Whose side is God on?  Lots of people with lots of different agendas, people with us today, people who lived hundreds of years ago have asked that question.  Throughout the lengthy course of human history, countless people have wanted to claim that God agreed with their agenda, and that he was, indeed, on their side.  And they all presented evidence, be it written, experiential, traditional, or all of the above, to back up their claim.
     So how do we decide?  From a European crusader set on "liberating" Jerusalem in the eleventh century, to Martin Luther and his ninety-five theses on the church door in sixteenth century Wittenberg, to millions of American soldiers being shipped to Europe to engage the "godless" German armies in World War I, to a modern day Islamic militant in Mali who insists that God had "told" him to amputate his brother's hand for theft, to a young Amish boy who told those who had just hacked off his father's beard and hair that, "God is not with you"--and the list could go on and on and on--how do we decide, really, whose "side" God is on?
     In a word, carefully.  Despite what we may suppose about the "rightness" of our particular cause, despite what we may imagine to be the unassailable correctness of our particular position, we too often forget that, ultimately, we march through a world undergirded by forces far greater than we will ever, in this life, fully know.  As God reminds us in the fifty-fifth chapter of Isaiah, "My ways are not your ways."  While this line of course represents a decidedly Hebraic posture on the divine, the larger point remains valid and true for every manner of transcendent belief:  regardless of whom or what we conceive God to be, we must be willing to admit that if we want God to be any kind of a God at all we must interpret his thoughts with utter and abject humility.  We are finite, he is infinite.  How can we really know what he wants?  Yes, we can through careful and broad ranging study, discussion, and reflection arrive at what appears to be God's thoughts and wishes--as we understand them in the scope of our spiritual tradition--but we must always do so in full awareness that, as the line from Isaiah reminds us, God sees things differently than we do.  We will try, but we will never succeed fully in grasping the full import of his vision.
     In this is the wonder, however, in this is the mystery, the wonder of humanity, the mystery of God.  In the end, all we can know for sure is that God is there, and that he loves us and our world far more than we can imagine.  We may reject or struggle with God's presence, we may laugh at or wrestle with his love, or we may embrace them both, but whichever we choose to do, we ought to do it understanding that, as Paul told his readers in Ephesus, even though we may believe, fervently, that God and his love are constantly present, we will never constantly comprehend them.  His love "surpasses" knowledge (Ephesians 3:19).  God's love moves mountains, and God's love moves human hearts, but precisely how it does so, well, we will never fully know.
     Do well, do your best, yes, but remember:  accept the mystery.  There is much more to come.