When in the Old Testament we find the prophets writing things like this quote from Isaiah, “For I am the LORD your God,” these are generally to be interpreted as intentional psychological manipulations of the anticipated audience—if we are to credit the prophets with bearing genuine authority from God. This is how you introduce a God-concept to externalized minds unable to form such a concept on their own. It has to look and sound like something they are familiar with in their senses, so “father” was chosen. It’s that grumbling guy in the background who nevertheless is not watching too closely.
The prophets gave no metaphysical underpinnings, their intent to lead humans where humans could be led, not to really teach them. For men it is quite comfortable to imagine that God is right beside him or her, in fact each imagines that even while they go to war or oppose one another in business or other human enterprises. This is part of the sin or downfall of man, that his God-concept gets no farther than his own underarm, that he is sure God stands right beside him even as he hates the neighbor. The prophets allowed this, and the seemingly angry God from the Bible was only reinforcing human prejudice.
God can only be thought of as close, by people who lack self-possession, which is to say who have not attained mastery of the soul. The soul which possesses itself values its independence, and would be alarmed to find outside forces entering unbidden, as the Christians prattle about the Holy Spirit coming to life in them. To a soul with self-possession, God, and all others, have to be “over there,” apart, their own type of person. Finding that God is not within them, they will understand these old declarations by the prophets could not be the actual voice of God, but are the prophet’s intended projection.
Such souls are also able to identify the Lord because He does not have a soul. Knowing their own soul, they can see immediately the source of the Lord’s presence is not like their own source. This is the real way the disciples identified Jesus, and if you don’t think so go down to the docks some day and tell the fishermen to drop their nets for your sake! One way of putting it is that the souls have an internal driver, and the Lord has an external driver. The Lord is a projection of the Father’s Mind, to express His Personality.
Only the Son or Incarnation can speak for God, forever. The Father has no other Voice. The angels can watch some of the powers of the Holy Spirit at work among the humans, but they can have no direct experience of the Father—nor do they wish it, for this means a loss of autonomy they treasure as noble cosmic citizens. If God is to be worshipped, it can only be through the Son, and this worship increases in its beauty and truth as the soul becomes more and more aware the Son is God’s glorious face, presented upon His globe.
