God is Personality
Audio File
God is personality. He is the acme of divine personality. He is the origin and destiny of personality — throughout all creation. “He who planned the ear, shall He not hear? He Who formed the eye, shall He not see?” Personality in the highest sense is thus the revelation of God to all creation.
God is not hiding from any of us. “To God belongs the East and the West: Whithersoever you turn, there is the Presence of God. God is all-Pervading, all-Knowing.” He “measures the waters in the hollow of His hand, measures a universe with the span of His hand. It is He Who sits on the circle of the earth, Who stretches out the heavens as a curtain and spreads them out as a universe to dwell in.” The situation rather is: the immensity and grandeur of God’s divine personality is beyond the grasp of our unperfected mind as evolutionary mortals.
Our Universal Father is truly a personality, notwithstanding that the infinity of God’s pure spirit Person is forever beyond the full comprehension of our present mortal human minds.
Reason, wisdom, and religious experience all infer and imply the personality of God, but they do not altogether validate it. The idea of the personality of God is an enlarged and truer concept of God which has come to us chiefly through revelation.
The truth and maturity of any religion is directly proportional to its concept of the infinite personality of God and to its grasp of the absolute unity of Deity. The idea of a personal Deity then becomes the measure of religious maturity after religion has first formulated the concept of the unity of God.
Primitive religion had many personal gods, and they were fashioned in the image of man. Revelation affirms the validity of the personality concept of God which is merely possible in the scientific postulate of a First Cause and is only provisionally suggested in the philosophic idea of Universal Deity.
Only by personality approach can any person begin to comprehend the unity of God. To deny the personality of God leaves one only the choice of two philosophic dilemmas: materialism or pantheism. In materialism, since man loses his body at death, he ceases to exist as a personality; in pantheism, since God has no body, He is not, therefore, a person. However, the superhuman type of progressing personality functions in a union of [only] mind and spirit. Thus the corporeality error is shown in both extremes of human philosophy. In the contemplation of Deity, the concept of personality must be divested of the idea of corporeality. A material body is not indispensable to personality in either man or God. Any person, human or divine, may be known and comprehended by their personality quite apart from the external reactions or the material presence of that person.
Personality is not simply an attribute of God; it rather stands for the totality of the coordinated infinite nature and the unified divine will which is exhibited in eternity and universality of perfect expression.
God, being eternal, universal, absolute, and infinite, He does not grow in knowledge nor increase in wisdom. God does not acquire experience, as finite creatures such as ourselves might conjecture or comprehend; but He does, within the realms of His own eternal personality, enjoy those continuous expansions of self-realization which are in certain ways comparable to, and analogous with, when you yourself acquire a new experience of self-realization; realizing something that has always been a part of you, but becomes new to you, for it was just being recognized by you, for the very first time.
The absolute perfection of our Infinite God would cause Him to suffer the awful limitations of unqualified finality of perfectness were it not a fact that He directly participates in the personality struggle of every imperfect soul in the wide universe who seeks, by divine aid, to ascend and return to Him. This progressive experience is a part of our Father’s ever-expanding Deity-consciousness of His never-ending divine circle of ceaseless self-realization.
It is literally true: “In all your afflictions He is afflicted.” “In all your triumphs He triumphs in and with you.” His prepersonal divine spirit is a real part of you. Our Father realizes, in the fullness of His divine consciousness, all the individual experiences of every progressive struggle of every expanding mind and every ascending spirit of every entity, being, and personality of the whole evolutionary creation of time and space-and this obviously includes you-for, “in Him we all live and move and have our being.”
It would be utterly futile for us to discuss such incomprehensible concepts of divine personality between our material-linked minds when our highest possible concept of our Universal Creator would only be embraced within the spiritual ideals of our most exalted, and indeed present, idea of divine personality, and not in actuality as to the divine reality of who God truly IS.
God is both infinite and personal; He is an infinite personality. Do not permit the magnitude of God, His infinity, either to obscure or eclipse His personality. God is much more than a personality as personality is understood by the human mind; He is even far more than any possible concept of a superpersonality.
Even though we may know that God must be much more than our present human conception of His personality, we equally can well know that our Universal Father cannot possibly be anything less than a loving, eternal, infinite, true, good, and beautiful personality.
Notwithstanding that our Father is an eternal power, a majestic presence, a transcendent ideal, and a glorious spirit, though He is all these and infinitely more, nonetheless, He is truly and everlastingly a perfect Creator personality, a person who can “know and be known,” who can “love and be loved,” and one who can befriend us. All of us can thus be known, as other creatures are known, as the friend of God.
God is lacking in none of those superhuman and divine attributes which constitute a perfect, eternal, loving, and infinite Creator personality. He is a real spirit person and a spiritual reality.
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Morals, Virtue, and Personality
