Now I know in part; then will I know fully (1st Corinthians 13:12)
God appears and God is Light
To those poor Souls who dwell in Night,
But does a Human Form display
To those who dwell in Realms of Day.
Carl Jung "affirms that he is not concerned with a metaphysical God.. but with the image of God as it is perceived within the human soul" (Hoeller).
These are just a few of the many visions of God we meet in the O.T. Reviewing them sequentially will reveal a progressive development from primitive to less primitive visions as the centuries went by.
The writer of Genesis tells us that Noah was the only righteous man of his day (Genesis 6:8-9), and that he "walked with God", so God included him and his family as the sole survivors of The Flood. (Noah's great grandfather, Enoch, also "walked with God", but had a different future.)
Abraham, the founder of the Hebrew race, seems to have
had a more intimate relationship with God than anyone, up to
the time of Jesus. Abraham was sufficiently impressed by God to leave
his home and travel many miles to a strange land under God's direction.
Abraham once had occasion to entertain God with a meal and have
extended conversation with him
(Genesis 18).
These are all worthy images, but some we find less so:
For example when God decided to exterminate the human race,
this is not an adequate statement about the God we know.
Likewise when he instructed the Hebrews invading Palestine
to exterminate the Canaanites, this is not the God we know.
In that light Professor
Riley asked this question:
"Why was the God of the O.T. apparently so different,
so small and material and full of human characteristics,
when compared to the God of the creeds?"
Moses saw God as a burning bush and later heard the voice of God on the Mountain. When he asked to see God glory or way, God showed him his backside. One could find other moments in Exodus when Moses had dealings with God.
Samuel encountered God as a young child as reported in 1st Samuel 3:1ff. Samuel often talked with God thereafter.
Elijah's most notable meeting with God came with the still small voice.
The prophet Isaiah had many and changing visions of God (most scholars believe there were many Isaiahs!), but the God he described in 6 has come down through the ages and serves today as the primary image of God that common people still carry in their minds, if they ever think about God- a grandfatherly gentleman sitting on a throne an undetermined distance above our heads.
Jeremiah spoke of an intimate conversation with God that led to his vocation as a prophet.
Ezekiel had many, bizarre relationships with god. "God afflicted the prophet with such anxiety that he could not stop trembling" (Armstrong page 54).
At three he ran screaming to his mother after the sight of a grim punishing God in his window. A few years later a similar vision embraced a roomful of angels. Brought up in a Swedenburg and/or Moravian climate he escaped the common fallacies that go by the name of Christian orthodoxy. But the first half of his life he occupied wrestling with the Old Testament God.
With The Marriage of Heaven and Hell he inverted the conventional values of good, obedient, unimaginative church goers (more likely to idolize and follow their minister than their God). Blake called them angels, and called those who ask questions, who think independently, who experiment, devils.
With Songs of Innocence and Experience he portrayed first the childlike, who have not met a judging God, and second those who have tasted that fateful experience.
In his prophetic books Blake exhaustively pictured the judging God, the Rulemaker and Enforcer worshipped today by 'fundamentalist' Christians and Muslims.
Through the years Blake gradually got free from the baleful influence of a God of Control, used mainly by the most powerful to control the rest of us. He came to refer to him as Old Nobodaddy.
In the fullness of time Blake met the God introduced to us by Jesus: the Loving Heavenly Father. The gospel was a matter of forgiveness. Most of us have to forgive (our) God, forgive our parents, our spouses, most of all ourselves. Blake's First Vision of Light is the moment when he came into that glad awareness. Afterward the old negative ideas of Diety faded away to be replaced by the New Creation characterized by the Gifts of the Spirit.