Joyce said:I agree Rich...you are right. That's what I was trying to explain earlier in
my first reply in this thread. He is not human, He is the CREATOR of humans. God does not have a penis or a vagina. Thus, He is not female or male. However, He can be a mother to the motherless and a father to the fatherless. Shekinah is a term used to describe the presence of God in a locality such as the "Burning Bush" for example.the masculine and feminine life principles of the Godhead do exist.
Some find it necessary to attribute to God,
human characteristics when in fact it's the other way round. God has given us godly characteristics such as the ability to love, communicate with each other, protect, provide for and so on. Your male characteristics (provider/protector) come from God. My female characteristics (Nurturing/guidance) come from God. The totality of this (male&female ) is expressed in the Godhead.
The Holy Spirit in Hebrew is Elohiym. This indeed is a feminine pronoun but does not mean that God is a woman. Again, we must remember that my female characteristics came FROM God...nurturing/guidance. This is in essence the work and character of God the Holy Spirit. Rich I hope I didn't go too deep. I really don't like to discuss these things places where it is possible to bring confusion to those who are still searching. I don't want anyone choking on meat while in need of the milk of the word only.
The bottomline is to keep your eyes on the gift. Jesus is the gift and trust me, He will not hold it against you for understanding the depth of the Hebrew language, else I am in trouble too.
This comes from applied studying of God's word and the study of Hebrew and still no one and I do mean no one will ever know it all, though some pretend.
Thus I avoid debates if at all possible. Sometimes I am put in that position though if someone responds to something I've said.
Joyce
Joyce,
I'm not sure if you are a christian, but your references to Jesus leads me to believe you place some credence to the notion he may be crucial to your center of being, something I do not share with you.
You've sort of contradicted yourself by refering to God as he. If the creator has no gender why ascribe one to it. I don't recall ever suggesting or flat out saying that God was a female. What I did say is that early matrilineal cultures venerated the Godhead as a feminine principle. and that in the case of Khemit(Egpyt) by the 15th century BC, the priest at Waset and Annu, Thebes and On respectively, Venerated the creator in the form of Maat and Ra on equal footing. That indeed the Hebrews later on, had a similar practice with respect to the shekinah and the tetragrammaton. Point being....personally, for me, there is no God without the Goddess