God alone knows if God exists. No one else is big enough. All finite beings must live by faith. Satan himself is agnostic. When he challenged God’s judgment of Job, Satan declared his unbelief before all heaven. For him, God definitely was not GOD. In the same way, when the mighty Archangels stand before the Celestial Throne, for all they know it might be a supremely convincing God stand-in on duty while the real GOD goes fishing. We cleverly get around the divine identity crisis by calling upon the Lord Most High. We go straight to the top and hope for the Very Best.
As a child, I found some money. It was good and I was happy. As a young man, I found a beautiful wife. She was very good and I was happier still. The best that could ever happen to me (and to us all) would be to find the Very Best, and this Very Best would be the Lord Most High.
This good God would be the one who makes all things well. A God who makes nothing well would be the very devil. A God who makes only some things well would be bound to disappoint. But a God who makes all things well would be worthy of our deepest love, service and praise. Lesser Gods simply aren’t worth worshiping.
Our desires are a measure of our sanity and our virtue. Perfect people desire all things in proportion to their proper value. They desire nothing too much and nothing too little. They have no desire whatsoever for the Very Worst, and boundless desire for the Very Best. Could anyone in their right mind fail to desire the Very Best?
Given this, it’s no surprise when the wise set off in the dark seeking their heart’s desire, the good God. It’s a courageous act, an act of faith. In their wisdom, they understand their quest may be a fool’s errand, but they follow their hearts nonetheless. This good God, their highest hope and deepest desire, may not even exist, but life without Him would be both hopeless and meaningless. What else should they do? This certainly was Puddleglum’s clear-eyed insight, and he wagered everything on the chance. He knew he had little to lose by fleeing the Green Witch, but everything to gain. And though the dim lights that guided him faded one by one, though rising water lapped his feet, though he came at last to a dead and hopeless end, strong hands from outside reached down and lifted him from the pit, and so he found his way home at last.
Like Joshua of old, we must choose the God we seek and serve. We must choose the books we trust, the institutions we support and in which we find shelter, and the company we keep on the journey. For myself and many others, we choose the good God who will make all things well.
I’m appealing here only to intuition and reason. How far can these take us?
The good God would be One. If two supreme beings existed, they would be absolutely identical in every way. There would be no differences between them, and being indistinguishable, they would be One, not Two.
The good God also would be boundlessly self-conscious, self-sustaining, and internally integrated. Loving himself with perfect love, he would be simultaneously the Lover, the Beloved and the Love that flows between them. Being in perfect communion with himself, he would be simultaneously the Speaker, the Listener and the Conversation. Knowing himself perfectly, he would be simultaneously the Observer, the Object and the act of Observation. This one God would exist as a unified community.
The good God would love everything that can be loved and glorify good ideas by giving them actual existence. He would be a tireless creator and consummate artist. In so doing, he would progressively reveal himself to us.
The good God would want the best for us. Since He himself is the Very Best, he would give himself to us in humble love. He would come to us, become one of us, be one with us. He would live amongst us and live within us. He would share our suffering and strengthen us. He would give us hope that our sorrows were both meaningful and necessary for some higher good. He would demonstrate power which transforms death and decay into eternal glory. He would love us with a love that never failed, that kept no record of wrong, that was patient, kind and humble. He would rather die than lose us. He would forgive us our sins, taking our failures into his own heart and burying them there. He willingly would bleed to save us from destruction. He would not rest until even his enemies were transformed by his love.
As a Christian Universalist, this is the God I seek.
Borrowing from St Gregory: Being good, God pities us. Being wise, he knows how to heal us. Being strong, he can heal us. Being faithful, he will heal us.
