295. God’s Reason for Being - Radically Personal Finale

Why does God seem hidden if God wants to be known?

In the ninth and final episode of Radically Personal, philosopher Jerry L. Martin concludes his exploration of what it means for God to know each person individually and invite us into a relationship that can transform how we understand ourselves, our lives, and the world.

Jerry examines the many ways God may communicate—not only through prayer, but through dreams, intuition, conscience, beauty, love, mystical experience, and quiet promptings that can feel like our own thoughts. He asks what kind of response God seeks and considers what it means to live in alignment with the divine rather than simply follow commands.

The episode then turns to the meaning of human life. Each life may be a unique test, exploration, and sacred improvisation in which our choices, failures, suffering, love, and growth genuinely matter. God is not presented as a distant observer, but as a partner who shares in every individual triumph and setback.

The series ends with its most extraordinary idea: our transformation may be God’s very reason for being.

Explore the full Radically Personal Series and Book

Get the books: Radically Personal: God and Ourselves in the New Axial Age | God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher

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We continue these spiritual and philosophical conversations through Ultimate Questions, a public discussion project of Theology Without Walls on Substack.

Join the conversation and share your perspective on life’s deepest questions:
 https://ultimatequestions.substack.com

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Other Series:

The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:

• Radically Personal: Reflections on lived experience, divine encounter, and personal vocation, drawing on a seeker-centered approach to spirituality in a new Axial Age.
• From God to Jerry to You: Divine messages and breakthroughs for seekers.
• Jerry & Abigail: An Intimate Dialogue: Love, faith, and divine presence in partnership.
• What’s Your Spiritual Story: Real stories of people changed by encounters with God.
• What’s On Our Mind: Reflections from Jerry and Scott on recent episodes.
• Two Philosophers Wrestle With God: A dialogue on God, truth, and reason.
• The Life Wisdom Project: Spiritual insights on living a wiser, more meaningful life.
• What’s On Your Mind: Listener questions, divine answers, and open dialogue. 

Stay Connected

• Share: questions@godanautobiography.com
• Ultimate Questions Substack
• Get the books: God: An Autobiography, Radically Personal

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Transcript

Scott  Langdon

[ 00:00:17,229 ]This is God: An Autobiography, The Podcast — a dramatic adaptation and continuing discussion of the book God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher by Jerry L. Martin. He was a lifelong agnostic, but one day he had an occasion to pray. To his vast surprise, God answered — in words. Being a philosopher, he had a lot of questions, and God had a lot to tell him.

Scott  Langdon

[ 00:00:58,169 ]Episode two ninety five.  Welcome to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. I'm your host Scott Langdon. And today we reach the conclusion of our limited series, Radically Personal. In this nine-episode series, Jerry Martin has reflected on his latest book, Radically Personal: God and Ourselves in the New Axial Age, and explored what it means for God to be radically personal, to know each of us individually, and to invite us into a relationship that can change the way we see ourselves and the world.

Scott  Langdon

[ 00:01:38,939 ]In this final edition, Jerry reflects on divine hiddenness and the many ways in which God communicates. If life is, as God suggests, a unique mission and perhaps even a kind of sacred improvisation, what are we being invited to become? Here's Jerry. I hope you enjoy the episode.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:02:09,819 ]What is man that thou art so mindful of him? So ask the Psalms. And it's a good question. Why does God take such an interest?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:02:25,389 ]I ask in prayer, is human recognition important to you?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:02:33,169 ]And I received the answer: “It is very important. It is at the heart of My being.”

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:02:44,339 ]Well, I found that a perplexing answer. How could human response be at the heart of divine reality?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:02:53,199 ]This answer only intensified the puzzlement. Why would a god who wants to be known remain so hidden, so remote?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:03:05,319 ]God responded, "On the contrary, I communicate through prayer, through dreams, through insights that seem like one's own thoughts, through hunches and intimations and intuitions. I am present in the human heart and speak to people directly."

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:03:30,259 ]Directly does not mean simply or literally or in a loud voice. People must learn to listen. to heed. That requires openness of heart and sensitive attunement to me.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:03:49,949 ]Later I was told that God speaks to people's hearts and told some of the ways. My other promptings, such as conscience, the sense of right and wrong, fine sensibility, appreciation of nature and beauty, love amongst creatures, and mystical union. And again I was told, not all communication is verbal. There are dreams, intimations, a sense of the sacred, intuitions, promptings of the soul, like conscience.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:04:30,709 ]These are all me.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:04:35,519 ]Once praying about the primitive response to things like certain animals, uh you know, sacred animals, sacred trees, as well as features like rivers and mountains also dubbed as sacred, I was told any religion that does not allow for this aspect of my presence, my presence in nature, in objects, in places, in forces is missing something.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:05:09,229 ]So if God is communicating in all these ways, what kind of response is God looking for? What does God want from us?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:05:21,009 ]I was told putting me first rather than last. Living every moment, making every decision in response to my call. Not just to do it mechanically, like a soldier following orders, but to do it as an organic flow, wishing to be in touch with me and to live in accord with my will, my love.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:05:54,509 ]And then the words I quoted earlier in a different context. The goal is to be in tune with me. This is not just a matter of doing your duty. It is coming into alignment with me. Like two singers doing a harmony.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:06:16,059 ]Ah, so it is living in tandem with, in concert with, in harmony with God.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:06:23,699 ]We have to listen for the faint beat to stay in sync. It is a quite personal alignment. And this is what it means to love God. I was told love is what fully actualizes a thing. The person comes into full personhood only in loving relationship, in loving and being loved. That is true of the whole world and of me as well. I am a part of all loving relationships.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:07:04,209 ]The universe is one great act of love.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:07:11,069 ]So we're supposed to be in alignment with the divine reality. But our lives are so very different from one another. How can we talk about the meaning of life, the purpose of it all, even the meaning of one's own life? God answered:

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:07:28,809 ]Each life is a kind of test.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:07:33,559 ]Each life meets a new kind of test, and that is a reason for many lives. Each life needs to be purified, sanctified, made more a part of me. Each life is faced with a struggle to do this.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:07:57,839 ]Each life is, God told me, an exploration, an experiment. It faces its own challenges.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:08:06,819 ]Every role or life task, challenge, mission has a truth and has a falsity in the sense of limitations.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:08:19,559 ]But truth here is elliptical for its own inner meaning or sense, its distinctive thrust. Just as for each work of music or poetry or each athletic event has its own mission, obstacles, keys to success, tendencies to failure, to overreaching or underreaching, facing or failing to face the truth of that mission.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:08:52,289 ]Succeed or fail, one learns something, and the universe learns something.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:09:01,719 ]So one dimension of God's story is our role as divine partners. Is that right? Not just one dimension, the crucial dimension.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:09:15,079 ]Individuals do not do this alone. I am with them, whether they know it or not. I relate to people. I share their adventures, their loves and losses.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:09:29,169 ]And this is essential to God's story? I live through each individual life, inspiring, guiding, being blocked, whispering, coaching, feeling joy and suffering. My story is that I live in and through each of these stories, these individual lives. I am intimately connected with them as a helper, as a vicarious partner, and my own fate or day waxes or wanes with each individual setback or triumph.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:10:09,339 ]This is not just the drama of individual lives, it is the drama of my life as well. It is the big drama of it all. Oh.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:10:22,679 ]So real life is a drama that has ups and downs, loves and losses, triumphs and failures. There are times when we rise to our best selves, days when we fall to our worst. Our lives are like obstacle courses where quests, where traps must be avoided and dragons slain.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:10:44,289 ]What could possibly be the purpose of such lives? Well, any good parent knows, any good coach knows, readers of quest stories know, we do not grow from comfort, but from discomfort. We do not grow from ease, but from difficulty. I was told in prayer immersion in the world with its causal networks, its gritty resistance, is necessary for growth. One needs a hard reality to work against.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:11:22,769 ]Otherwise, nothing would be serious.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:11:27,699 ]So we grow from adversity and from challenges. Sometimes we learn more from failing than from succeeding. My colleague at Boulder, the great economist Kenneth Boulding used to say, nothing succeeds like failure. It is failure that tells us where the edge of the cliff is. That a line of cocaine does not lead to happiness, nor does unbounded lust ground a life of love.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:11:58,659 ]As a drama, life has a meaning. It is a meaning shaped by how we cope with the ups and downs, how we deal both with our own mistakes and with the cruelties inflicted on us, and yet remain open to hope and love.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:12:17,559 ]We talk about a perfect God and we expect God to be writing the perfect script. But God doesn't lay out the story in advance and just have us walk through it. We write our own script, maybe with God as co-author. We create our own dramas with God as partner. In prayer, I was told that the world is like an improv theater in which God is the director, but the actors aren't paying attention.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:12:48,549 ]So it seems that a so-called perfect world may not even be desirable.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:12:55,089 ]Imagine a world without suffering. A world in which no matter what we did, everything came up roses. It would be a world in which actions had no consequences. A world with no need to regret one's mistakes or to resolve not to repeat them. A world with no need to resist evildoers or to help those in trouble. It would not be a real world at all. It would be a hologram world. And we would be hologram people.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:13:31,419 ]Real life is lived in an inconvenient world in partnership with an inconvenient God.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:13:41,339 ]It is a tough life in which God is not overprotective but is still always on our side.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:13:51,409 ]When we're living right, enjoying life's bounty, God flourishes. When we're in pain or do wrong, God suffers. Maybe the real world inhabited by the flawed people we are isn't convenient for God either.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:14:11,589 ]God is part of our drama and we are part of God's. inconvenient for each other. We're in this together.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:14:23,359 ]I asked myself, what do you know when you know God?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:14:29,299 ]In graduate school, I'd been taught that knowledge consists of propositions. For example, Maria knows that the proposition Paris is the capital of France is true. So here is one thing, Maria. There is another thing, Paris, and a cognitive relation between them based on a third thing called evidence. It is a distant, intellectual relation.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:14:54,989 ]But is that the correct model for knowing or understanding the divine reality? The knower and the known, the reality and the person attuned to that reality, are not quite so separate, so distant from one another. And the knowing or understanding is neither abstract nor purely intellectual. It is existential, participatory, and transformative. It is a saving or liberating relation.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:15:33,859 ]One of the existential facts about relating to God is that in spite of divine assurances to the contrary, God seems hidden. Even when God is most available, most fully present, it is not the way the Lincoln Memorial was visible from the park bench where I first prayed.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:15:56,259 ]Some call it a matter of faith, but that sells the experience short. It's just that the evidence of things unseen is elusive, hard to nail down. We live in the light of that divine presence that one never captures, never holds in one's hand.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:16:18,339 ]Perhaps it is precisely this elusiveness that makes the knowledge of divine reality transformative. To be aware of spiritual reality at all, you have to reorient your life.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:16:35,819 ]These reflections prompted my final questions and God's final answer. I asked, "Is this right? That what one knows when one knows God is not an inert fact; it is a living reality that places demands on us and transforms us."

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:17:01,619 ]Yes. As if this were your sole reason for being. Yes.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:17:10,129 ]These are the final words of God in autobiography as told to a philosopher. I thought it was a rather anticlimactic ending. It was not until I read those words many times that I realized how extraordinary they were. We and our transformation are God's very reason for being.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:17:33,389 ]We and our transformation are God's very reason for being. We think of God as explaining the rest of creation. We do not ask why does God exist the way we typically use concepts like explanation. That question barely makes sense. But here God was providing a final cause, a teleological reason. The divine reality exists precisely for the purpose of transforming us and the rest of nature.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:18:08,569 ]Oddly enough, we, that is you and I, are God's reason for being.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin

[ 00:18:18,409 ]Apparently, God too is radically personal.

Scott  Langdon

[ 00:18:34,509 ]Thank you for listening to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. Subscribe for free today wherever you listen to your podcasts and hear a new episode every week. You can hear the complete dramatic adaptation of God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher by Jerry L. Martin by beginning with Episode 1 of our podcast and listening through its conclusion with Episode 44. You can read the original true story in the book from which this podcast is adapted — God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher — available now at amazon.com, and always at godanautobiography.com. Pick up your own copy today. If you have any questions about this or any other episode, please email us at questions@godanautobiography.com, and experience the world from God’s perspective — as it was told to a philosopher. This is Scott Langdon. I’ll see you next time.