God's Reality Include Purity And Constancy

I want to discuss two characteristics I think of when I think of God: purity and constancy.  First is purity. Imagine a dam with a body of water on each side.  One body of water is pure and unblemished, and the other is natural with all of the possibilities of inconsistency and contamination.  If the dam was to open and the two bodies of water were to be thrust together, our experience tells us that the body of pure water would be contaminated.

            However, if God were the body of pure water and we the body of inconsistent, "contaminated" water, then the mingling of the two bodies of water would result in total purity. This is somewhat difficult for me to understand until I inject this second characteristic of God, which is constancy.

            God is a constant. God will not change in the face of introduced, altering agents.  It is not so much that God will not change … but rather that God cannot change.  Why?  Because God is the pure reality that we only see human glimpses.  God is the pure truth for which we constantly strive.  God is pure life of which we have a human share.  Think of it as water that breaks upon the rock.  Even if the rock wished to be tossed about by the raging tide, it could not simply because of its nature.

            As human beings, we are used to relating in terms of impurity and inconsistency.  Gold or silver is usually sold with the understanding that it is 99.9% pure, and cleaners or water filters will do the job 99.9% of the time.  We may stand in the face of temptation nine times only to fall into sin on round number 10.  We simply understand reality in terms of the fragility of the natural.

            Yet God understands reality in terms of His constancy and purity.  I suspect this is at the heart of the issue when Christ becomes frustrated with those of little faith, those with the faith of the mustard seed or those for whom He could provide no miraculous intervention due to their lack of faith.

            We are reminded repeatedly of God’s guidance for us.  We hear it in the commandments.  We hear it through His prophets.  We hear it in the words of Scripture; in the words of Christ; in the words of the saints … repent and turn to God.  Strip away the impurities of your life (which will naturally bring about a true humility) so that you can see with unfettered vision the one aim in this life – to form a more constant and pure union with God.

          It is difficult (if not virtually impossible) for us to understand reality in terms of this constancy and purity, especially in times when the fundamental beliefs of our faith our challenged.  And yet even in our incompleteness, we can cling to the hope of one day being complete in the presence of our God.  In our impurity, we can reach out for the time when we will be made pure in our Lord.

            Just because we cannot fully grasp purity and constancy does not mean they do not exist.  Just because several handfuls of people have, throughout the centuries, "legally" redefined certain foundational truths, does not mean those new definitions are either pure or constant.  And though we will have many days when we fall to our knees under the weight of our inconsistencies, we shall not be over-burdened, for we know that when our human frailty is co-mingled with the waters of our God, we will be made both pure and constant, as He is pure and constant, for it is in both His image and His likeness that we are created.