimate ways, confidence to step out and take risks are all conditioned by our experiences with our parents and family and then sometimes with friends. Also, any honest assessment leads one to conclude that, to one degree or another, we are all wrong in how we see God, ourselves and others. Some of this error comes directly from the negative role that others have had in shaping our views of reality.  Yet having said this, we also have to acknowledge that in this world fathers (and mothers) are essential, even if they parent in ways that are flawed. For this is how God has set up human procreation and development, and more frequently than we perhaps admit, those human agents have done good for us. But even the best fathering falls very short of God’s fathering to those who belong to him. For our “father in the hea...