GOD: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher - The Podcast

220. What's On Our Mind- Spiritual Trust and Transformation: What God Really Wants From Us

• Jerry L. Martin, Scott Langdon

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Does God test us? What does obedience to God really mean? 

In this episode of What's On Our Mind, Scott Langdon and Dr. Jerry L. Martin dive deep into the complex and often misunderstood concepts of obedience, trust, and free will in our relationship with God.

Exploring the story of Abraham and Isaac, they discuss whether obedience is simply following commands or if it is something much deeper- a spiritual transformation that brings us into alignment with God’s will. Is faith about blind submission, or is it a partnership with the Divine?

Through thought-provoking analogies of music, dance, and orchestration, Scott and Jerry reveal how obedience isn’t about rigid control but about harmonizing with God’s presence in our lives. They also uncover God’s ultimate desire- not to demand unquestioning obedience, but to lead us toward fulfillment, awakening, and divine partnership.

Join us as we break down misconceptions about faith, question whether God truly “tests” us, and discuss how to discern God’s voice in our lives. If you've ever struggled with trusting God's plan or wondered what it means to truly walk in faith, this episode is for you.

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Scott Langdon 00:17: 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. Episode 220.

Scott Langdon 01:11: Welcome to God and Autobiography, the podcast. I’'m Scott Langdon, your host, and for this episode I join Jerry to talk about What's On Our Mind. We talk about obedience. What is it that God wants from us, and how does he want it? How do we know if it's God nudging us or if it's an ego-based situation? How do we obey? Surely, trust must play a role, a big role actually. So how exactly do we go about trusting God? Join Jerry and me as we dive into these questions and more for this edition of What's On Our Mind. We really appreciate you spending this time with us. I hope you enjoy the episode.

Scott Langdon 02:02: Welcome back, friends. This is another edition of What's On Our Mind. I'm Scott Langdon and I'm here with Jerry Martin. Jerry, this time we're going to talk about obedience, which was really the theme of these last few episodes centered around episode 24 and our Life Wisdom Project episode, with you and Abigail talking about episode 24. And in that episode we dealt with Abraham and Isaac and what God asked Abraham to do in terms of sacrificing his son, and that story is very tricky, very difficult, and when you ask God about it, you say, God, this story is it about obedience? And He says yes, and yet there's more to it than obedience in the way we might think about obedience on its face.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 02:51: Yeah, it sounds kind of like the obedience to the sergeant. You're in the army and you're maybe in boot camp and he's telling you 50 push-ups, soldier, and oh you know, I got to obey because he's the sergeant and I'm the poor guy who's just been drafted for something. Okay, it often sounds like that and I tell people this is often the least popular part of God: An Autobiography, because it just sounds arbitrary, authoritarian. And anyway, we're the kind of modern day people who like to have our own lives, you know, do things our own way and not have anybody bossing us around. We're a sort of low authority era right now, and especially in America, that never quite had the established church and monarchies and all of that kind of thing, and people like to go their own way. And here obedience is the lesson.

Scott Langdon 03:51: God often talks to you about the partnership. He talks about our relationship in terms of partners: being in tune, being together, intimately intertwined, and when I think of a soldier reporting for duty, I don't think of the soldier, the private and the general as having a relationship that is partners. You know there's that authoritative, for sure, but the private doesn't feel comfortable, I wouldn't think, I don't think it's supposed to be this way, that they would feel comfortable feeling like they were partners with a general. And yet God talks about it this way. But obedience and the idea that we would need to understand more about what obedience is: God says in an answer to your question, when you ask God, is there a goal? Like, what's the goal of all of this? Well, God says the goal, one way to describe the goal, is to be at one with God. So not a private and a general, not even partners, but even more at one with God. At bottom, the soul's will is the will of God. It's the nature of what the soul is to be at one with god. So this idea of obedience and God wanting us to be obedient to God seems to be God saying I would like you to wake up and recognize that, in a sense, you're not who you think you are- that you don't exist only as your ego separate from Me to be able to do your thing. I want you to wake up and understand that we are together all the time, in partnership.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 05:49: Yeah, it's not bad to think on the analogy, to kind of close this distance between yourself and your higher self, something like that, because we all have that sense, I believe. Or at least it seems like a good, healthy sense to have that you have a thing like a conscience, you have values and sometimes, at any given moment, you have desires that cut against those values. But now, if you ask which one is really you, which one is your will, well, your will may not be the momentary urge. I always have a struggle with it, I eat too much and you give me the smell of chocolate chip cookies baking. Well, all my engines are going to go and stuff in some chocolate chip cookies. On the other hand, I do have a very fundamental desire and I'm aware that it's not healthy to be the weight I am. I always have a very strong desire. It's on my mind virtually all the time. You know that I've got to not be indulging this other side of Jerry, but indulging, you might say, follow the higher side. Well, our relation to God is a bit like that. We have an obscure— it's obscure the question of what is my will, what is Jerry's will or Scott's will, and if you think of your higher will, well, they're kind of, God is probably smiling on that. You know, if you were to live your best sense of yourself, then God probably says, well, yeah, that's, my partner is right there and we want the same thing, God and Jerry's or Scott's higher self or highest values, living by highest values, that's what God wants. Nothing else. So it's not God bossing us around, but helping us to come into our own.

Scott Langdon 07:52: In your latest From God To Jerry To You episode, to episode 216, you wrestle with this story of Abraham and Isaac and God and you decide to look further into the book for maybe some other texts that God has shared with you that you guys have talked about and that might shed some light on this idea. And in doing that you talk about transformation.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 08:25: Yeah, God says obedience, another word for obedience.

Scott Langdon 08:29: Obedience at its fullest.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 08:31: Yes, yes.

Scott Langdon 08:32: Which, I find that a very fascinating thing. Obedience at its fullest is transformation. There's a movement in transformation, isn't there?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 08:43: Yeah, yeah, and it's like you can imagine that in a musical thing where you've got to work together, you could probably follow each order you know and still not be quite cooperating with your quartet or something, not be quite cooperating in that fullest sense. And the fullest sense you almost leave yourself. You become one with the music the quartet is making, and that is transformation. You're a rather different kind of person at that moment. You're not doing a little solo, you're making music with the group and their music is your music. Your music is their music and the relation of God is a lot like that.

Scott Langdon 09:31: Like a dance too, if you have a dance partner that you're not in sync with and you can try to do the moves, but it's you and it's your dance partner doing these moves, but when the two of you get in sync, it's still the two of you doing the moves, but you're doing them in a way that seems like and feels like to the both of you and to others who watch you, as if you're one other thing now, which is I hadn't thought about that until you brought up the analogy of music, which is a beautiful one, the dance one. You can feel it. You know you can feel when your partner is resisting you and maybe wanting to go this other way, and you say, oh no, I think we're supposed to step left and you step right while I step left, and we step on each other's toes, but when you're in sync, it's like another creature made out of the two of you.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 10:25: Yeah, I think God may use the example of dance at some point although I didn't pick it out as I looked at these, the harmony but I certainly had that impression of and also I think of dance, like ballroom dancing, for example, there is a lead and a follower. You know someone has to lead. I had the problem when I first tried to learn to dance, I wouldn't give sufficient lead, you know, and then it's kind of inert, it doesn't do anything. You can't quite get into a dance. But that kind of the follower role there is not being browbeat by an authoritarian. That's part of how you produce this tight unity, comfortable, flowing unity, not a unity of order and obey, but a unity of being in total sync with one another, in rhythm and in bodily engagement with one another. And that's a wonderful image for our relation to God. And I'm often chided in these directions in prayer because my tendency from the beginning if you look at the opening parts of God: An Autobiography, you see God sometimes is telling me to do things, and sometimes they're odd and arbitrary things, and it's as if I am learning obedience. But my way of relating to God tends to be like that, that I pray in the morning: What am I to do today? You know, give me my orders for today, and that's really not the goal, you know. I mean, it's a good thing and I'm told pray your way through the day, but even better is when you get to the point, I often think of in Genesis, God speaks to people a lot. But you get to the end of Genesis, it's the story of Joseph. God never speaks orally to Joseph. Joseph just knows what God wants. That's the summit of the relationship with God. And I often find that sometimes I sit and I write out questions and get answers. That's helpful for certain purposes, but sometimes I'm just around in the day and I start praying about something and I don't get halfway through thinking out my question when, oh, I know the answer, it's coming and that's not a surprising thing. But then it's more like okay, you don't have to tell me what to do, I'm making my moves, like the dancer, like the singer, like the musician in a quartet. I'm making the moves and if we do need a choral director, which a large group needs, an orchestra needs a conductor, again, you're following a leader, but it's not like, oh, the conductor is one thing and the orchestra is another. They're making the music together and the conductor has a functional role, just the way the violinist has a functional role, and they're making something absolutely together. And you couldn't at the end of it say, oh, that bassoon player really put it over the top. If they did, there's probably something wrong because we shouldn't be noticing the orchestra as in terms of the various contributions. So we lived with God organically, in a free-flowing, easy, you might say relaxed way, not an anguished way, but a relaxed way. Be yourself and be your divine self at the same time.

Scott Langdon 14:23: When I have looked at the story of Abraham and God and God's request to Abraham to sacrifice his son, that's always been a hard story for me, for many people. You mentioned, for readers of the book, that's one of the most difficult things about the whole thing is this story, and it really has been for me for my whole life, I mean when I was a kid I learned these stories and, upon reflection, every one of those tellings of that story, at whatever age I might have been, it seemed like the whole thing was about obedience, for sure, but also a kind of like God knows better, so don't question. Hymns like farther along we'll know all about it. You know, trusting, that kind of thing. I'm not against trusting God, of course not. At the same time, if you look at the story, what God asks Abraham to do and we talk about it like a test, a trial- I've heard that often and it's even in the Bible it says God put Abraham through these tests, through these trials. On it’s face, it looks like God is putting Abraham through a really difficult and horrible job interview. Like a big loyalty test. You know like okay, boss, he passed, he's good, he can come in, you know, and that seems horrible and cruel. And yet Abraham, it is said, God tells you that Abraham was really the first one to really get that it was Me. So we had this relationship and Abraham then must have gotten that God and Abraham were in tune, that God's will and Abraham's will were one. He understood that. And so when God says, hey, I want you to sacrifice your son, Abraham immediately goes ahead and does it. It is a trusting that, yeah, God's will and my will are one in the same. And if I'm feeling I'm getting all the signs and everything to do this, I'm getting the word to do this, this has got to be God's will. So I'm going to go and do it. And he's trusting that God will not steer him wrong. Now I can't be in Abraham's head, nobody can. So I don't know that Abraham said God will spare me at the last minute. He'll spare Isaac. I know He will. I trust that He will. I don't think we can make that conclusion. What we can say is that Abraham did it. And God says to you Abraham, and he knew Me. We were in tune, so there's something about this trust that seems to be the message also not just do what I say, but understand deep down underneath that My will and your will are going to be the same ultimately.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 18:01: Yeah. Well, trust is certainly central. It's central to all these analogies we put together. The orchestra trusts the conductor, even though they can say this one's good and this one's better than that one. But during the performance you're trusting and you've got one instrument and one part to play. So you're following along and your dance partner you're trusting, okay, maybe the dance partner starts twirling around or something. Well then you twirl around, you know, and there's, because nothing happens without trust, nothing happens without trust. And you, in real life, you know you've got to make sure it is divinely guided. You know a preacher will come along. You can't just say, oh, I trust him because he seems like a man of God. Well, wait a minute. Or a guru or something, a new movement, new ecstatic movement. Well, it may feel ecstatic, but that's not necessarily mean it's God. So that's why we've often talked about spiritual discernment, paying attention and paying attention with- it's got to be eyes wide open. And Abraham has eyes wide open. But, as you put it, Scott, yeah, he's trusting God as the one he's living with. He's put his fate in the hands of God and trusts God implicitly.

Scott Langdon 19:51: We know from later on in the story that Abraham is not just some kind of you know, roll over, push over, God says this okay, because later, when God is going to destroy Sodom, and Abraham says well, wait a minute, are you going to destroy everyone, because you know? And he says listen, I don't want to make you mad or anything, but maybe 50? And God says okay, 50. Great, great, okay. 50 righteous people will save the whole city. Okay, I'll do that. All right, I don't want to make you mad, far be it from me. But what about 40? And he goes okay, for 40. Great, that's awesome. Could we do 30? And he's talking to God in this way, that he's calling God out, so in this partnership kind of way. So I don't think it would be fair to say, when God says, Abraham, I want you to sacrifice Isaac. Okay, Lord, I'll do whatever and I'm not going to have any discernment. I don't think that's fair because there's evidence later that Abraham asserts himself to God in a respectful understanding that his position is quite lower. He does take that understanding and yet still feels like God, if we're partners here, I've got to say this doesn't look right. Help me understand this.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 21:12: And I think in God: An Autobiography what God says is well, God's learning also along the way, and Abraham doesn't refuse. I can't remember if he's being asked to do anything, but he's just aware that God's going to do this. I guess his family is permitted to flee the city before God does it. But wait a minute. And he just argues with God. It's not his own Abraham's will or Abraham's self-interest or ego or anything like that. It's wait a minute. And it's almost as if you know you're supposed to be God and God is supposed to be the moral judge of things and you've got to live up to your own standard of who you are. And this sometimes happens in normal life, where someone is about letting down their own standards and you have to go remind them. Look, you have this role and you've got to live up to this role. So he's doing that and God is either learning, as if it wouldn't have occurred to God before, or the process of Abraham doing that is itself part of the divine dance with humanity. You might say that God is making God moves and signals and human beings are responding and we're in a kind of dance together, as if you must sometimes happen that your partner has lost the beat a little bit and you try to reestablish the beat and God does that for us. We do that for God.

Scott Langdon 22:59: God tells you early on, even before you prayed about Abraham, God says to you: you need purification. Transformation is a good word. It is obedience which, at its fullest, is transformation. So it seems like God is doing the same thing here with Abraham not just a test to see if he'll pass and be okay for the job, to kind of go through a trial like this, while waking up to or realizing or understanding that your will and God's will ultimately are the same. When I think of purification, fire, comes to my mind. Steel burning, the purification that fire will do, and that what is transformed in those flames, what comes out on the other side, is this sharpened and stronger steel and the transformation process I kind of have been thinking about it more like an awakening process, now. Again sort of a realization, instead of a getting from here to there. What do you think about that?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 24:32: Well, you've got to say more about what you mean by awakening.

Scott Langdon 24:36: Well, when you ask God: what does transformation involve, Lord? And God says putting Me first rather than last, living every moment, making each decision in response to My call. We could also say, instead of My call, we could say love, God's love or God's will, because God says God's will is the same as God's love. That was really interesting, that this movement toward what is going to bring us purification and transformation, that we're moving towards God's will, in that direction of God's will, that that's God's love for us. It's moving us consistently toward God's love. That's we're always sort of going through these trials to sort of burn off, in a sense, this, this way of our own, and be purified to the way of God's will. A recognition that God's will and our will are the same, a constant reminder.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 25:44: Yeah, you have to come to that realization. When I ask about that it's a test idea in the Abraham story and appears sometimes in religious literature elsewhere, God rejects that. God talking to me, rejects that idea. No, I don't put up little trials for people you know, like that. Life itself is a trial. Life itself is a trial. You're thrown into a life. You have all these challenges and burdens, including how are you going to handle, you know, having an alcoholic mother, or having a lame foot, or you know, just some challenge of your own or your situation. Your family it's the middle of a war, or your family is being thrown out of its territory into another and, my gosh, you've got to put everything you own on a backpack and walk 500 miles. Anyway, you're born into whatever you're born, and maybe you're born with, like young Mozart, with this extraordinary talent. What do you do with that? You know, and so on. We have this whole mix of possibilities and challenges and opportunities, and you've got to there too, discernment is crucial. Well, what is my situation? You've got to pay attention to it, not deny it, not pretend you don't have talent if you're Mozart, not pretend mother is not an alcoholic if she is. But then figure out how can you and God handle this situation, what can you do about it? Because God's life, the divine life, is lived through our lives. God doesn't have a whole, interesting separate story somewhere. God's story is the story of living in tandem and partnership and in unity in some sense with us, and our suffering is God's suffering and our joy is God's joy and our challenges are God's challenges because we're facing them together. And that's a kind of- I guess you can use the word awakening. I don't normally use that kind of language but yeah, you gotta realize that, you gotta realize that, or you're not going to be able to pull it off, to live your life, you might say, in the most successful way possible, which is to face all of these things in divine partnership or with God and you in tandem. You know, as they sometimes say, of allies with no light between you, separating you in tandem.

Scott Langdon 28:42: I think one of the most important lines that God gives you in your search here on this subject anyway, He says I do not have some arbitrary plan and then demand obedience to it. I want nothing other than your fulfillment. That is what you want too. So when we really step back and think about, what do I really want? And the superficial desires in front of us may seem like something in the immediate, and maybe they are important to a longer range thing, who knows but to be in alignment, the times when I feel most in alignment, I think, is when I fully embrace and surrender to this very idea that God wants my fulfillment, because I know I want my fulfillment. So if God is saying I want your fulfillment, that's all I want and that's what you want too, they're the same thing. To surrender to that, to let go of what is it that I want? What's the right thing? Like knowing that God wants exactly what we want, which is our fulfillment. It makes it easier to let go.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 30:08: Well, and when you that is the transformation when you realize fully, realize down to the soles of your feet, from the top of your head to the soles of your feet, that you really want the same thing God wants. And God does not want you to suffer and to be miserable, right? God wants you to flourish and to be your very best self. And why on earth would you want to be less than your best self? You know that would be ideal. I have occasionally it seems like a funny sort of thought, but if I have encountered someone I think is kind of like a crumb bum, you know, a bad person, maybe they're mean to people around them or self-centered or whatever. I kind of thank you, Lord, that I'm not that person. And it's as, if you know, maybe like in casting a play I don't want to be the villain. Thank you, Lord, that that person is handling that life possibility. I don't have to do it. And one of the things I prayed at the beginning when God, you know I was doing whatever God said, even though some seemed arbitrary, very much like some of these, like Abraham, but not horrible, arbitrary, just mild, arbitrary things. But I prayed. Please, lord, do not ask me to do anything morally wrong or unloving to Abigail, and those would have been crisis situations for me. You know, I don't think I could just go, and that's why, when praying about Abraham, that's why I say, Lord, if you told me to do that, I wouldn't think it was you, I would think this can't be coming from God. And that's where God says no, I wouldn't do it. The story is a kind of hyperbole to stress the point of the absolute authority of God, which really can be translated into the absolute necessity of living your divine life, you might say, with God, enabling God to live God's divine life, infusing you in tandem with you, and what else could you want? That seems so much better than beating out your business partner and cheating them or, you know, or seducing one of your students. You know that's really slim pickings in terms of a full and meaningful life. But living with God is not slim pickings, it's very slim pickings in terms of a full and meaningful life. But living with God is not slim pickings, it's very rich pickings.

Scott Langdon 33:23: 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 one 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 , and always at . Pick up your own copy today. If you have any questions about this or any other episode, please email us at , 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.