A friend who would call herself a follower of wicca or some other earth-centered religion posted her credo which included statements like:

• You call him God; I call it the universe
• You call it prayer; I call it meditation

She ends with:

• It’s the same… We are all one. I see the separation and the lies and the separation IS THE LIE.

About the same time I read that post, I read Psalm 86.

Among the gods there is none like You, O Lord; Nor are there any works like Your works. All nations whom You have made Shall come and worship before You, O Lord, And shall glorify Your name. For You are great, and do wondrous things; You alone are God. (Psalm 86.8 – 10, NKJV)

“You call it prayer; I call it meditation” is not the same thing as asking the God of the universe (not “the universe”) to do something. The Bible teaches a living, active God who does things:

Oh, that You would rend the heavens! That You would come down! That the mountains might shake at Your presence— As fire burns brushwood, As fire causes water to boil— To make Your name known to Your adversaries, That the nations may tremble at Your presence! When You did awesome things for which we did not look, You came down, The mountains shook at Your presence. For since the beginning of the world Men have not heard nor perceived by the ear, Nor has the eye seen any God besides You, Who acts for the one who waits for Him. (Isaiah 64.1 – 4, NKJV, emphasis mine)

Also, there is no paragraph that starts this way:

You say that Jesus of Nazareth is the son of God who came back to life after being put to death. I say…

It’s hard to come up with an alternate view of Jesus and call it “the same.”

Nor is there salvation in any other, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved. (Acts 4.12, NKJV)

Back to Psalm 86, here’s a prayer:

Teach me Your way, O LORD; I will walk in Your truth; Unite my heart to fear Your name. (Psalm 86.11, NKJV)

It’s not my truth and your truth, it’s God’s truth.

PS (repeated) If you’re following the reading plan of going through the Poetry section of the Old Testament, you may have discovered (or will shortly discover) an error. I had divided Psalm 88 into two parts. Oops. It’s Psalm 89 that needed to be divided into two parts. This is the corrected version.