Ask
the average person to tell you what is most important in the day-to-day
relationship they have to God and few will say that “to enjoy Him” is the
“chief end” of their lives. Reveling in the love of God probably won’t make
most people’s list of how to glorify Him. You’ll more likely get an answer that
has to do with obeying Him or serving Him or something else works-related. When
we frame our relationship to God in terms of what we do, we will inevitably
come to the place where we ask ourselves, “How well am I doing?” The very
question then becomes a bridge that we can easily cross, leading us to a skewed
understanding of who He is and why we have a relationship to Him.
When
our focus is more oriented toward our behavior than it is toward Him, imagining
Him judging our actions to see how well we’re doing becomes inescapable. It is
at this very point that we move away from seeing our Father as primarily
relational and begin to see him as the god who is judicial. He becomes (in our
minds) the Judge who watches what we do, scrutinizing our actions to make sure
that they are up to par. When we take that step, it may seem like a small shift
but in reality we have just moved away from grace and into legalism.
Doesn't
God care what we do? Do our actions not matter to Him? Of course He cares about
our behavior, and actions do matter. The question is why do they matter? Certainly, it’s not because God is the morality
monitor of the cosmos whose job it is to make sure that we’re all behaving like
we are supposed to. No, behavior matters because actions have consequences. Our
God loves us and doesn’t want to see us make choices that lead us to harm. He
doesn’t want to see us hurt ourselves, and that
is the reason He cares about our actions. He loves us and His relationship to
us motivates Him to guide us in how we behave lest we bring harm to ourselves.
God
didn’t tell Adam not to eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil to
be selfish and hold out on something Adam might enjoy. He forbade the first
couple to eat from the tree because they would die if they ate from it! God
loved them and didn’t want to see them suffer the consequences of disobeying
Him by eating its fruit.
The
Trinity is a culture of loving acceptance and you are loved and accepted
regardless of how you behave. His heart is linked to ours through love, not
laws of performance. However, our Triune God desires for you to avoid bringing
harm to yourself by ignoring what He has instructed about how to live. If we
choose to disobey, we will suffer the consequences, but even then He will walk
through the pain with us. He will comfort and guide us as we move through the
injury we have brought upon ourselves. He won’t be saying, “I told you so” or
“This is what you get for not listening to me.” Instead, He will sweep you up
into His arms and say, “Let me carry you. Just trust me. I’ll carry you through
this.” That is what a relational God does!
Reject
the idea of a judicial god who judges your life while looking for an infraction
of the rules. That is not who He is. He is interested in redemption and
restoration, not retribution. Christ Jesus is not a courtroom judge. He came to
deliver us from sin’s penalty, not to impose it on us. Don’t confuse your
relational God who revealed Himself in Jesus for a judicial god who is more
interested in rules than relationships.
A
relational God would do everything necessary to show Adam that he was still
loved and accepted after he sinned in the Garden of Eden. He would come to
Adam, in pursuit of him, even though he had sinned. He would promise him that
sin would not get the last word over humanity.
He
would cover him with the skin of an animal like a man gives a beautiful diamond
engagement ring to the one he pledges to make his own forever. He would put him
out of the Garden to protect him from himself, lest he eat from the Tree of
Life and, in so doing, damn and doom himself to a place beyond redemption by
becoming eternally trapped in his fallen estate. He would go with Adam when he
left the Garden of Eden and would be with him all his life, loving him until He
led him safely home.
A
judicial god would have made Adam seek Him; He’d wait for him to beg for
forgiveness. He would be angry and punitive. He would make Adam prove his
sorrow about having sinned by changing his ways and gradually regaining that
god’s acceptance and favor.
Do
you see the difference between the relational God revealed in the Trinity and
the judicial god manufactured in the murky minds of the misinformed? It’s one
thing to say we believe that God is relational but what we believe becomes
clear when we apply our understanding to our own lives and the lives of others.
A
relational God wouldn’t keep score or, to quote another who understood God
better than most of us: He would be “patient and kind. He does not envy, does
not boast, and is not proud. He does not dishonor others, is not self-seeking;
He is not easily angered and He keeps no record of wrongs. He does not delight
in evil but rejoices with the truth. He always protects, always trusts, always
hopes, always perseveres.” (See 1 Corinthians 13.)
A
judicial god would have rejected Abraham when, because of fear, he had his wife
go into Pharaoh’s tent to sleep with him. The relational God didn’t shame him
but only reaffirmed the covenant He had sworn to him earlier.
A
judicial god would have had the prodigal son’s father lecture him. The
relational God had him laugh with joy over the son and throw a party in his
honor. A judicial god would have had the father leave the self-righteous older
brother in the outer darkness alone while everybody else partied. The
relational God had his dad go out into the outer darkness with him, refusing to
leave him there alone.
A
judicial god would have told a parable where the vineyard owner paid people
what they deserved for working in his field. The relational God told the story
in a way that the owner lavished generosity on everybody, regardless of how
long they had worked.
Do
you get the picture? Example after example from Scripture could be cited to
illustrate the fact that it’s all about relationship to God. The Trinity is the
matrix for the family system that our God desired for all humanity. His eternal
intention was to include us in the Circle of Love and Life that has eternally
existed among the Godhead.
Before
the first tick of the clock He had already embraced us and cuddled us in the
center of the circle of the Father, Son and Spirit. Paul wrote, “Even before He
made the world, God loved us and chose us in Christ to be holy and without
fault in His eyes” (Ephesians 1:4, NLT).
When did this happen? “Before He made the world,” the Bible says. Where were
you when He chose you? “In Christ,” the Scripture clearly affirms.
The
inside story the gospel tells is that you were in before you knew it. The game
is rigged. Before sin stained the garment of humanity, the Eternal Eradicator
had already cleansed the stain by “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the
world” (Revelation 13:8, King James
Version). Sin was a big issue in time, but in the eternal realm nobody
experienced the slightest nervousness about it because there was the Lamb,
having drawn the consequence of sin into Himself before it even became a
problem in time. We might say that we were all born with a credit—a big credit.
Our sin was already forgiven before we even got here to commit the first one.
It was that important to God. Nothing
was going to keep us from living in His loving embrace. He saw to that.
If
you want your relationship to your Heavenly Father to be one that causes you to
experience the abundant life that He created you to know, renounce the lie that
He relates to you as a courtroom judge and begin to renew your mind to the fact
that He relates to you as your Abba,
the word Jesus used that denotes the kind of childlike relationship that a baby
has to its daddy.
- Steve McVey
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