Driving God Out
but indeed, as I live, all the earth will be filled with the glory of the Lord. Numbers 14:21 NASB
Will be filled – It’s a process. The verb is an imperfect—a state not yet completed, an on-going action. But despite the biblical claim that the glory of God will eventually fill the earth, it seems like this process is moving very slowly. Almost imperceptibly. There were times when God’s glory burst into Man’s history in undeniable ways. Sinai, Elijah’s fire, the resurrection. Shock and awe, in the truest sense. But most of the time, well . . . we wonder, don’t we, if anything is happening at all? Why do you suppose that is?
Perhaps Heschel and Eliade offer some explanation.
“An idolatrous culture is one that sees reality in terms of impersonal forces. A Jewish culture is one that insists on the ultimate reality of the personal.”[1]
Since we now occupy a world that basically thinks inside the box, that doesn’t ask or even look for questions from outside the physical universe, perhaps one reason why we don’t see the glory filling the earth is because we no longer even see the earth. We see what the rational, causal paradigm tells us to see. Our mountains don’t clap. Our seas don’t sing, and in general the world’s voice has been reduced to algorithms.
Mircea Eliade had something important to add:[2]
The man of the archaic societies tends to live as much as possible in the sacred or in close proximity to consecrated objects. The tendency is perfectly understandable, because, for primitives as for the man of all pre-modern societies, the sacred is equivalent to a power, and in the last analysis, to reality. . . . in comparison with the experience of the man without religious feeling, of the man who lives, or wishes to live, in a desacralized world. It should be said at once that the completely profane world, the wholly desacralized cosmos, is a recent discovery in the history of the human spirit. . . . desacralization pervades the entire experience of the nonreligious man of modern societies and that, in consequence, he finds it increasingly difficult to rediscover the existential dimensions of religious man in the archaic societies.[3]
We are far from ancient societies today; far from the perspective that the world is sacred, that the gods are everywhere and reveal themselves in everything. We have put aside those antiquated, “mistaken” beliefs. We live in a completely profane world. God is not welcome here. And so, . . . “Nor do we ever revere the known; because the known is in our grasp and we revere only that which surpasses us.”[4]
“Is the presence of the glory in the world a divine secret, something known to God and the seraphim alone?”[5]
How would you answer that one? Have we really “progressed” from archaic Man or have we driven God out because we couldn’t stand His presence?
Topical Index: Mircea Eliade, archaic society, idolatry, glory, Numbers 14:12
[1] Jonathan Sacks, Radical Then, Radical Now, p. 102.
[2] You can read more here: https://skipmoen.com/2017/08/where-we-live-now/
[3] Maurice Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane, pp. 12-13.
[4] Abraham Heschel Between God and Man: An Interpretation of Judaism (Free Press Paperbacks, 1959), p. 54.
