Genesis 1:1-5
1:1 In the beginning when God created the heavens and the earth,
1:2 the earth was a formless void and darkness covered the face of the deep, while a wind from God swept over the face of the waters.
1:3 Then God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light.
1:4 And God saw that the light was good; and God separated the light from the darkness.
1:5 God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And there was evening and there was morning, the first day.
Some people assert that money talks, but they are wrong. Money, especially when it is worshiped, belongs to a category, called idols.
Just as the 135th Psalm says that “ the idols of the nations are silver and gold, the work of men’s hands. They have mouths, but they can’t speak. They have eyes, but they can’t see. They have ears, but they can’t hear, neither is there any breath in their mouths.”
Also some people insist that nobody has seen God yet, thus it is improvable that God exists at all.
Actually the Bible agrees that God can not be seen by men and they live. God is invisible, that is why forbidden to make any graven image, as it is outlined in the Ten Commandments.
However the Bible and the tradition states that God talks. And not only that, but he can see as well, and moreover he does it intrinsically, as the Psalmist warns the wicked again in the 94th Psalm that “
Consider, you senseless among the people; you fools, when will you be wise? He who implanted the ear, won't he hear? He who formed the eye, won't he see? He who disciplines the nations, won't he punish? He who teaches man, knows.”
And we can continue this with the statement that he who created life, lives.
In the first part of the yearly recurring January, World Christianity celebrates the holiday, called Epiphany, though the schism between the West and the East is tangible here. The religious tradition of the East is older than the the tradition of the West, thus the Eastern tradition is closer to the original practice of the early church, which covers an early notion of the so called adoptism.
In the Eastern Churches, like the Armenian, the Syriac, the Chaldean, the Egyptian Coptic Church and so on, they celebrate the Birth and the Baptism of Jesus on the same day, usually around on the 6th of January. There are some issues with the interpretation of the calendar and also some covering up scholars say that they do celebrate the birth and the baptism on the same day because they mistakenly took the Gospel of Luke literally when Luke wrote that Jesus was baptized about the age of 30. They thought it means that Jesus was baptized on his 30th birthday.
However the case might be a bit more intriguing than that because a big part of the early church maintained that Jesus was not born exactly and literally as a perfect God child with all divine faculties attached at birth, but as an extraordinary child, having the potential to become the Christ.
As the ancient tradition holds that in every generation a potential Messiah is born.
The Gospel of Luke might have preserved that, saying: “And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man.”
The adoptionist view preserved in the Eastern Churches, as their Epiphany - Theophany celebration practically teaches that Jesus became fully adopted as the Son of God, exactly at the time of his baptism, with the declaration of God, when the Heaven opened and a divine voice was heard:
“ Thou art my beloved Son; in thee I am well pleased.”
Again some people are able to ignore the fact that this phenomenon of the sound of the heavenly voice, per se, is not a unique one, it happened quite often, exactly because God talks.
In the Hebrew tradition such a voice was known as bat kol, literally "daughter of voice"). It was meant as a "heavenly or divine voice which proclaims God's will or judgment. It differed from prophecy in that God had a close relationship with the prophet, and God had spoken through a prophet, who was acting as a messenger, but the direct message from God was received by the prophet only, based upon his closeness to God. The bat kol, the voice of God could be heard by any individual or group regardless of their level of connection to God.
Even wicked people were able to hear the voice of God, like king Nebuchadnezzar as it is written in the book of Daniel in chapter four that “The king spoke, and said: 'Is not this great Babylon, which I have built for a royal dwelling-place, by the might of my power and for the glory of my majesty?' While the word was in the king's mouth, there fell a voice from heaven: 'O king Nebuchadnezzar, to thee it is spoken: the kingdom is departed from thee. ”
In his case the voice of God was given as a declaration of the judgment on the wicked king.
The voice of God is so innate within God, that even the creation began by his spoken word. God said that let there be Heavens and there were Heavens, God said that let there be Earth and there was Earth. One of the most famous quote of the voice of God had been popularized by Albert Einstein as well, that then God said, "Let there be light"; and there was light.
The idols are deaf and dumb and dead, but the living God hears and speaks. God talks to us.
He talks to us through the wholeness of his magnificent work, which is the totality of the Creation, which still keeps evolving and unfolding.
God speaks to us through the Holy Scriptures that is why it is recognized as the Word of God. God speaks to us through the prophets as they are his ambassadors, personal envoys, authorized messengers. And God speaks to people using the Bat Kol, the direct voice from Heaven.
According to the tradition when the capital letter Prophecy ceased to exist in the Land of Israel, the last ones were Zechariah and Malachi, still the Bat Kol, continued to exist, even today.
The New Testament applies Bat Kol, the Voice of God from the opened Heaven to significant events, like the Baptism of Jesus, the Event of the Transfiguration, the very Crucifixion, the conversion of Paul, the instruction to Peter regarding the clean diet and so on.
On the day of the Baptism of Jesus, according to the ancient tradition of the Eastern Churches, the voice of God was a declaration of the graduation of Jesus, who was receiving the full authorization to reveal himself to the world, to fulfill his potential, to accept his destiny as the Christ of the World.
The Christmas child “grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man”, and reaching the maturity at the age of 30, from that point he had the authority to show the perfect face of the Father in the Son and by the Son, in his words and deeds.
It is very characteristic that after the baptism at the river Jordan by the hand of John the Baptizer and the declaration made by God that “This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased,” Jesus had to go to the desert, more than likely to the Qumran, to do soul-searching and to have the spiritual wrestling with the task he just received from God.
It was and is worth that the New Testament also kept the account of the full humanity of Jesus, as well, because otherwise we could misunderstand his message. Sometimes and some people conceive Jesus as God, and only as God, and forget the perfect humanity in Jesus, which was also present, and it had a great purpose, beside physicality of the cross and the resurrection.
Because before everything one of the major message and commandment of Jesus are that : You shall follow me. The metaphoric dove of the Holy Spirit will not fall from Heaven into our laps as a ripe fruit, if we are idle Christians that make no efforts in prayer, in contemplation, in charity, in self-sacrifice. It does not work on that way. We have to love God with all of our hearts minds and with our all strength and efforts, which means that we have to give everything what we got.
In following Jesus we can, we have to grow every day as the Jesus child “grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man”, in order that when our graduation day comes, may the Voice of God speak to us, saying, let there be forgiveness. And there will be forgiveness and heavenly joy, for the greater glory of God, by the merit of Jesus and by the power of the Holy Spirit.
AMEN
