Free What We Talk About When We Talk About God by Rob Bell

we’re using language, language that employs a vast array of words and phrases and forms to describe a reality that is fundamentally beyond words and phrases and forms.
    In the biblical book of Exodus, Moses is told to hide along a section of rock because God is going to pass by and Moses is going to get to see God’s back . In one ancient commentary on this story, the best Moses gets is a glimpse of where God just was . This same Moses reminds the Hebrews that when they experienced God, they “saw no form of any kind.” In the New Testament it’s written that God is the one “who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has seen or can see.”
    There are limits to certainty because God, it’s repeated again and again, is spirit. And spirit has no shape or form. Spirit, Jesus said, is like the wind. It comes and goes and blows where it pleases.
    Words and images point us to God;
    they help us understand the divine,
    but they are not God.
    For example, gender.
    In the ancient world, it was observed that a woman became pregnant only when she’d been with a man. It was assumed, then, based on primitive, limited understandings of biology, that the man’s contribution must be the essence of the life force and a woman’s the place where that life force was carried and held and nurtured. God, it was believed, was the life force of the world, so God must be like a father.
    Or take early agricultural settings, where women used hoes to break up the ground for planting. Women in those cultures were responsible for putting food on the table, and so the gods in those cultures were generally understood to be female. But then the plow was invented, which was pulled by an animal. When women used this new invention, it required significantly more physical effort, and as a result miscarriage rates increased. So men took over working the plow, which led to the gods being perceived as male.
    These forms and expressions come and go over time because our conceptions of God and the images we use to picture and explain those conceptions are deeply shaped by the patterns, technologies, and customs of the world we live in.
    And so there are masculine images of God—Jesus prayed to his “Father in heaven”—
    and there are feminine images of God—
    the prophet Isaiah quotes God saying,
    â€œCan a mother forget the baby at her breast
    and have no compassion on the child she has borne?
    Though she may forget,
    I will not forget you!”
    When God is described as
    father or
    mother or
    judge or
    potter or
    rock or
    fortress or
    warrior or
    refuge or
    strength or
    friend or
    lawgiver,
    those writers are taking something they’ve seen,
    something they’ve experienced, and they’re essentially saying, “God is like that .”
    It’s an attempt to put that which is beyond language into a frame or form we can grasp.
    An image of God doesn’t contain God, in the same way a word about God or a doctrine or a dogma about God isn’t God; it only points to God.
    Whatever we say about God always rests within the larger reality of what we can’t say;
    meaning always resides within a larger mystery;
    knowing always takes place within unknowing;
    whatever has been revealed to us surrounded by that which hasn’t been revealed to us.
    When you hear about a teenage girl being kidnapped and sold into the sex trade, it makes you really, really angry, correct? It breaks your heart, right? And you know it: you know that it’s wrong, evil, corrupt, vile, and violating to all of us in some way.
    You’re sure of it.
    I know a man named Charlie who is in his late fifties. When he was fifty-five, he and his wife Kim became deeply grieved by how many orphans there are in the world. And so they started adopting kids from all over the globe. They currently have five children and they’re in the process of adopting two more. When you see their family coming, it’s