Why is God so elusive, hard to communicate with, and difficult to decipher?

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WhiteDove

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Why doesn’t God speak more clearly to Mankind? What is the reason for scriptures couched in parables? Why doesn’t God spell things out for us? Why did God speak in ways that would leave doubt as to exactly what he meant? Why are details of heaven and hell kept from us? Why do you all think?
 
Beats me. When Thomas doubted, Jesus didn’t scorn him for lack of faith, but gave him the evidence he said he needed. Sometimes I wonder if God is sitting back, drinking a beer with his favorite angels and watching Christians fight each other over what He meant on any given topic as they simultaneously try to to His work. It must be quite a show.

(ducking for cover now 😃 )

Alan
 
Jesus, who is God did speak very clearly. Some of the people who heard Him speak claimed they didn’t understand Him. This was because they wanted to do what is evil, rather than what is good.

God has given us, through the Catholic Church, all the information we need to get to heaven.
 
Another interesting question from WhiteDove! 🙂

I think it’s we humans who are so hard to communicate with!! and so elusive! I think God speaks very clearly and directly and often through other humans but we humans often misunderstand what He is saying! I also think that if it were too easy we wouldn’t work at understanding! LOL!!
 
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NightRider:
Another interesting question from WhiteDove! 🙂

I think it’s we humans who are so hard to communicate with!! and so elusive! I think God speaks very clearly and directly and often through other humans but we humans often misunderstand what He is saying! I also think that if it were too easy we wouldn’t work at understanding! LOL!!
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Well I have to agree with you …well said NightRider!
Annunciata:)
 
God, for some reason we don’t quite understand (or at least i don’t quite understand) values faith very highly. it takes faith to believe in God when we don’t ‘have all the answers’.

like it’s been pointed out, God HAS spoken to us clearly, and we’ve usually rejected it when He does. i think the most effective speaking God does to a person is not with words, but in the heart. that’s where He’s been the most convincing in MY life…
 
duh, 10 commandments, sermon on the mount, Last Supper discourse, judgement of the nations, what part of thou shalt not don’t you understand?
 
Why do we put a young child alone on a bus to go to school?

I think God has been clear about the basics, about what we need to know. The rest is having us be gold tested in fire.
 
Just a helpful bit of Scripture:
Who only hath immortality, and inhabiteth light inaccessible, whom no man hath seen, nor can see: to whom be honour and empire everlasting. Amen.1 Tim 6:16
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I think some of the confusion about how clearly God speaks to us may stem from original sin. We don’t really fathom–today least of all it seems to me–the consequences of original sin, one of which is the demand for or the apparent difficulty of faith, and for working through each other. With strong love for God our faith can survive the blows, and God is Charity (1 John 4:8). We may not always see the point of it, but the trials are to give us a chance to grow in that charity that is the abiding essence of Heaven. This is one thing that worries me about irenicism: I think it is a refusal to do the work of telling people the truth. God insists that we love Him to the point at which we tell others about Him, and yet today we are in the apparent habit of affirming others to the exclusion of telling them they are chasing a false god.
 
First, I’d just like to say - WhiteDove, you are the poll queen!

I haven’t voted in the poll, because my “answer” to your questions (which isn’t complete or final, by any means) is somewhat mixed…
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WhiteDove:
Why doesn’t God speak more clearly to Mankind?
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Well, I think sometimes He does - other posters mentioned the Ten Commandments- but mankind has an infinite capacity for clouding issues and explaining away even obvious commands.
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WhiteDove:
What is the reason for scriptures couched in parables? Why doesn’t God spell things out for us? Why did God speak in ways that would leave doubt as to exactly what he meant?
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I would answer the last question above partly in the way I answered the previous question.

But, I also think man’s capacity for prevarication is perhaps a reason why God uses parables and symbols in the Bible. Parables can convey more than one truth and can convey the kind of truth that can’t be simply stated. Man HAS to struggle with parables in order to understand them and can’t reduce them to statements that can be wriggled out of. I don’t know if this makes even the slightest bit of sense…

Finally, I don’t think that the fullness of God’s Truth can be stated in human language… so perhaps there are things that we will not be able to understand until after death…

Just my highly inarticulate :twocents:
 
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peregrinator_it:
Finally, I don’t think that the fullness of God’s Truth can be stated in human language… so perhaps there are things that we will not be able to understand until after death…
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I think God has gotten His message across. This thought alone as peregrinator_it so blithely stated “we will not be able to understand until after death…” declares it. Wow! Here is a creature of flesh and blood who knows for certain that one day he will die and disintegrate and yet he speaks with confidence of waiting until after death to understand. He knows a God greater than his own passing life that is Life and Truth, and is Faithful to their relationship.
 
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NightRider:
Another interesting question from WhiteDove! 🙂

I think it’s we humans who are so hard to communicate with!! and so elusive! I think God speaks very clearly and directly and often through other humans but we humans often misunderstand what He is saying! I also think that if it were too easy we wouldn’t work at understanding! LOL!!
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Yes I to think that if God just spoke clearly to us, every thing would be open and I think God wants us to use our free will and he likes the time we take to talk and to listen. This way free will is exercised a little more than God simply saying no I told you to do it this way! I read a story to the children today, that God wants us to talk and listen because we really want to not because we have to. If everything was so clear and we did not take the time to meditate on it would it mean as much.
 
Yes, original sin has something to do with it. Adam and Eve received clear communication from God yet they still chose to disobey Him. Now our minds and hearts are in a darkened state and we are open to temptation, sin, and deception from the Evil one. Despite this, God has communicated to us pretty clearly through His Son, the Church and the natural law (our informed conscience). Through human suffering, we will hopefully grow in wisdom and holiness and through faith and our natural reason we will discover the truth, which is God Himself. The blinds will be lifted if and when we finally embrace the Beatific Vision.
 
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peregrinator_it:
But, I also think man’s capacity for prevarication is perhaps a reason why God uses parables and symbols in the Bible. Parables can convey more than one truth and can convey the kind of truth that can’t be simply stated. Man HAS to struggle with parables in order to understand them and can’t reduce them to statements that can be wriggled out of. I don’t know if this makes even the slightest bit of sense…

Finally, I don’t think that the fullness of God’s Truth can be stated in human language… so perhaps there are things that we will not be able to understand until after death…
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I like your point. Also it occurs to me that if God speaks in parables, then they are more likely to be passed along properly from one generation to the next, than if He simply told us what’s what. This way He conveys messages at a deeper level than conscious awareness, that can get through censors who might have taken objection to something more concrete. Through practices like Lectio Divina we can experience the scriptures at a deeper level than the literal. Also parables are probably more immune to changing their deeper meanings when translated from one language to another.

Alan
 
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AlanFromWichita:
This way He conveys messages at a deeper level than conscious awareness, that can get through censors who might have taken objection to something more concrete.
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Render therefore to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s. And they marvelled at him. *

That would certainly be an example of something that gets through various censors!
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AlanFromWichita:
Through practices like Lectio Divina we can experience the scriptures at a deeper level than the literal.
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The practice can’t put a meaning into the Scriptures that isn’t there; the literal meaning is given precedence, and exegesis governed by the Church would determine that. If we are faithful to the sensus fidelium, Lectio Divina will help us to discover the significance and application of the meaning–whatever it may be–more fully for ourselves.
“It is absolutely wrong and forbidden, either to narrow inspiration to certain parts only of Holy Scripture, or to admit [into discussion] that the sacred writer has erred.” *
 
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csr:
If we are faithful to the sensus fidelium, Lectio Divina will help us to discover the significance and application of the meaning–whatever it may be–more fully for ourselves.
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I don’t disagree with you here, although I don’t know what a “sensus fidelium” is. Also I believe that a deep prayer life can help with our spiritual journey, leading us closer to the transformation (transforming union) that will dispose our hearts to more clearly hear and understand the true meaning.

Alan
 
maybe this will be put way to simply but, it is what I think, and my opinion. Adam and Eve did speak directly to God, he did tell them everything they needed to know. Yet they disobeyed him, and were lead easily astray, to get their own means.

Now, in a lot of ways God does still speak directly to us, in the Bible and the Catholic Church, and other people. I believe that the parables are more like puzzles. Some people really like puzzles, and get more out of the lessons by doing them, others like things spelled out directly. God accomodates both. The better question is do we really listen to him, or make our excuses, to keep doing things our own way, and say we don’t hear him?

Two senerios come to mind. One is based on faith to listen. In raising children, there is so much they don’t understand because they have not got the experience, they have to trust their parent to tell them what is right. Starting with don’t go in the street you will get hurt. When they are little it is blind faith. When they become teenagers it is a whole different game. They question the teachings of parents, mainly because they want what they want, and want it now, for them there is no tomorrow. We treat the Catholic Church the same way. I want it my way, so the Church needs to change to help me with things the way I want them, and needs to do it in such a way that I can still feel like I am following the teachings of the Church and God. When problems begin to happen because we wanted it our way, we finally begin to listen, and begin to find the peace that God has promised, others continue on their own path until they get desperate, and some never realize.

The other senerio most of us have already heard. Some one is sitting there wanting to honestly hear God. However, he has his mind made up as to how God will speak to him, so he doesn’t hear either.

The story is the man whose town is flooding, his neighbor says lets get out so we don’t drown. The man’s reply no God will save me. Finally he has to get on the roof of his house because of the water level. A man in a boat comes by, and offers to give him a ride, again no God will save me. Then a helicopter comes to get him, and again he answers no God will save me. So he dies, then he questions God why he didn’t save him. And God’s reply. I sent you a friend, a boat, and a helicopter. What more did you want?

So are WE listening, and praying, and offering sacrafices? is the real question.
 
I don’t think it’s that God is so elusive…he is so careful to make himself available! But rather, we humans put up obstacles.

God speaks to us through means that reach us directly…through our pets, thorugh our co workers, through our families…that is, if we’re dense enough (and we are) when reading the Bible and following the teachings of Jesus.

I once told my boyfriend at the time (I thought I would marry him…God said different) that God was crying. I said that God was crying when he saw all the things we do to each other and all the callenges we have which undermine the very teachings he installed.

At the same time, God has a sense of humor…look at the humorous moments in your life…the embarassing ones…the ironic moments. Do you think God wasn’t there? When he laughed, he laughed with you. Sometimes when you cried, he laughed AT you because he’d warned you EXACTLY as to what would occurr!

God comes to us where we are. I see a blue heron or an egret flying overhead when I walk my dogs by a certain pond every morning…and I see God in that. I sense his peacefulness, and notice something I never have before. God does not communicate as we do…he uses nature, he uses situations, and he speaks vividly in our souls.

No one is an expert, and I’m the first to admit I’ve misunderstood…though my own will for what I DIDN’T want him to say. God is direct, he is solid…and believe you me, he is first in line both to pick us up and to laugh at us when we fall.

God is our father, and we need to take him as he is…not by our definition, but by his.
 
I beleive it’s because of the Fall of Adam:
God created man and woman with the natural life of a soul and body, and “with sanctifying grace”, God dwelling in his soul and pouring supernatural life into it.
For Adam had broken the union with God, and the life ceased to flow. He lost “sanctifying grace”, supernaturally he was dead.
So all men were involved in the catastrophe of Adman’s sin.We are all born with natual life only,without the supernatural life of sanctifying grace. That was the cheif thing Adam lost for each of his descendents.
Communcation was borken down at this point and man would need to repent, turning to God again, God would rmake the contact and sanctifying grace would be in him once more.
To obtain grace we need to have stong faith, without it we lack the communication with God.
My :twocents:
 
I would say mostly because he gave us Free Will and requires us to have faith in Him.

If everytime we did something bad, God spoke outloud to us, you shouldn’t do , our free will would be greatly dimished.

Faith is believing without seeing. If God was in-our-face obvious, what need would we have for faith.

He is not elusive if you truly seek with an open heart.

He is not hard to communicate with if you prayfully listen and be honest with yourself.
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His will is not hard to decipher if you follow His commandments and love Him.
 
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