And yet you returned again to an external example to make your case. ?]
The other problem with your model is that a whole bunch of other stuff in the Bible is rendered strange and unhelpful. The booming voice from the sky at Jesus’ baptism by John - was that Jesus, then and NOT a voice from outside him? On the cross, was Jesus shouting to himself about being forsaken? The angels consoling him in the garden, were they inside Jesus too? Did Saul knock himself off his own horse with a flash of light? Did the tongues of fire sprout from inside the Apostle’s heads?
The voice at Jesus’ baptism was not intended for Jesus, but for those around him. Why would it be inside his head? The traditional Christian view of God is that of Trinity or three Persons having the same nature. Does personhood or consciousness where God is concerned entail specific location? If God is immaterial that means he is not limited by space. Jesus “became” man which means he constrained his person to physical human nature while he lived on earth, but the Father was not so limited. Are all real phenomena (lights, tongues of fire) necessarily caused by or constrained to physical activity?
Even within your internal model, however, there is an insurmountable difficulty in discernment. a.) Plenty of people have done plenty of bizarre/evil things because they thought the voice of god inside of them told them it was the right thing. b.) Why would I think voice x inside me was any more real or more right than voice y? The characters in my dreams seem pretty real, does that mean they ARE real? There has to be a connection to something beyond the dream or outside the person against which the conflicting voices can be compared - the things in the dream that don’t match with the real world when I wake up are judged imaginary.
Fundamental, however, is Christ giving us ‘father’ and ‘spouse’ as pardigms. If we can not use those to make sense out of our relationship with God, then we must question whether we can discern between competing explanations within the Bible itself and must, then, turn to something outside the Bible to compare them against just as in the case of our internal voices. The point of this thread is that there is a glaring absence of such things.
It seems to me that there is an almost insurmountable problem that you have encountered.
If God is immaterial and comprised of three Persons, then it is impossible to subjectively experience or “know” him through objective means. He is not another thing or “being” in the world that you can see or hear or in any way experience through your senses as you can with other human beings. He is not another “being” but “Being itself.” You could experience things he might do, but that is not “knowing” him on a personal level, which is what we need to do: know, love and serve God. We can’t know him if we just experience what he does or how he “manifests” himself. Those are not “him” in the sense of Person(s).
The only way that knowing God could be possible (and we couldn’t love him without knowing him) would be in some direct way. If God is “being itself” then we have direct contact with him through our being. We exist because we exist in him. If we are beings it is because we have our being “in him.” The ground of our being is being itself - the being of God. This is the only way that we can come to “know” him directly.
Yet when you are asking, “Why does God not communicate with us directly?” what that means is any form of “communication” will not be effective in letting us know God directly because God cannot be sufficiently known through any objective means. It has to be subject to subject, being to Being.
I am not talking about “in our imagination” or “in our thoughts” or “in some act of conceiving him,” I mean in the very act of being, the ground of who and what we are. We don’t try to imagine God or “think” him into being, we just “are” in Him, simply by being.
Your problem with “making sense” of this relationship is more of a incidental question. Why is there a need to do so? Perhaps we do not need to apply some secondary means to decipher the relationship as if that is more important than the relationship itself. The relationship itself may be the fount of sense, it could make its own sense.
The problem, it would seem to me is that of dealing with “the world,” a world which seems so contrary to this intrinsic relationship with God.
I think the Church provides a great answer to this problem. If the Church is the “Body of Christ” then the members of the Church are individuals who are in communion with Being, the Being of God in the depth of their own beings. We are not alone. Some may be in better communion with God than others, but the point is that the Church is there to help each of us be in better communion with God. The tradition and authority of the Church is the “objective” means by which we can “check” our progress so that we as individuals don’t do the bizarre/evil things that subjective voices suggest. Recall, however, that God is not in those imagined voices or even in our thoughts.
The existence of objective “guides” like the Church, Scripture, lives of the Saints, Tradition and Doctrines are all there to confirm and help us to deepen our relationship with God through the core of our being to Being itself. There is the direct communication you are asking for. The objective realities are there to assist and guide us, but they are not, fundamentally, the teleological end of our quest, just signposts to help us be one with God. It is more a matter of being in direct union rather than having direct communication!
Communication is necessarily mediated whereas communion is not.
Here read this article: