Mysterium Tremendum

In the beginning, God created humanity in God's image.  Since then, it has, with a few very brief exceptions, been the other way around.  Everyone who has ever lived has imagined God or the gods in their own special little way, and no one (except Jesus) has ever been 100 percent right.  The fullness of God's identity remains hidden, and unknowable.  On the whole, this is a good idea, knowledge is power and power makes us dangerous.  There is no better illustration of this fact than the reality of the atomic bomb.  One of the first things we did, when we developed the capability of splitting the atom was make a weapon.  Before power generation or any of the various scientific applications that later came from nuclear fission, we constructed a weapon straight from the pit of Hell, and we used it, on people... thousands and thousands of people, mostly civilians.
The thing is that the people who were developing the bomb, knew that they were messing around with the very powers of creation.  After the first test detonation, code named Trinity (yeah that's right, Trinity as in Father, Son and Holy Ghost), Robert Opphenheimer infamously invoked a the Hindu scripture, Bhagavad Gita: "Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."  Indeed we have spent most of the time from then until now, with a very serious possibility that we could witness the end of humanity with the press of a button.
The power to destroy is nothing compared with the power of creation.  When Jack was a baby we got him a big tub of Lego Duplo blocks.  Our first game was for me to build big towers and for him to knock them down.  Gradually he grew into making things, and now is quite the Lego artisan.  It was fun to watch him gleefully knock things down as an infant, but as his father I am much more satisfied in his creative, constructive ability now that he is ten.
The point of all this is that God knows our nature, and therefore God limits our access to his power.  I would still be unwise to hand my circular saw to Jack and turn him loose to build things, he's not ready for that sort of power, for now, Legos will have to do.
God reveals things to people in small increments, and we should never make the mistake of thinking that somehow way back when, people understood God better and heard God more clearly.  In ancient days only a select few were given access to the divine name, the name that Moses first learned at the burning bush.  The Name was really the thing that Moses wanted before he started his mission to lead the Israelites out of Egypt.  If you actually trace the arc of Scripture you see that God is certainly not a static character.  That name that God gave Moses is an action: "I AM."
The thing is, burning bushes to the side, God doesn't make a habit of showing up and having conversations with people.  I know the Bible seems to be full of "God said unto..." and "thus says the Lord..."  But the way God really "talks" to people is through something that has been best described as "convictional knowing," which means basically that we come to an awareness of God's will through many channels, and most often they are non-verbal.  In other words, Abram's conviction that he was supposed to leave Ur and go to Haran was probably not as simple as a voice speaking to him out of the clear blue, but he knew it was what he was supposed to do nonetheless.  In telling the story, rather than recounting an entire internal dialogue and enumerating the reasons why their ancestor had left his father's country, the people of Israel simply state that God told Abram to go.  It's simpler, and it advances the narrative without a whole lot of mess.
All of the prophets and writers of the Scripture, including the Gospels and letters of the New Testament, have a specific perspective, and woe to anyone who tries to read their works as objective truth.  Willful ignorance of the human element in all of scripture only leads to tortured and ultimately unsustainable hermeneutics that will collapse on itself and leave us in a wasteland of self-inflicted darkness.  The symptoms of this wasteland are all around us, people using the Word as a weapon, not against evil but against other people who disagree with them.  The Word is not a tool to be used, it is an entryway into a relationship, and a path towards approaching the mystery of God.
Don't get me wrong, I believe that God speaks to people, and I believe that scripture is a primary conduit of that conversation.  I have formed my vocation and my life around a foundational sense of God's Call, but I also know that I never specifically heard a voice.  However, I am sure of the call in way that goes far beyond anything I have ever heard in words.  But I also know that, in my sinful, fallible nature, I could be wrong, and that is important, because it keeps me humble, it keeps me from grasping at power, because I know that I couldn't handle it.
The Old Testament is full of stories of people who grasp at God's power as though it's a tool: Abraham does it, Moses does it, David does it, and they are all convicted of their sin.  When people try to take the power of God in their own hands, disaster almost always ensues: there is no more heartbreaking example of this than the story of Jephthah's daughter (Judges 11:29-40).  Jephthah makes a vow that, if the Lord gives him victory in battle, he will sacrifice whatever he sees first upon arriving at home victorious, probably thinking that he would see a sheep or a goat out in the fields.  But his only daughter comes out to meet him, singing and dancing with bells.
Because he figures that God values a vow more than he values a child...
Oh... crap.
The Bible is a record of people's stories, and God is a factor in those stories, but people, even the "heroes" never actually get a verbatim account of God's will, we are left to muddle through as best we can.  Sometimes we get it right, and sometimes God has to send an angel to stop us from killing our only son.  Sometimes God's anguished cry never reaches a foolish father in time to save a little girl.  Sometimes people think that God wants them to murder thousands of people or even commit genocide, which doesn't actually mean that God wants those things, even if your name is Joshua. We're most dangerous when we think God is calling us to some glorious victory and that there is a divine sanction for our basic utilitarian thought process.
If you think that humanity would magically snap to and stop being so power-hungry if we had more knowledge and therefore had to live with less mystery, you haven't been paying attention.  Our first impulse is to weaponize every single power we get our hands on one way or another.  War has always prompted technology to advance by leaps and bounds.
The essence of God is to be able to create out of nothing, and to speak light out of darkness.  Quite frankly, I know I'm still a long way from being trustworthy with that sort of power.
I'm glad that God holds that terrifying mystery away from us, even if it means that some of us choose to be Atheists, agnostics, or pagans.  As the stories of the Old Testament suspect: One cannot see God face to face and live. This leaves us to live with a tremendous mystery, which should always humble our arrogance and temper our lust for power.
Individual humans have reached inspiring and beautiful levels of creativity, in that there is hope.  But as a species we are still infants, tearing down block towers as fast as others build them.  We are dangerous enough to become death, the destroyer of worlds, but I don't really think that's what God has in mind as a final destination for creatures made in his image.