A word for God
The word “Elohim” is the plural word for God. By this, the original text of Genesis refers to God in the plural. This is not to say that there were many Gods, because the rest of the sentence (“In the beginning…”) is singular.
What it points to is the infinite-ness of God. The word implies that God is so beyond our understanding that we cannot even imagine how great and amazing He is. The is the awe-some-ness of our Creator!
Gods?
I have wondered a lot about the use of the plural “Gods” in the Bible. While in this context the word is signifying the immenseness of God, in other parts of the Bible we read about other gods. Baal, a commonly referred to god, is mentioned quite a lot! Is there only one god, or are there many gods that are competing for us.
I think that there is only one actual God. We create the others when we worship other “gods” that we have set up ourselves. So, we set up Baal. We set up “money”, “sex”, and “fame” as gods that we worship. Anything we spend that much time chasing after is something that we set up as a god in our lives and it pushes the true God out of our lives.
One True God
We are cautioned throughout the Bible to be on watch for the idols we worship (I think that idols is just another word for these other gods). If we look at how we spend out time…those things are idols to us. If we spend a lot of time in God’s word and worshiping Him, then we are spending out time with the only Idol there is. But this is often not the case. We spend a lot of time chasing money and other idols.
These other idols will always, eventually, fail us. Nothing can fulfill us because nothing is like Elohim. Nothing is like the infinite-ness of a God that cannot even be described by human language!
It is this unfathomable God that we seek to connect with. Imagine the source of power that is!
The Trinity of Man
Worthy of a lot more writing than here, I believe that when humans were created in the image of God, our Creator, we were created in three parts (much as we believe God to be in three parts, the Trinity, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.)
For us, it is the Body, Soul, and Spirit.
In this image you can see that our Spirit is upward-facing and receiving from above. This is our connection to God through the Holy Spirit. Our Soul is our true self, the unique identity we have as a Child of God. Our body is our material selves, connected to the Earth.
We (our souls) are pulled in different directions, like the Spirit and the Body are “hooks”…but, these are also “cups” of a sort…we receive from above the guidance of God through the Holy Spirit and we connect to the natural world through our Body.
As we strive to keep this system whole, we venture to ensure that we continually expose ourselves to God through his Word, through other believers, and prayer. We also strive to keep our bodies pure and chaste. While we remain on Earth we remain fixed in this system. Only when we release our physical connection to Earth (when we die) do we become just Soul and Spirit.
Fill my Cup
When we ask God to help us and our “cup runneth over” we are referring to this Spirit part of us…an open cup receiving the Grace of God. This is overwhelming to us.
Like a bird with our beaks wide open waiting for our mother bird to feed us, we open ourselves to be filled with God. Be prepared! There is a lot coming! This relates to the Elohim, the infinite greatness that stands above us, waiting to feed us.
The Mission: Today, seek to know God as one who doesn’t know the half of Him. Seek to know Him more, and afresh, as if for the first time.
Mark K.