How Far or Close is God to Us?

It is recorded in the books of the bible that man was created to worship and praise God. He was to fill the earth and thereafter live in it forever, with God paying man a visit every now and then and communing together. But man was to enjoy everlasting life on the condition of obedience and being sinless.

A while after man's creation, the serpent lured him into committing sin which made him realize that he was naked. The nakedness of man made him hide on one of the occasions that God came to visit them, and thus the explanation that the communication between man and God was broken.

Further explanations for the breakdown in communication between man and God are found in the statement when God said to Moses that no man can see his face and live. But there is a remarkable difference between the God in the bible and the God most us worship.

The God in the bible could be heard by a person, a group of persons and a multitude. Angels could talk to people face to face (Like in the case of Abraham and Lot: Genesis 18), servants of God see him in vision and dreams, and even after the death of Christ, Paul met Christ almost face to face.

Today though, it is rare to have a meeting like those, let alone hear God's voice as it was heard by John the Baptist immediately Jesus was baptized. What we have as experiences is God dealing with his people in silence, requiring a lot of faith in the unseen rather than the immediate communication (by the five senses of human being).

Therefore, the statement that Jesus has reconciled us to God sometimes seems absurd and unreal. I believe in the truth of the statement that Jesus did the reconciliation for man in the cross but I don't seem to comprehend the seemingly closeness of God to man before the cross and his separation after the cross.

Though I expected that after the death of Christ it would have been easier to talk to God (or for God to talk to us), I sincerely don't have explanations for God not dealing with us as he did with those of old (but you must realize that such dealings are also very scary due to instant deaths that some people had to face).

Before you scorn on me, let me say that I believe in the second coming of Christ and the new life in new heavens and the new earth. But what do you think if it were possible for people to meet angels again in order to receive instructions? What if some experiences involved meeting Christ on the way to Damascus and people turning from evil to righteousness out of it?

Well, having said all those, I still must confess that it is up to every Christian to build a firm relationship between him/her and God. It is up to our own walk with God to determine how close we can get to him, and we should stop worrying as to why he is not dealing with us as he used to do before the crucifixion of Christ.