Who is the Great I Am?

The Imaginative Conservative ^ | March 8, 2015 | Joseph Pearce

[don-o]

I am the great sun, but you do not see me,
I am your husband, but you turn away.
I am the captive, but you do not free me,
I am the captain you will not obey.

I am the truth, but you will not believe me,
I am the city where you will not stay,
I am your wife, your child,
but you will leave me,
I am that God to whom you will not pray.

I am your counsel, but you do not hear me,
I am the lover whom you will betray.
I am the victor, but you do not cheer me,
I am the holy dove whom you will slay.

I am your life, but if you will not name me,
Seal up your soul with tears, and never blame me.

[don-o]

It is sixty years since the Cornish poet, Charles Causley, published his profound sonnet, “I Am the Great Sun.” Yet, as is the way with great art, its power is as undiminished by the passage of time as is its meaning. The Great Sun is of course God Himself, the Great I Am, to whom we owe our very existence. And yet, as the poet laments, we do not honour the debt. On the contrary, as all of human history has demonstrated, we continually spurn Him, either by denying Him, defying Him or, perhaps worst of all, by simply forgetting all about Him. The truth is that we replace the I Am, who always is, with our own ridiculous “I am,” making ourselves the centre of our own diminished and ever diminishing cosmos, which shrivels as surely as we do. This pathetic inversion of the true order of things is as old as sin itself. It was the sin of Satan, who preferred to rule in his own self-made hell than to serve the One who gave him his being, and it was the sin of our own first parents who preferred the seductive lie that they might be gods to the God-given gifts of life, love and paradise that had been lavished on them.

[muir_redwoods]

My first though was that this was one of Obama’s stream-of-consciensness internal monologues.

[Tax-chick]

The last line doesn’t scan. I’m sure he did that on purpose.

[don-o]

one of Obama’s ....

I refuse to allow him to live in MY head.

[don-o]

More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.

World copyright ©1983 by Aleksander Solzhenitsyn; translator: A. Klimoff; reprinted by kind permission of the author.

http://www.roca.org/OA/36/36h.htm

[Fiddlstix]

Bookmarked

[CharlesOConnell]

“But,” said Moses to God, “if I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what do I tell them?” God replied to Moses: I am who I am. Then he added: This is what you will tell the Israelites: I AM has sent me to you. - Exodus 3:13-14

Jesus, knowing everything that was going to happen to him, went out and said to them, “Whom are you looking for?” They answered him, “Jesus the Nazorean.” He said to them, “I AM.” Judas his betrayer was also with them. When he said to them, “I AM,” they turned away and fell to the ground. - John 18:4-6

[Tax-chick]

I attribute it to Original Sin.

[muir_redwoods]

A stream-of-consciencness, internal monologue exists in his own head.

[don-o]

I attribute it to Original Sin.

Well, sure. But, that sounds fatalistic. Solzhenitsyn asserts that a society salted with a Christian ethos is better than one that denies God.

[1010RD]

The correct translation of the “I AM” Hebrew is “I shall be that which I shall be”. No man can define or delimit God.

[Tax-chick]

Solzhenitsyn asserts that a society salted with a Christian ethos is better than one that denies God.

I agree with that. However, being devoutly Christian does not mean that national leaders have good judgment and make smart decisions for the country. Look at Czar Nicholas II.

[huldah1776]

Wow. So much more profound and their reaction makes sense without the grammatical insertion of “He” that is found in the NASV which I read. I will try and remember to read things as they were written more often.

[don-o]

Nicholas inherited a situation not of his own doing. Solzhenitsyn, in the Templeton address (linked above), points to schism in the Church and Peter the Great as the causes of Russian turn to secularism.

[Tax-chick]

Nicholas inherited a situation not of his own doing.

True, but what he did about it was generally not optimal, either.

I'm far from an expert on the subject, but it's quite reasonable to see Peter the Great's "modernization," particularly his importation of Western European intellectuals, as a secularizing force.

[CatherineofAragon]

Thanks for posting this.

"I am your life, but if you will not name me,

Seal up your soul with tears, and never blame me."

That's the simple & truthful answer to the question, "If God loves us, why does He send people to hell?"

[don-o]

ping

[Mrs. Don-o]

I wonder if societies which once knew God, but turned away from Him, aren't worse off than those who never knew Him.

It's like the case of the pagans whom Paul addressed in Acts 17. He said God overlooked their paganism for a time, because they were ignorant, and (v. 27) "God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us."

So they were in error, and yet they were, some of them, reaching out to find Him.

But when a post-Christian society goes pagan, it is going in the opposite direction. Having encountered the true God, they are rejecting Him. It seems to me that modern paganism is quite a different thing from pre-Christian paganism. The earlier one, though erroneous, was seeking. The modern one is rejecting, much more likely (it seems to me) to proceed from a depraved heart.

[Tax-chick]

Interesting point. There’s a parallel to the situation of the Israelites and the Gentiles, before Christ. When Israel turned to idolatry, it was much worse than the Egyptians’ or the Babylonians’ being idolators, because Israel knew better and deliberately chose to reject the true God.