Sunday, September 28th: "The Image of God: Elements and Objects"
The First United Presbyterian Church
“The Image of God: Elements and Objects”
Rev. Amy Morgan
September 28, 2025
Exodus 3:1-6
Moses was keeping the flock of his father-in-law Jethro, the priest of Midian; he led his flock beyond the wilderness and came to Mount Horeb, the mountain of God. There the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a flame of fire out of a bush; he looked, and the bush was blazing, yet it was not consumed. Then Moses said, “I must turn aside and look at this great sight and see why the bush is not burned up.” When the Lord saw that he had turned aside to see, God called to him out of the bush, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” Then he said, “Come no closer! Remove the sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” He said further, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” And Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.
John 6:25-35
When they found him on the other side of the sea, they said to him, “Rabbi, when did you come here?” Jesus answered them, “Very truly, I tell you, you are looking for me not because you saw signs but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not work for the food that perishes but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For it is on him that God the Father has set his seal.” Then they said to him, “What must we do to perform the works of God?” Jesus answered them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.” So they said to him, “What sign are you going to give us, then, so that we may see it and believe you? What work are you performing? Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’ ” Then Jesus said to them, “Very truly, I tell you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” They said to him, “Sir, give us this bread always.”
Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.
Whenever folks are invited to share an object that feels sacred to them, they never show up empty-handed. I’ve done this exercise a number of times, and people have brought Bibles and bookmarks, but also feathers and rocks. One person brought a lunchbox. Another brought a candy bowl. We are very comfortable connecting tangible objects with sacred meaning.
We’re also very comfortable attaching divine significance to natural elements like rainbows and lightning, sunsets and mountain vistas. Many people experience the divine in nature and have certain places they go to commune with God.
What these folks may not know, and what we may have missed, is that the Bible is in complete agreement with this approach to God. The Biblical writers were perfectly comfortable with images of God as inanimate objects and elements in nature. The scriptures we just read give us but a small sampling – God as fire and God as bread. We’ll explore those particular images in a little more depth in just a moment, but there is a wide array of images to choose from – God as the natural elements of wind, water, mountain, rock, and cloud, and God as objects like a gate, a vine, a cornerstone, or wine. God is even depicted in one Old Testament story as the “sound of sheer silence.”
But before we delve more deeply into these images, let’s remember why it is so important for us to be attentive to the great variety of images for God in the Bible. We’ve talked about how animal images for God might encourage us to respect and care for other-than-human creatures. Next, we explored how the variety of human images for God empower us to recognize and celebrate the image of God in each human being. But why would images of God as natural elements or objects, things that aren’t really alive, matter very much?
Spiritual writer Lauren Winner, in her book Wearing God, explores a variety of images for God in the Bible. She notes that “Scholars have found correlations between the ways a person imagines God, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, eating disorders, shame, and alcoholism. People who primarily imagine God to be distant and judging, as opposed to intimate and loving, tend more toward psychopathology and have higher rates of gun ownership.” But according to at least one study of patients with HIV, those who held an image of God that was compassionate and loving had higher immune function than those with an image of God that was judgmental and punitive. Winner concludes, “Changes in God image changes t-cells in randomized trials.”
This is all to say, what we imagine God is like influences not just what we think about God but also how we see ourselves, other people, and the world around us. It can impact our relationships, our actions, and even our physical and mental health.
The images of God in our biblical readings today are two examples of this.
In the Exodus passage, God as fire is, first of all, wonderous. God is not a forest fire, destroying the landscape. God is an unquenchable fire that does NOT destroy but instead draws Moses in. God as fire connects us to a God who is alluring, a God who desires our full attention, a God who wants us to come near and take a closer look. Second, God as fire is purifying. The ground all around the burning bush has been made holy. God as a refining fire comes up many times throughout scripture. But remember that to be purified or refined is NOT to be destroyed. God as fire burns with a desire to remove all that contaminates, denigrates, or tarnishes the divine image in the world. Even so, God as fire can be terrifying. Moses was afraid to look at God, at the white-hot holiness that both attracted him and threatened to transform him.
And, in fact, it did transform him. And not just him, but his whole people. This image that Moses encountered empowered him to become a liberator and a leader. It allowed him to engage his enemies with a desire to refine instead of destroy. Remember, Moses had fled into the wilderness because he was wanted for murder. But after he encounters God as fire, he gives Pharoah the opportunity to let God’s people go without violence or destruction. Moses carries this image of God as fire all through the wilderness, following a pillar of fire by night, his face reflecting the heat of God after each conversation they have on mountaintops and in meeting tents. Moses lives the rest of his life with his full attention on the spectacle of God, helping purify God’s people as they prepare to enter the promised land.
In John’s gospel, Jesus identifies with a variety of objects, including, as we heard today, bread. Jesus wants people to see God as ultimately satisfying, as the source of all nourishment.
But here’s where God as object gets tricky. Because the people in this story are more or less objectifying Jesus. He’s given them something they want and need, and now they’re chasing him down, demanding more. The bread they are seeking is literal bread, something that fills their bellies, maybe something they can even trade or sell.
So Jesus explains that he is a different kind of bread, the Bread of Life, a bread that satisfies in ways no earthly, ordinary bread can.
But interpreting God as objects isn’t always straightforward. On the one hand, this image of Jesus as bread can encourage trust and reliance on God, gratitude for God’s providence and a mindset of abundance. This God as bread image might lead us to be generous and fulfilled and even joyful.
However, we, like the folks in John’s gospel, can also end up objectifying God, turning God into one more thing we can consume, buy, sell, manipulate or somehow profit from. In much of our consumerist, materialistic social imagination, God is that divine vending machine that dispenses whatever most readily brings us health, wealth, and happiness.
This is where God as object tips over into idolatry. And we aren’t the first people to run into this problem. After Moses encounters God as fire, after God as pillar of fire and pillar of cloud leads them through the wilderness, the people of God get anxious and create a Golden Calf that they worship as God. Instead of connecting with God through meaningful objects, they create a god as an object to solve the problems they don’t trust God is solving, at least not on their timeline or not in the way they want.
And we do the same thing. Instead of trusting in the Bread of Life for our daily bread, we create bigger and bigger storehouses to hoard more than we’ll ever need in our lifetimes. We create things to worship that will make us feel safe and ease our anxieties – stronger walls and more powerful weapons, larger numbers in our bank accounts and more prefixes and suffixes on our names, more things to do and people to see. Bullying, business, and busyness are the Golden Calves we worship today instead of being nourished by this image of Jesus as the Bread of Life.
The other pitfall we have to address in talking about God as natural elements and objects is pantheism. Pantheism identifies the universe and everything in it as God. Pantheistic belief systems would say that God does not exist outside of tangible, observable reality, and that all of the tangible, observable reality that exists is a manifestation of God.
Now, there is nothing inherently wrong with pantheism, and there are a number of very beautiful earth-centered religions that hold this view of the divine. But this is not what the Bible’s images of God as natural elements and objects are pointing to. They are not trying to reduce God to something we can grasp. Instead, they are trying to describe what our relationship with God is like. All images of God in the Bible have that purpose – to describe our relationship with God, not to make God into something we can understand.
Some theologians use the term panentheism to describe how God is both in the created world but not confined to the created world. God can be in fire, but God is also much more than fire, infinitely more. And, as we saw in the bread example, God can be like bread, but also not like bread, because if you eat bread you get hungry again, but Jesus is ultimately and infinitely satisfying.
It is this like, but not like that steers people away from images of God in natural elements, objects, animals, and even humans. It is dangerous to equate God precisely with anything in creation, in part because of our tendency toward idolatry, but also because of our diverse judgements about things. For someone who has a gluten intolerance, God as bread is not a comforting image, for instance. For someone who has survived a forest fire, God as fire is not an empowering image.
This challenge, among others, has led some Christian theologians throughout the centuries to denounce all positive images of God. This via negativa, as it is called, was developed in the 6th century by a Syrian theologian who took the name Dionysius the Areopagite. He wrote that “God is known in all and separate from all; God is known through knowledge and through unknowing, and of him there is understanding, reason, knowledge, apprehension, perception, opinion, imagination, and name and all other things—and yet he is neither understood nor spoken nor named; he is not any of the beings nor in any of the beings is he known; he is all in all and nothing in anything; he is known to all from all, and to no one from anything.”
So that clears everything right up, doesn’t it? Thomas Aquinas, in the 13th century, took up this theme but clarified and simplified it somewhat. He stated that at best we can know only that God is and what God is not. He wrote that the ultimate human knowledge of God occurs when someone "knows that [they do] not know God, inasmuch as [they] realize that what God is exceeds everything we understand about [God]."
He starts by ruling out certain qualities – God is not temporal, evil, etc. Then he moves into some modified negations – God is good, but not the way humans are good, because we struggle with goodness and God doesn’t. And finally, he explores proportional negations – God is wise, but we can’t speak of this as an accidental or acquired attribute because wisdom is identical with the divine nature itself.
Another way to understand Aquinas’s view is to look at how he ultimately affirms we can know God. He says we know God by what God causes. God is holy because God causes us to be holy. But, God’s holiness is not like our holiness because it transcends our holiness.
This works with the images of God we’ve been exploring today. God is fire that causes Moses to turn aside, to stand on holy ground, to be refined and purified. But God is not like the fire we see and touch and are burned by because God’s essence transcends every essence and quality of earthly fire. Jesus is bread that ultimately and infinitely satisfies our hunger and longings and nourishes us for eternal life. But Jesus is not like the bread we eat and digest and need more of because God’s essence transcends every essence and quality of earthly bread.
This is all a long and scholarly (and hopefully not terribly boring) way of saying that images of God sometimes need to be explored not just for what they say God is but also for what they say God is not. And that all images of God fail to fully capture the great mystery of the divine. We are gifted all these images so that we can grow in our relationship with God, so that we can see and relate to the world in ways that are God-honoring and life giving. But if all we are finally able to say is that God is, well, that might be enough. And that might be best. And that might open up a sense of wonder and possibility that no image possibly could.
To God the fire, God the bread, to the God who is, be all glory, now and forever. Amen.
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