It's a valid question. Somebody comes to you and says, listen pal, I wanna become a Christian, but explain some thing to me before I do: Say...mother of God? What's all about that? God created Mary, yet Mary gave birth to God?
I do wanna hear the answer to all of those questions, yet you fail to provide them. All please give some more details on "God changing His form", which implies "God has a body", or "God is formed of elementary particles just like we, etc." Now that doesn't sound like God, Who created those very pieces.
I hope my answer to MustafaMc, above, covered what you were asking. Where it didn't I'm sure you'll have an opportunity to ask again, and I'll do the best I can at that time.
PS That is...if my English is good enough for you to understand it?
I hope you didn't take offense at my comments regarding your English. I know that there are many on this board for whom English is a 2nd, even a 3rd, language. While English is my first language, I do know the difficulties associated with learning another language first hand. And I know that sometimes things do get lost in translation because of that. I wasn't trying to put you down, but simply suggesting that we are working with multiple translations here, from the original languages to English and then from English to whatever is your mother-tongue. And in addition to language, we are also working with different cultures and periods of time. What a 17th (or even 20th) century English translator choose as an appropriate way to express something to people in his day may not be the best way to express it for you, especially if you take something literally that was meant more figurative by the author in the first place. The results can lead to misunderstandings of the concept even when you understand all the terms.
I personally have only minor problems with God coming in human form, the main one being, it's a bit easy for a standard run-of-the-mill non-divine human to claim they are God. I work in psychiatry and hear it evry day.
The bit I wonder about is, If God decided to appear in human form in order not to freak people out by appearing as a fifty headed cat or something , quite clearly supernatural, then why did he go to all the fuss and bother of being born conventionally. Why wait 27 years before jumping up and saying "Hey everyone, I'm actually God, i was just keeping me head down for a bit, but nows the time to come clean!"
Why not just appear on the mountaintops, glowing a bit and appearing simultaniously to the Israelites, The Romans , The Gauls and the Native Americans and Inuits, so that everyone got his message, was in no doubts and could get on with praising him and making the world nice.
Total Public Relations muck up.
I agree with PurestAmbrosia, you create a clever image. And really, it is a good question. Why didn't God appear in some other form? Why not just appear as a full-grown man rather than having all that "down" time involved with growing-up human? Why not make himself known to all people at one time rather than to so few and depend on them to get the word out?
Well, first, let me suggest that even in asking the question you have admit 2 things:
1) If God is God, then God could have done any of these things, or others we may not have the ability to even conceive of. And I would agree that those options did exist.
2) If God had multiple options available to him, when he finally settles on the particular option that he did use, he probably had a reason for it. I think it is incombant on us then to try to determine what God's reason was, rather than say God it would have been better if you had done XYZ.
You see, many here assume that they know God's reason in coming:
1) Muslims say that it was to get his message out.
2) Atheists and agnostics say that if God really does exist and is going to come, that they simply want God to prove himself to them.
But, what if God didn't have either of those things on his agenda? If God had a different agenda than we would create for him (and if he is God and we are not it might make sense for God to have a different agenda than we could conceive on our own), then it would also make sense for God to come differently than we would conceive of him coming.
The Christian message is NOT that God came primarily to reveal himself. Although Jesus does make God known to us, if it was only about sending a message, he could have continued to have sent prophets (as he had in the past) or used more and greater theophanies (again as he had in the past). The Christian message is that God came to reconcile the world to himself. That's Paul's language, and I know that some of you don't like Paul, so let me quote Jesus on this one: "the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost" (Luke 19:10). And while it is true that Jesus was sent only
to the lost sheep of Israel, it is not true that he was sent only
for the lost sheep of Israel. (I'll have to cover that more at some other time, but in the very same Gospel quoted by Muslims to assert that Jesus was only for the nation of Israel, we see Jesus tell the parable of the tenants and the parable of the wedding banquet that tell a very different story. Plus his most emphatic command to his disciples is the last thought Matthew leaves his readers with, that Jesus commands us to make disciples of "all nations".)
So, with the goal of reconcilation, it is not so much the message of Jesus that is important, but the work of Jesus that is significant. That work is one that is not done by a messenger, but by a very unique indvidual that could stand in the gap between God and human kind. For that one needs a God who not only looks human (ruling out that 50-headed cat), but actually shares our humanness with us And so Jesus enteres into it completely. He doesn't come just masquerading as a human being (ruling out the showing up fully formed adult from out of nowhere), he suffers through it with us. And more identification could he have with us than to enter the world exactly as we do and to face all of the issues of growing up that we do and live with all of the problems of life that we do. Jesus, scripture tells us, identifies with our weakness -- "For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are—yet was without sin" (Hebrews 4:15) -- teaching us that in our weakness we can still find God's strength to be the people God wants us to be and to become.
Yes, God wants the world to recognize him. But that would not have been enough. God wants a world that actually can belong to him, and until Jesus took care of the problem of sin, just getting the message out of his existence or how we should live would not have been enough. So, Jesus did what only God can do, he stepped in the gap between God and humanity, and then God invites us to join him in what it is that we can still do, that is to get the word out. Which, is what we are still trying to do.
kay:
