Bible Study With Douglas Revelation 4 Nov 15 2012

Paul November 24, 2012 at 12:19 pm

Good stuff, Doug!

I really liked your idea that God has veiled Himself from us for our own good. When most people read that “our God is a consuming fire”, what do they think? The more I read Scripture, the more I think that God writes it so that a child may understand. If a child were to read that verse, how would he understand it?

Fire is what physicists term a plasma — it is the fourth (and most energetic) state of matter (the other three being solid, liquid & gas). Lightning is also a plasma. As is the sun. …And the stars. In fact, most of the visible matter in the universe is in the form of plasma. And plasmas give off light (we’d be in big trouble if they didn’t!). Could it be that that God has a body (or rather, has chosen for Himself a body) which is formed from plasma? I don’t mean that His body is just like the plasmas with which we are familiar — let alone a weak plasma like simple ‘fire’ — but probably the very purest, highest-energy plasma of all (e.g. quark-gluon plasma or maybe something even more exotic).

To say that He has a body is not the whole picture: Jesus tells us that God is Spirit. I believe that this is the most fundamental statement about God’s nature. …But it seems fairly clear from Scripture that God also has a body, and that body would appear to be composed of something rather different from our own bodies. Whereas we and other terrestrial creatures have bodies whose constituent parts remain in the lower-energy phases (solid, liquid and gas), perhaps God’s own body is entirely in the highest-energy phase.

And what of the heavenly host? I find it interesting that angelic beings are often termed ‘stars’ — perhaps this is more than poetic, and might point to the composition of their bodies. After all, they reside in the presence of God, so one would expect them to have bodies compatible with His own. Perhaps — for example — this is why seraphim are so called, given the Hebrew roots of the word.

Michael Heiser (with whom I don’t always agree) said something in an interview the other day which stuck in my mind. He said Scripture shows that God created everything — and he reasoned that each and every thing that He created must be made out of something. …Not necessarily the exact same ‘something’ from which we ourselves are made, but everything created must nonetheless be made of a particular kind of ‘stuff’. So angels must be made of certain ‘stuff’.

It’s clear that the angels who deal with humans cannot be made of exactly the same material as God the Father’s body, otherwise the humans to whom they are sent would be vaporised. (For example, were Gabriel’s body of exactly the same nature as that of YHWH, then the Annunciation would have been a disaster!) I think God uses angels not only to guide humans, but to protect humans from direct exposure to Him. (The Israelites were very anxious not to be exposed to Him — see Exodus 20:19!)

Anyway, those are the thoughts so far — I’m not even half-way through the show, yet! Plenty of meat in there…

Thanks, Doug, and God bless,

Paul.