You can Experience God, I Want to Encounter Him!

While this is sort of tongue-in-cheek, I think this is a message that is skimmed over so much now because we hear it often. But I have been dealing with this issue with more scrutiny as I have been working on a music project that is for the church, yet can be kind of like a rock album at the same time. Am I encouraging a loss of encounter with God by overwhelming the the senses and creating a experience instead? Honestly, maybe only time and the correct congregation can determine that. But the broader picture has been illustrated to me more clearly through a very powerful passage from Isaiah.

Before I hit the passage though, I want to clarify what experience and encounter mean. Experience can be explained as passive, something that happens to you, many times, whether or not you want it to. It is always focused on the self or ego. It is my experience; going on a roller coaster is only an experience for me - the roller coaster does not experience anything and the person I'm sitting next to may have an experience but it is not related to me experience. However, an encounter is something or, more appropriately, someone who confronts you. An encounter demands a response from you, an interaction, a relation.

With that somewhat clear, let us move to Isaiah's commission:

In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted, and the train of his robe filled the temple. Above him were seraphs, each with six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. And they were calling to one another:
"Holy, holy, holy is the LORD Almighty;
the whole earth is full of his glory."
At the sound of their voices the doorposts and thresholds shook and the temple was filled with smoke.

"Woe to me!" I cried. "I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King, the LORD Almighty."

Then one of the seraphs flew to me with a live coal in his hand, which he had taken with tongs from the altar. With it he touched my mouth and said, "See, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away and your sin atoned for."

Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, "Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?"
And I said, "Here am I. Send me!"

Isaiah 6:1-8

Isaiah definitely had a unique experience. In the face of God's holiness and magnitude, Isaiah realized his failures and became humbled. However, I want to suggest that Isaiah's responsibility for his own failures is not his gravest concern. Will not even Satan eventually acknowledge his unrighteousness before God? But what Satan will never do is what Isaiah does in light of God's call: take on the responsibility he has to God and his neighbor. God did not confront Isaiah with condemnation, but with a request. The first part of this passage is merely an experience, albeit a phenomenal one! And Isaiah does, in light of such an experience, react, but is not communion with God more than reaction to His holiness? True communion is dialogue, confrontation, and an acknowledge responsibility to the other. And this is what we see in Isaiah ultimately. "Here I am..." literally means "Here I am for you" in the Hebrew. At this moment Isaiah learns to look beyond himself and see the true responsibility he must take on.

So you can experience God and not be worse for it. But I desire an encounter with Him; when mere presence becomes relation, and a confrontation to become more to my God and my neighbor than I am at this moment. That is the true life before God.