We Serve a Talkative God

We serve a talkative God.

From before the beginning of time, He has carried on an intimate, personal, and unending conversation within Himself -- Father, Son, and Spirit.  That eternal trialogue is the overflowing mutuality and love among the Persons of the Trinity.

Eternal and three-sided as it is, that conversation is not internal only.  It carries on outside God as well.  By it, He speaks worlds into existence.  His mighty Word is the powerful and creative force that made the world and that made us:  “Let us make man in our image,” He said (Gen. 1: 26).  By His creative external Word arose all things -- light, animals, fish, oceans, dry land, day -- everything (John 1: 3)

From the creation account in Genesis, we learn that God is a communal, articulate maker, and that we are to be like Him.  We are to be creative word users who live in community.

As Genesis 1 makes clear, God created us not only by his Word, but for his Word. We were made to receive God’s Word. We were made to hear Him, to contemplate Him, to respond to Him, to accompany Him, to love him, and to reflect Him. We were made sometimes even to speak for Him, as Adam did when he named all the animals (Gen. 2:19). We were intended for dialogue with God. We are able to respond to God, and He to us. We become fully the persons God intends us to be only when we receive and reflect something from God, namely his Word, whether you think of God's Word as his Son or as his message. We are to receive and respond to both. We are properly and fully human only so far as God’s Word echoes in our hearts and renews and reforms our minds, only to the extent that we resemble his Son, the Word, into whose likeness we are being transformed.

            We serve a talkative God.

Does Aristotle?  Not so much.

But sometimes I do wish Aristotle more fully reflected his silent god.