“Seek the Lord.”

That imperative is found over a hundred times in scripture.

Why so often?

For one thing, finding God is not easy.

Not because God is a construct, but because God is not a construct.

God is the very real treasure, found by those who truly seek (Proverbs 2:4-5).

God wants to be found, not constructed.
In fact, God sets himself against all of our constructions (Jeremiah 10).
God wants to be found, but on God’s terms, not on ours.

In Exodus 3:13, Moses asks God: “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what shall I tell them?”

God replies: “I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I am has sent me to you.’”

Names held meaning in the ancient world. So by asking God his name, Moses was asking what construct best applied to God.

God was having none of that. “I am who I am.”

This is not to say God is pure mystery, or anything like that. No, we call the Bible “revelation” for a reason: God is revealed.

• God is love (1 John 4:8)
• God is light (1 John 1:5)
• God is faithful (1 Corinthians 1:9)
• God is just (Deuteronomy 32:4)
• God is good (Nahum 1:7)
• God is compassionate (Psalm 145:8)
• God is holy (Isaiah 6:3)

Each of these revelations about God mean something constructive, but they are not mere constructions. They are constructs that point to a being who dwells beyond the scope of their demarcation.

We’re told again and again to seek God because we can all fall easily into a lazy groove of comprehension, mentally affirming this-or-that concept of God, while never seeking God himself.

👆 Please read this as a confession.👆

Thirty-five years into my quest for God, I still feel like God is distant. My ideas about God are ample, and I hold them with great conviction. My experiences of God are rare, and I hold the sweet memories of those encounters with nagging suspicion.

Still, I trust that God is more than a construct—in fact, God is the antithesis of construct: God is fundamental reality. God is not only real; God is the realest. And I trust that one day God will dwell with us again in that embodied presence—the same one with which he once dwelled with his disciples.

I don’t know Deepak Chopra, and I don’t know if he did anything sexual with the girls on Epstein’s island. Some who have shared the email-screenshot I shared below also included a picture of Deepak doing the upward-facing dog yoga pose. This seems intended to suggest sexual impropriety.

“Unfair,” I say! Most yoga poses are pseudo-erotic. Heck, I do yoga almost every day, but I refuse to begin until I’m sure nobody else is around. So shame on anyone who includes this picture!

Still, in this context, his comment that “cute girls are real,” seems prurient at best.

I hope his comment was just a slip. I truly hope it was simply a case of Deepak giving himself over to the carousing spirit fostered by Epstein.

I’ve been there. I’ve been around important and powerful people, and I’ve been around them when they’ve been up to no good. I know the gravity and peer pressure they emit, pressure to give yourself over to their revelry. And I know I have succumbed to that pressure, and I’ve said things I wish I hadn’t, things for which I had to repent.

I hope that’s the case for Deepak. I do. I hope that for him because those girls are made in God’s image. They also exist beyond the arbitrary construct of their flesh. They are each irreducible to their bodies. They each carry the breath of God within them. They are each worth Jesus suffering and dying on the cross for.

To treat a treasure of such immeasurable value as if it were a mere construct for sexual gratification, well, I cannot comprehend such woe.

I say “woe” because—when the “I am” returns, and
when we see for certain that God is not merely a construct, and
when we see that God’s love for those cute girls was not merely a construct, and
when we see that God’s goodness and justice are not mere constructs,
woe to those who disregard God’s moral mandates,
woe to those who disregard their own consciences as they blithely exploit God’s children,
woe to them all—because who can withstand the weight of such depravity under the gravity of God’s real and perfect holiness?