NOTES for Deu 4:12

What is communion with God? How does it happen? One thing is obvious: no matter how hard a person, no matter the efforts displayed, he can do nothing to approach God. And that is why man cannot imagine God. Certainly, one can find in human language words to somehow characterize the Only, but all these characteristics will be only a human perception of those properties, which man attributes to the Only. But who He is really, can be said only by Him Himself, If He will want to do that of course. It is not by chance the highest achievement of heathen mysticism became apophatic, the refusal of whatever definitions and characteristics of the Only. But can’t God Himself tell man, who He is? And yes, and no. Of course, God can reveal Himself to man and indeed reveals Himself when He finds necessary.

But how can He reveal Himself to him? The way God sees and knows Himself, will never see and know Him either man, or somebody else created by Him. We can know God only as He reveals Himself to us. It would seem there is no problem here: that’s why symbols exist in the human culture, in order to express something ambiguous, something where form and content are under dynamic complex relationship. The problem however consists of fact that the fallen man is inclined to make absolute the form, often to the detriment of the content, particularly when it is about religious forms, which are mostly used for the expression and the realization of revelations.

And in such a case it is really better in general not to use the form, at least, the visual: because, it is in particular the image that is most easily transformed into something self-sufficient, darkening and relegating in the second plan what it was intended to symbolize. But isn’t necessary communication, and the words can also be emasculated, by losing their meaning? Yes, of course; but it is easier for God to communicate with us in particular through the word: because the word is a process deeply personal, it is inseparable of the expression and the realization of the meanings that man perceived and experienced, as his own.

Verbal communication can in general be over the words, nothing prevents God from communicating with man directly at the level of meanings, which man himself will materialize in words. Like this we can avoid to make absolute the form to the detriment of the meaning, dangerous for man. And God makes it, above all for the sake of man. So that the revelation arrives to those, to whom it is addressed, in maximum purity and fullness.

The Book of Deuteronomy did not receive its name by accident. To be fair, it should be noted that it was named this by the translators who translated the Hebrew text of the Pentateuch into Greek in the second century BC, but the name proved very successful: it is a matter of a second law, a new version of the Torah that appeared later than the first, earlier one that we find in the Book of Exodus. Biblical scholars speak of the late origin of the Book of Deuteronomy, while its author himself places his text in the time of Moses; but, whatever the case, it is at least understood that the laws we find in the Book of Deuteronomy appear later than those contained in the Book of Exodus.

Law develops: this is the main thing, and everything else is only historical detail that does not change the essence of the matter. If the Torah can change over time, it is no longer so important whether forty years or six centuries pass from one change to another; what matters is the very fact that the Torah changes, develops, and takes shape in the process of history. The Book of Deuteronomy, its first introductory chapters containing a historical survey of the path the people have traveled, bears witness precisely to this development of the Torah. Here the legislation is preceded by a description of the path that has been traveled, and it is on the basis of that path that the legislation is given.

The Torah changes in accordance with this path, and at the same time it defines the path, giving it meaning, without which the whole path traveled by the people would have been worth nothing. One could say that, in a certain sense, the Torah itself becomes the path: the path of the people before God, for which the external, geographical, and historical path proves to be the outward form. The path of the Torah cannot exist without that outward path, but the outward path itself, without the Torah as its spiritual core, remains only an empty shell. There is no history without the Torah, at least no history of the people of God precisely as the people of God.

Yet there is no Torah outside history either. For even if the Torah is viewed only as legislation or only as a moral code, it is unthinkable without the people who will fulfill it, outside the context of their history and their spiritual and life journey. The Torah is embodied in history, above all in the history of the people of God, and at the same time it becomes the power that gives history its spiritual form and quality, filling it with meaning: not passing human meanings, but God's meaning, eternal and unfading, the meaning that links earthly history with the Kingdom.

Who is God? What is important for us to know about Him? The God of heaven and earth, invisible and unimaginable, appearing in darkness and flame, gives people the law, the commandments. Through understanding these commandments we can come to know Him Himself.

We will never know everything about Him: He is incomprehensible. But we can know Him, know Him personally, as a friend. This is all the more possible now, when we have heard the joy promised to all people: God became Man, opening for everyone the possibility of a personal relationship with Him.