Making Connections With God

It is a long time since I read the book written by Svetlana, Stalin’s daughter, but I remember that while she was being raised in a country where all knowledge of God was suppressed she privately believed that the moon was God, and would gaze at this moon god out of her window. The people in the towns where Abram had come from believed the same thing. They built huge temples to the god Sin and worshiped the stars in the sky. Their gods were visible; they did not have to argue about their existence, Abram’s God was invisible.

The first recorded act of Abram after he arrived in the place he’d been told to go to, was to build an altar. The temples to the moon god Sin, were huge and impressive but Abram never built a temple. He built altars; four of them that we know about. The altars were low platforms of gathered stones. The platform needed to be quite big; big enough to lead a large animal unto it and then slaughter it and build a large fire so that the animal could be burnt and the smoke go up into the sky as a signal to God that someone on earth was worshiping him. It’s unlikely that this was a private ceremony, much more likely that the platform had to be big enough so that all Abram’s household could stand round and watch the offering being made. The altars would be considered sacred by other travelers and not dismantled. It’s possible that travelers would ask which god the altar was built for and would be told by anyone who knew that it was built to the One God, a surprising reply. How irritated other people would be at the suggestion that if Abram’s God was the only God then their god was not a god.

We who are Abram’s spiritual descendants, no longer offer burnt offerings, because Jesus has made one offering for all time, but we worship the same One God. Worship is our way of making contact with God. Like Abram, worship is our first priority and we mark all the stages of our life’s journey with acts of worship. We travel, says the writer of Hebrews, towards a city: the City Of God where he will be both light and environment, and all his desires for his dearly loved children will have become reality. Even when we arrive at the City of God we will still be offering worship. Then worship will be even more natural because we shall truly understand who God is, and what he has accomplished. Abraham will be there and all the generations will have become one generation. It seems a long journey, and we travel through some dry places but God who called us to begin the journey will be watching our progress.