Everyone from the day after Jesus ascended into the clouds has been seeking the essence of Christ. One of the first ones was probably Paul of Tarsus.  Except for that brief encounter with the spirit of Jesus on road to Damascus a few years after he physically left us, he had no personal contact. Today there are 40,000+ different organized version of this essence and probably thousands of personal versions inside each of those. It seems that each one of  these 40k groups are convinced that their version is the only real one.

We all want to know what the essence of God is. We think if we can just determine that then our immortality is somehow assured. We cling onto one version that most aligns with how we want God to be and then mock all the others.  There is no way that each of us, let alone all of us, can ever really understand the essence of God. It is quite simply impossible.  When we get over this almost god-like belief that we know God and others don’t then we can come to accept that everyone is the same as we are.  We simply don’t have a lock on God.

I, like everyone else I imagine, have thought about just who God is?  I think there is quite enough historical evidence that Jesus walked this earth and that many in those times were convinced that he was from God.  That seems to be factual to me. But what about the essence of God.

Who is he and why does he seem to be so in love with us.

• Maybe he was an extra-terrestrial who came from a world much more developed than ours. Maybe he beamed down to give us  knowledge that we needed to survive as a world.

• Maybe He is the very glue that holds our universe together and keep our earth spinning around one of the millions of stars in the universe.

• Maybe He is some wise old white-haired guy who sits in the clouds looking down on all of us to make sure we don’t screw up the world too much.

• Maybe He simply put the whole thing in motion and is watching to see how we handle his creation.

I don’t pretend to know the essence of God. That is just WAY WAY above my pay grade or anyone else for that matter. All I can do is to take the utterly simple message he gave us through Jesus to love Him and to love each other to be the purpose of my life.  I think he made it simple so we could understand it. I think that is what he expects of us and if we do that then everything else will fall in place both personally and worldly.  We don’t need all those thousands, if not millions, of rules and things built about around his image.

But we seem to be a very long way from even accomplishing that simple loving task.