Description
The God Experience
YES, I SAW THE miracles! I saw Egypt decimated by the Ten Plagues.
I witnessed the sea split for the Jewish people and drown the enemy army.
I ate mann and watched the miraculous victory over our most brutal enemy, Amalek.
Most spectacular of all,
I heard God speak at Mt. Sinai and give us Torah.
I was there for all of it!
If someone spoke these words today,
we’d lock him up.
Aside from the fact that he’d have to be over 3,300 years old,
or have reincarnated many times with a good memory,
we would still have a VERY difficult time believing him.
Even people who WANTED to would call such a person “meshugeh.”
Let’s say the person goes through a lie detector test and passes.
Then he goes for a psychiatric evaluation and gets a clean bill of mental health.
All of a sudden,
as incredible as his story sounds,
it becomes truer with each examination.
We do not know how he could have been “there” over 3,300 years ago and here today.
We just know that he has become more credible.
There will always be those who will remain suspicious of fraud,
and many who will want to be.
But, once the miracle-witness from the past has been deemed reliable,
countless others will flock to him to hear what he has to report.
They will look to him for something they cannot give themselves:
a TRUE God Experience.
They’ve read the Torah countless times.
They believe in its Divinity.
They live by its rules and know about the many and incredible miracles that
happened for their ancestors thousands of years ago.
They believe all of it,
but only in their heads.
Today,
the best we can do to create a God Experience is “see” the hand of God in the events that occur.
We can be aware of and point out anomalies that “suggest” something “supernatural” just happened.
We can see patterns and designs in life that strongly suggest a Creator.
Unfortunately,
someone who does NOT believe can do just the opposite.
Today,
there is no “proof” of God’s existence,
or of His involvement in history.
There is only evidence.
At the end of the day,
what separates the believer from the non-believer is faith.
The former has faith that what he perceives as evidence of God’s
reality and His Providence is in fact exactly that.
The latter has faith that it is not.
The amazing thing is how the faith of each can push them further in the direction they are going.
The believer claims that the more he believes,
the more self-evident God’s existence becomes,
at least to him.
The disbeliever claims just the opposite.
This makes each side of the religious struggle desperate for proof.
But here is the irony.
They both want proof for their respective positions on God and Torah,
but for themselves.
They each want PERSONAL proof.
The believer wants proof to validate what they know in their head,
in their heart.
They have the body of Torah,
but not its soul,
and they want the complete religious package:
a sense of God as real as the person before them.
Disbelievers want proof that God does NOT exist so they can live guilt-free.
God’s existence means Divine morality,
and consequences for doing anything you just happen to feel like doing,
especially if the Torah censures it.
We are told, and we believe, that the day will come.
The prophets spoke about it, and the Talmud elaborates.
It is even one of the thirteen fundamentals of Jewish faith
that God will bring history as we know it to an end,
that Moshiach will rectify the world,
and that God’s Presence will once again become palpable:
>h4>God will be King over the entire land.
On that day, God will be One and His Name, One. (Zechariah 14:9)
The God Experience will become the most natural of all,
moment-to-moment, every day of life.
Until such time though, belief in God remains an intellectual exercise that requires a
lot of effort to make it an emotional experience.
In Yemos HaMoshiach, it will be automatic.
Now, if you don’t make the effort to have one you don’t get the reward of having one.
If you want a TRUE God Experience, you have to “make” one.
