God Is Not a Man in the Sky: Rediscovering the Infinite Source of Love
There was a time when humanity looked up at the stars and imagined a divine being seated above the clouds—an old man with a beard, enthroned in the heavens, watching from a distance. This theistic image of God, deeply rooted in ancient cosmology, reflected our early understanding of the universe and our place within it. But as human consciousness has expanded, so too has our vision of the Divine.
We now know that the universe is vast beyond comprehension—billions of galaxies spinning in endless space. And yet, we also sense that within the mystery of this unfathomable cosmos, there is something sacred: a Presence, a Light, a Love that pulses through all things. Many no longer see God as a distant ruler but rather as the very essence of life itself. This view, known as panentheism, understands God not as separate from the universe but as both within it and beyond it—as the Source of all that is, and yet more than all that is.
“I do not think of God theistically, that is, as a being, supernatural in power, who dwells beyond the limits of my world. I rather experience God as the source of life willing me to live fully, the source of love calling me to love wastefully and, to borrow a phrase from the theologian Paul Tillich, as the Ground of Being, calling me to be all that I can be.”
~ John Shelby Spong
The Evolution of Our Understanding of God
Throughout history, our concepts of God have evolved alongside our understanding of the world. In tribal times, God was seen as a storm or sun god, fierce and tribal like the people themselves. As civilizations grew, so did our image of God—from a divine king to a moral lawgiver, and eventually, in much of Western thought, a supernatural being residing “out there.” But in the quiet of the soul and the depths of contemplation, mystics across all religions began to describe something different. They did not encounter a God of thunderbolts or wrath, but a God of unspeakable intimacy and overwhelming love.
Julian of Norwich, the 14th-century Christian mystic, wrote, “All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well,” after experiencing a vision of divine love that encompassed all of creation. Meister Eckhart, another mystic, proclaimed, “The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.”
These are not the words of people imagining a man in the sky. These are voices who have experienced God as the very heartbeat of existence. God as Light, Love, and the Ground of Being.
When we move beyond literalist religion and into the contemplative heart of spirituality, we find that God is not a being among beings, but Being itself. As Paul Tillich describes, God is the Ground of Being—not an object in the universe, but the depth dimension of everything that is. This God is not “up there” but “right here”—closer than our breath, present in every atom, every moment, every soul.
The mystics, the poets, the prophets, and the philosophers have all tried to give language to this experience. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” This points to a profound truth: the spark of the divine is not something we must reach up for—it is already alive within us.
God, then, is not a separate entity to be worshiped from afar, but the Source Consciousness from which we arise, to which we return, and in which we live and move and have our being.
Love Without Conditions
Those who have tasted the divine intimately often return with one central message: God is love. Not conditional love. Not love that must be earned. But love that is infinite, boundless, and unconditional.
St. John of the Cross described his mystical experience as being “wounded by the arrow of God’s infinite love.” Rumi, the Sufi poet, cried out, “Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.” And the apostle John wrote plainly: “God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God.”
These voices, spanning centuries and cultures, all point in the same direction: toward a divine presence that transcends our theologies and shatters our limitations. This presence is not angry, distant, or controlling—but radically loving, endlessly creative, and intimately near.
Becoming What We Truly Are
To experience God as love is to awaken to the sacredness of everything. It is to recognize that we are not separate from the Divine, but expressions of it. We are, in a sense, the eyes through which God sees, the hands through which God heals, and the hearts through which God loves.
This is why the words of John Shelby Spong ring so true: God is not a being to believe in, but a Presence to experience. A Source that wills us to live fully. A Ground that calls us to be. And in that awareness, we are invited to live lives of courage, compassion, and connection—not out of fear of punishment, but out of the overflow of divine love that courses through our veins.
Let us be people who no longer seek God in the sky, but who see God in the sky, in the tree, in the face of a stranger, and in the mirror. Let us become those who recognize that to love is to know God—and that to live fully, and to love wastefully, is to honor the sacred Source from which we come.