The 3 Gods of Abraham

In a time of drought, three men went searching for a sacred well. 

They’d been told that if they looked into the well they’d see the face of God. 

They drew lots and the first man went to look into the well. He came back running, excited, claiming he had indeed seen the face of God, and began writing feverishly on a piece of parchment. 

The second man rushed to the well and came back equally excited and also began to write.

The third man repeated the journey and returned exuberant. 

But when they all three compared their accounts, they became confused. Each man claimed that God’s face looked like his own. 

They began to bicker and argue, shove and kick, until they went their separate ways in fury.

They returned later with others and fought over the well, while at home their families, animals, and farmland slowly died of thirst.

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This allegory came to me several years ago as a way to convey the very common thing that happens when human beings enter into contact with what we call “divinity.”

Probably the most well known example of this are the Abrahamic religions.

The Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, have produced three similar - but somewhat unique - versions of Gods.

Supposedly these are all the same God — the God of Abraham — but the way each religion represents this God has such a difference of flavor that in practice people often treat them as unique Gods- three different faces of Divinity.

The Jewish God, YHWH, is most similar to a human King. Jealous, demanding, tribal, a law-maker, a punisher, but also can be relied on for redemption, deliverance, justice, and ultimately ordering and upholding the world.

The flavor of the Christian God is that of a benevolent, if somewhat absent, Father. This God, together with his avatar on Earth, Jesus Christ, offers forgiveness, grace, and love. Yet for all His kindness, the Hell this God is entangled with is far worse than anything in Judaism.

The Islamic God, Allah, is in many ways closer to the Old Testament God. Allah is like a King, but rather more demanding. He is in many ways a warrior’s God, which makes sense given that many of source texts were written when Mohammad chose to spread Islam militarily.

That simplification is of course so simple that it is nearly wrong. But it serves to get the point across.

Each of these three faces of God arose from a particular people at a particular point in history. And the face that emerged depended on what was taking place in the hearts and minds of the people who "saw" it.

Each God is an egregore — a communal thought-form — that has been added-to and evolved over thousands of years.

This isn’t to say that these Gods “aren’t real.” On the contrary, they are very real. In fact, for many these Gods are more real than reality.

When we look dead in the eyes of the Godhead - as mystics, saints, and prophets have done in all of these traditions - we find that the “Face” is a mask that reflects the culture that is looking at it. And what is beneath that mask is raw divinity.

The way that mask appears to us, the laws it seems to give, and the demands it makes on human societies, is as reflection of the needs of the people and the time.

Compare the let’s-all-join-hands Allah of Mecca vs the war-like Allah of Medina.

Compare the strict and frugal Puritan vision of God with Joseph Smith’s extravagant, gold-rush-era God who delivered His laws golden tablets several hundred years later.

Compare the vengeful God of the exiled Jews at the fall of the Second Temple vs. the mystical, reparative God of the Jews one thousand years later when the notion of tikkun olam "repair the world" took root.

These many Gods live in superposition. And there are many of Him because there are many of us.

The world, after all, is a mirror.

But what lies beneath and behind the images we see is something that remains the same across all of these faces of God: which is Reality itself.

This underlying Reality is the God with no name, and this is the only God that can I genuinely believe in.

This Reality doesn't replace any other God or gods — rather, this Total Reality exists in each of the Gods of Abraham. And in any others human beings have imagined.

If you follow any religion to its core, you will find what my friend Mike Myers likes to call the "silent roar" of sacred Reality.

Touching this Reality is like touching an endless ocean of magic. It is the very energy of Life. And it’s from this non-human ocean that the many human Gods arise.

When we look into the well-water, we see our own face looking back at us. But it’s the water itself we should be looking at.

And better yet, to share it with the thirsty.

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