The Christian God

In the beginning, man attributed what they couldn't explain about the world to a god or a community of gods. There are mythologies all around the globe to prove this, but recalling the Greek, Egyptian, and Nordic mythologies may help understand what I mean.

In these ancient mythologies, every unexplainable matter in the world was attributed to a god and its attitudes either towards other gods or man. An eclipse, for example, could be easily understood as a punishment of the god of sun; a flood could be the punishment of the god of water to the people. It is not rare to read about sacrifices done by all civilizations to these gods, willing to please them. Some sacrifices even included human beings.

Yet I think there is something interesting to point out in this regard: ancient explanations included a picture of god, even in civilizations which did not have a way to influence each other. Is there anything inside man that moves us to a god? I talked with a priest about this, and he showed me a very interesting reasoning:

In his opinion, man has a natural inclination towards God. Something inside us moves to Him. The problem in ancient times was that people did not have any contact with God, so they could not get to know Him. They took the characteristics they found around them to picture one or many gods, and, as a consequence, a variety of gods appeared:

―Sun gives us life ―someone may have said. There must be a god of sun.
―Water and land gives us life too ―someone else may have recalled. There must be a god of water and a god of land too.
―How about death? ―someone added. There must be a god of death too.

Over time, men imagined a set of gods and the relationships between them, and mythologies appeared. However, when science allowed man to understand natural phenomena (an eclipse, for example) were caused by explainable things, and not by the anger of a god, mythologies fell.

The Christian God, he explained me, is different. It did not appear because of the imagination of man, but because of a revelation. Christians believe in a God who came, and introduced Himself to a man named Abram (Abraham in Christianity, and Ibrahim in Islam). Perhaps tired of so many incomplete pictures of Himself, He chose to have a relationship with man then onwards.

From the Christian point of view, now that God has chosen to reveal Himself, all we need to do is to get to know Him.

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