Quote Originally Posted by JunkYard
If God is, and created everything out of nothing, then there would be something outside of God, which I don't believe. In fact, I think that God actually created out of himself, which would make all creation a fragment of the whole of God. That being said, wouldn't this make all things divine in and of themselves? (being extensions of God) God is the all, or all that is - in my mind. To me, God is life, and God is love, (light) and everything that falls inbetween. "In him was life; and the life was the light of men."
Then without realizing it, you're worshipping the creature instead of the Creator. Confusing the two is exactly what the Apostle was talking about in the opening chapter of the Epistle to the Romans.

People often say "God is the Creator" without knowing what they are saying, mainly because in modern tongues the distinction the Scriptures make between "creating" and "fashioning" are lost. Strictly speaking, only God "creates" - however, both God and man can be said to "make" or "fashion." Both can excercise their wills within the created order - both have "will" within that order. But only God creates, in that He brings out of nothing, and this because of His absolute freedom. Men on the other hand, are always fashioning out of pre-existent "matter" (whether physical or spiritual/intellectual); we're sponges and recyclers, we originate nothing - we only choose between what is basically put in front of us by others.

God is known, because He makes Himself known. However apart from this, He is utterly unknowable. He is "in essence" completely different than anything you can even conceptualize, let alone see or hear. What we know of Him, is to the extent He wants us to know of Him, and in terms we can understand (basically, analogies with things we know.) That is Who He is for us, because He "wants" it that way...and why? Who knows? I don't. Likely because I cannot. No one can.

So while His creation points to Him in it's details, and the "reason" He has made us with points to Him, and while inspired men "knew" Him in a special way (receiving "words")...none of this is of itself, Him/God. That is something we are ceaselessly moving towards, endlessly. Endless divinization, endless theosis. Endless revelation.

It says in the Bible that Moses was not like other men, because he came to know God "face to face." What that means, is that his relation to God was direct, almost hypostatic (oness of being) - for him (though I'm sure he couldn't communicate this save by analogies) "knowing God" went above categories or impressions - He (God) just "was", and he (Moses) just "was", together. That is how it would be, and that's still dumbing things down in language heathens like us can hopefully understand. Really this is the road everyone is headed toward - it's just Moses, alone amongst men (even amongst the Prophets) was "there" in this world, in this present life.

But yet as close as they were, God hid Moses' body from the superstitious Israelites, when Moses died. Why? Because they would have worshipped it "as God", just like they did the idol of the Golden Calf. Keep in mind, that according to the Bible (read carefully), they worshipped the Golden Calf as God. IOW. they called it "YHWH" (possibly pronounced "Yahweh" or "Yahuwa" in archaic Hebrew...we don't know....it means "He Who Is"), offered it sacrifices with YHWH's Priests officiating, etc. And why did they do this? Because they thought Moses was dead on Mt.Sinai, and to their superstitious way of thinking he may as well "be God".

But the Scriptures reject this. The creation is not the Creator - hence why, as great and lofty as Moses was, as close to God as he was...he was NOT God, and so his remains were hidden away (according to the Jewish midrash and a brief mention in the New Testament, it was occulted/translated into Paradise via angelic powers, but that's ultimately neither here nor there.)

If you think about it, even though Jesus Christ Himself is BOTH Divine and Human, God and Man, the two are still distinct - He wasn't pretending when He felt pains of hunger, or even wept at the anguish of His friends when Lazarus died. Indeed, He even felt anxiety and misery over the prospect of being brutalized and put to death upon the Cross, as the story of the "Garden of Gethsemene" clearly states. Christ is the "key", the symbol and figure of the entirity of existence - the unity and duality within Him, are the microcosm of the relationship between the creation and the Creator (just as it's been said that man himself is a microcosm of the created order.)