It is good to think through what is being communicated and I do think there are some concerning features of the gospel offered here.  For instance, let’s ponder the assumed motivation.  Are people really trying to leap the chasm to get to God?  Are people longing for closeness with the throne/crown authority figure presented in this illustration?  I don’t remember talking to someone who was desperate to get to God and disappointed that they could not.  Furthermore, the relationship offered seems ambiguous – what sort of connection will we have with this throne/crown if we do choose to walk his way?

I’d like to offer another version.  Why? Because it is good to rethink the gospel presentations we use. Even if we end up rejecting my modification, the exercise will surely be helpful in thinking through how we present the gospel.

Instead of having the human figure facing towards God and apparently motivated to move towards God throughout the illustration, let’s draw him or her facing away from God.  We were created for relationship with God but we have turned away.  Introduce the chasm (sin is our rebellion against both God and the love he has for us).  Now the illustration is ready to fill in.

1. On the God side, why don’t we represent God in a more Trinitarian way?  After all, the authority imagery is obviously incomplete, so let’s play with an alternative.  How about a house?  Verbally explain the context of the relationship of the Father and the Son by the Spirit – three persons united in love.  This relationship was the home, the family, the belonging that we were made for.  If it is explained well then the authority of God as creator and ruler can still be established fairly easily.  However this is not a God of conflicting realities. He is not “loving, but also just.”  Because of the perfect love within the Trinity, therefore God is just, etc.
2. In the chasm let’s draw a manger.  Why a manger?  Because God’s goal for us is not merely to change our location from the realm of sin to the realm of heaven.  God’s goal is union with us, which is why God the Son became one of us – the incarnation matters to the gospel!  He had to become one of us so that he could be one with us in marriage, which leads us to …
3. Behind the turned away person let’s draw the cross.  Why here? Because ultimately that is how far Jesus travelled for us.  It was the price that had to be paid, it was the revelation of what God is like that had to be made, and it was the proposal to win our hearts to entrust ourselves to God.  God’s proposal was not in nervousness on one-knee, but in agony with outstretched arms.

Why do I like this adaptation of the classic illustration?

1. Because it speaks of the three great unions of Christianity – the union of God with God (Trinity), the union of God and man in Christ (incarnation), and the union of Christ with humanity (union with Christ).
2. Because God is presented more relationally.
3. Because mankind is not presented as motivated to seek and reach God.
4. Because God, in Christ, came all the way to us.  (You could also explain that the Spirit points our hearts to the cross and invites us to be united to Christ.)
5. Because it presents a loving God doing everything for a rebellious and dead-to-God creature like me.
6. Because the gospel is about trusting in that love, rather than about making a personal commitment to travel to God.
7. Because in the gospel we are brought back home by a loving spouse – it is not our solo trek on a God-made bridge to a nice place, in a very real sense he carries his bride over the threshold!

My goal is not to convince you of this illustration.  Perhaps you have another classic gospel explanation you have used – why not think through its weaknesses and modify it to better offer the richness of the good news?  (The judge doesn’t simply pay our fine, he also approaches the stand and proposes…for example.)

The post Rebuilding the Bridge to Life first appeared on Cor Deo.

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Another New Year, another set of resolutions?  Every January gyms sign up loads of new members, people give up bad habits, start new hobbies, commit themselves to make major changes, organize their lives and so on.  Every February most of this is forgotten!

Don’t get me wrong, I am not one of those anti-resolutions people that never even tries.  This year I am making a big effort to get on top of my email, and I’m starting to swim each week.  But there is something far more foundational than how we organize our lives or look after our bodies.  Let’s call it the real foundations of life.

The foundations of our worldview and belief system will influence everything we think, everything we do, and every way in which we engage everything around us.  Probably the healthiest thing we can do is take some time to prayerfully ponder the foundations of our faith.

What do I mean by the foundations? I mean the answers to basic underlying questions that everything else is built upon.  The foundational questions of any belief system are these:

Which god is God, and what is He like?

What does it mean to be human, to be made in His image?

What is the nature of the problem between us and God, or what is sin?

What is the solution to that problem?

These are really basic questions, and yet strangely, most of us never stop to think about them.  After all, everyone knows who God is, right?  Everyone knows what sin is?  Do they?  Do we?

Let’s just take the first question: Which god is God, and what is He like?

Which God?  For too long we have been lulled into a false sense of clarity here. How easily we assume that God is, well, God.  He is the supreme, ultimate, in charge, powerful being sitting on the throne, right?  Well, these facts may all be true, but already the description is starting to specify a certain version of God.

Let’s say you are talking with a friend and they say they don’t believe in God.  Uh oh, defensiveness rises within you. But then they start to describe their view of the heavenly Hitler who inflicts suffering without any sense of care for the creatures. Hopefully this starts to feel very uncomfortable. After all, I hope the God you believe in is not a heartless despot inflicting agony on a helpless world. And thankfully, your job in this conversation is not to defend the absolute power of a generic God-being, but rather to help introduce your friend to the true God.

The world is full of different “gods” and we need to start thinking about which God we actually worship. For most people, in most of the world, for most of history, there have been numerous deities.  It is only really in the West, influenced by a combination of Greek philosophy and a politically powerful but theologically poor Christianity, that the generic distant power-broker god has become the assumed deity.

The Bible does not assume that everyone is referring to the true God when they speak of God.  The Bible points us to the God who is a Father revealed by His Son through the Spirit.  The Bible points us to a specific God, with a specific character, who can be known. This is an amazing reality – nobody has ever seen the God (the Father), but unique God who is at the Father’s side, He has made Him known! (John 1:18)

 What is He like?  God is like Jesus.  Perfectly like Jesus.  And once this truth grabs a hold of us, suddenly this most foundational question can become a lifelong quest.  In a good friendship there is the joy of continual discovery as you get to know more and more about your friend.  In a healthy marriage this quest to know the other is thoroughly satisfying, but never complete.  And if it is true in a friendship or marriage, how much more will the infinitely wonderful Son of God captivate our hearts forever? For all eternity the Father has found the Son to be delightfully satisfying.  Surely there is enough there to stir our hearts for the rest of this life, not to mention eternity!?

Too many of us have settled into assuming we know the answer to the most foundational of all questions.  I know which god is God – it is the God of the Bible.  What is God like?  Well, you know, omniscient, omnipotent, omnipresent, etc.  And we sound like we are describing a set of facts like the specifications on a car (and not like a car enthusiast would either!)

God is not a set of facts to know and quote.  God is not a set of doctrines, no matter how wonderful that theology may be.  God is personal, and He can known through Jesus, His Son.

Do you like God?  Seems like a strange question for many.  We know the correct answer to “do you believe in God?” or even “do you love God?” but what about “do you like God?”  It does seem weird that we know instinctively whether we like a waiter or waitress before they finish their first question at our table, and yet many go to church for years, live in God’s family for years, and then struggle to answer the question, “do you like Him?”  It is almost as if God were impersonal, just a set of facts.  Do you like the spec-list for your microwave?  Do you like the ingredient list for your bag of crisps?  Who cares?  These are impersonal.  But do we like God?  This is a gloriously significant question.

As we stop to ponder the foundational questions we will find that the answers the Bible gives us are progressively more thrilling.  The foundational questions can be answered quickly, but our entire lives are really a working out of our answers to these questions.

Let me encourage you at the start of this year to take some time to pray through the four questions and ask God to help you see the truth of the Bible for each, and to see how getting the right answers to these questions can become the thrilling quest of a lifetime for you.

What is God like?  He’s like Jesus.  Get to know Him better this year.

The post Foundations for a New Year first appeared on Cor Deo.

This truism will stretch us but, as followers of Christ, we must receive it. And as we explore it we have at least two rails to run on. First we take up the Genesis disclosure that in marriage, by God’s Spirit, two become one—making a single male-and-female human. And, second, we embrace the New Testament disclosure that all who share Christ’s Spirit are one in Christ.

The common point is that the Spirit shares and sustains God’s eternal, invisible, and immaterial relationship and, by the Father’s love, extends that relationship to us and, potentially, through us.

In other words God’s being explains our being. He created us in his image as beings-in-relation. Yet, as an important sidebar, God’s enemy posits just the opposite. He insists that both God and humanity exist as autonomous beings—as individual gods. So we won’t find these relational insights affirmed by any who lack the Spirit’s life—anyone not “born again.” Which is incredible, given that in life we are immersed in relationships.

That warning aside, this relational image—our “likeness” to God—allows us to commune with him once we know him. The eyes of our hearts are opened when we turn away from satanic premises of autonomy and live, instead, by faith in God working through his love.

Love is key. Love is the label for God’s inherent mutual devotion. Importantly, it is not something external to God—some sort of commodity or power. It is, instead, God’s relational bond. The Father initiates love; the Son responds to it; and the Spirit shares it. Or, as Augustine of Hippo summarized it, in God we meet the true lover, his beloved, and the one who communicates their reciprocal love. And salvation is the fruit of the Spirit sharing that love in human hearts.

From the very beginning, then, as relational beings we were made to love and to be loved. And, in human marriage, to be united in the flesh as the male-female who can then bear children in love engendered by the Spirit’s indwelling presence.

The distinctions in God and in us are key. In reading John’s gospel, for instance, the differing roles of the Father, Son, and Spirit are underscored. So, too, partners in a marriage differ in ways that make a whole—not simply in biological distinctions but as whole persons—with differences that attract and intrigue. God means for these wonderful and sometimes mystifying distinctions to complement and fulfill the one-with-another bonding of love.

And even apart from marriage Christians are members of Christ’s body by his Spirit—and, collectively, the bride of Christ. Our being-in-communion is God’s shared love present in us. By his love we are bonded both to him and to each other.

But what does this mean in practice? Much more than any blog entry can explore! But let’s at least start.

I picked up one lesson in a seminary counseling course. “Remember,” the professor told us, “in marital counseling you counsel the marriage, not the individuals.”

His point was that the two spouses share a relationship. And the relationship is what needs the care. It consists in shared values, choices, hurts, hopes, friendships, children, and more. Each spouse brings different qualities to the whole—as complementary distinctions—so any problems will only be resolved when the spouses come to a more profound and effective bond through Christ’s love.

The claim of 1 John 4 that “God is love” sets all this in play. His love in us makes all the difference—something John unpacks in his letter.

Another lesson comes by collating the Bible accounts of Genesis 3 and John 3. The Spirit has been eternally present in the divine communion of the “one” who is also the “us” of the Genesis creation account. Which is to say that the fruit of the Spirit—his sharing Christ’s heart—should characterize growing Christian relations.

This lesson—that the Spirit grows us—was the point Jesus made to Nicodemus in John 3.  At a minimum, knowing God involves a wholehearted response to God’s love as the Spirit shares that love. His voice, offered in the Scriptures, is needed to make salvation—and marriages—work. It also offers the basis for true church growth.

Jesus summarized this in John 13:15—“By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” This characterizes his bond with the Father and he treated it as the goal of his incarnation in John 17:22, “that they may be one even as we are one.”

So the practice of responding to God rightly consists in always treating his being-in-the-communion-of-love as the basis for every relationship. He is the ground of every true aspect of creaturely reality. We are, in other words, meant to live in the union and communion of love by always aligning our hearts with God’s heart. There we find shared values and practices.

This isn’t simply a matter of learning truths—though learning is always present—but growing in love. The Father is always initiating in love and the Son is always responding; and the Spirit is always communicating in an eternal swirl of initiative-and-response. And we are invited to join in.

So we are called to be one, just as God is one. This takes place in a progression of heart changes as we have his Spirit working in us. We begin to grasp our own unique distinctions as elements of a whole—as members of Christ’s body—and not as capacities to be used for our selfish ends.

Then in our self-giving we reveal God’s heart—as a holy whole—to the world. And that invites unbelievers—those enslaved to autonomy—to taste and see God’s goodness through our love for each other. His loving kindness lasts forever and we, as his beloved children who are all distinct yet one, offer living samples of what that means!

The post One with Distinctions first appeared on Cor Deo.

In this story God—the Father, Son, and Spirit God—is the protagonist. And the Son’s captivating qualities set the scene: to know him is to love him. The Father delights in the Son and wants him to have a Bride who can love and enjoy him as the Father does. The Spirit’s mission is to arrange the marriage: he sets up introductions.

God’s motive in this is love—a giving heart—and marriage is his venue for sharing. The story began before the foundation of the world as the Father, Son, and Spirit communed in a shared glory. It was in this period that the Bride was anticipated: “chosen” even before creation.

Of course this marriage transcends human marriage: it is neither physical nor temporal. Instead the Bride is the collective body of men and women who respond to the Spirit’s wooing. So the Bride is spiritual in the sense that she is “one” not in any tangible sense but in the reality of the shared Spirit.

How the divine Son can take a bride from the creation is central to the plot. First, humans were made in God’s “likeness” to be suitable candidates. But another step was needed. The Son had to join humanity: to share the tangible life of the Bride. And as such he became a bridge for the Bride to join the Father’s family. The Son was already united to the Father in his divinity and then by a physical birth he joined humanity to take his Bride. And all—Father, Son, and Bride—share the one Spirit. By this bond the Bride has eternal life.

This epic story explains both our creation and, for the Bride, salvation. Yet to many of us it sounds odd and unfamiliar. Why?

Because an antagonist muddles this true story with false accounts.

This is the Liar: an angel gone bad. In his beauty and free self-expression this figure became an arch-narcissist: loving himself in place of God. And with that he sought to take over the creation by forming a counter-kingdom: a realm of moral opposition.

He was, of course, only a creature himself and unable to form his own creation. Instead he plotted to take over humanity and through seduction to rule the creation through humans. His ploy has been to replace good with evil in every aspect of reality. This is the moral equivalent of making old-style film negatives: he converts light to darkness and vice versa.

In his plan he presumed God, as pure goodness, would lose access to all who were part of this morally-reversed realm. And when the Holy Spirit’s bonding love was quenched in Adam—and the Spirit now stood outside human souls—humanity as a whole turned instead to the reversed narratives offered by the Unholy spirit.

And this spirit—Satan—reconceived each element of God’s goodness by overt reversals. His new realm treats God as a disaffected singularity rather than a God who is love; it offered animated death in place of Life. It replaced love for others with a love of self; a devotion to light with a fascination for darkness; the power of love with the love of power; a proper form of marriage with improper forms; and much, much more.

So the Bible calls him the Serpent, the Devil, the Accuser, and more. The Son called him the Liar and the Father of lies. No truth will ever be found in him or offered by him.

His ultimate Lie is that we can “be like God.” As if humanity, apart from God, can do just fine. God may still be useful since he sustains the creation but he seems to be impotent.

The Bride in God’s story is gathered from those who accepted the Lie and were then devoured by Satan’s living death. But, in an amazing turn, the Son devours death for those who love him. He entered death to rescue us and to reverse our moral polarities. Satan didn’t anticipate this.

How did the blameless Son die? In the great exchange of marital properties he took on our evil; and we received his life. He, as God, swallowed our death and was raised from death on the basis of his unquenchable life. And so we now live in him by faith.

So the true Epic ends with the Bride returning to the Living Truth and sharing his glory—the glory of the Father—with the new life of the Spirit making it all work. The Unholy spirit, on the other hand, still has death—along with all who spurned the Son’s Life—forever.

It’s an epic reality that brings us to the one True Love worth living for.

The post Living Truth first appeared on Cor Deo.

So what about the true God’s anger and our experience of the storms of life—both metaphorical and tangible? Is most of life best explained by a theology of God’s capricious wrath?

No. God, no matter how he’s portrayed by his critics, does not struggle with anger management issues. Instead the Bible explains God’s wrath by starting with the serpent’s promise in Genesis 3, “You can be like God.”

This bold lie—a claim that replaces God as the single center of reality with a host of alternative centers—was embraced by humanity and instantly distorted every human perception of life.

The distortion is seen in human motives. Adam was made to be other-centered, with God’s love as his ultimate delight. But when the first man embraced the serpent’s premise of being like god it led him to a new self-concerned orientation—to focus on his nakedness and needs. An ambition for autonomy had replaced his prior rest on God’s providential love.

And with the resulting departure of the aggrieved Spirit each of Adam’s offspring now has to be wooed by God. The Spirit is no longer an indwelling companion but now stands outside the soul calling and inviting a response to God’s love and a trust in God is now supernatural. The premise of independence turned human freedom into the ultimate human goal.

This is where human anger emerges. Anger is a motivational defect of an upended metaphysic. From Eden onward our true being as creatures—made by God, for God—is denied. And anger is the sense of being violated while trying to achieve the destiny of a god. Or, more to the point, a given bout of anger almost always points to a circumstance where our ambition to be a god isn’t working.

Yet we must say “almost” because there are times when anger is a proper affection.  Paul warned, for instance, “Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and give no opportunity to the devil” (Eph. 4:26-27).

So when and how is anger proper?

We need to turn to the Trinity and to the first creation for our answer. As we probe the events of Eden the dispute between God’s word and the serpent’s word involves even more than a conflict about death and autonomy.

We recall the starting point of the debate as “you shall surely die” versus “you will not surely die.” This featured the nature of life. Jesus later exposed the ultimate issue as a contention about whether a life “born of the flesh” is the same as a life “born of the Spirit.” Life, he made clear, actually consists in God’s participation in the soul by the Spirit. The devil was offering a realm of ongoing animation apart from God’s life: a living death. Jesus exposed this as a false option.

There was another implicit element in this debate. How does God’s life actually exist?

The premise of Genesis chapter one is that God exists as a being-in-communion. He is a God who speaks in a plural voice: “let us make man in our image.” The rest of the Bible presents the substance of this statement as the Father-Son-Spirit reality unfolds over time. He was fully present from the beginning but after the fall his reality needed to be restated and demonstrated.

The serpent in his hubris dismissed this relational reality as he invited Adam to a new vision of deity: to singularity and autonomy as the basis of being. Why this arrangement?  Because he needed to stake out metaphysical space for challenging God. And by positing being-as-a-singularity he could deny any need for dependence. In this scheme every “relationship” is strictly utilitarian and self-serving—a negotiation among gods who, when violated, become angry.

So after Eden the functions of individual thought and action were treated as the basis for being. And in this presumed reality deity is linked to every thinking-choosing creature. Taken in biblical terms this meant that any bond between the true Creator and his creatures is re-envisioned.

But the vision is nonsensical—given that God still sustains the creation—even as the devil redefines life, death, being, and morality on the basis of autonomy. He needs God’s gracious docility to make it work. The serpent, in effect, presumed on grace to dismiss grace. He declared each animated being to be a carrier of deity—the stuff of polytheism—and tried to make it work.

Without ever saying so the devil was and still is the guiding spirit in this presumed realm of autonomy. He was, in other words, still deploying the relational bonds of our creation in God’s relational image to slip into the coaching role once held by the Holy Spirit. As an unholy spirit he thought he could devour all God’s people by simply employing his ultimate Lie to redirect faith away from God while calling people to trust his Lie.

Now, back to anger. In John 3:35-36 God sets out the basis for his own anger. It has everything to do with the Father’s devotion to his Son—the bridegroom of the faithful (cf. 3:29): “The Father loves the Son and has given all things into his hands. Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life; whoever does not obey the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God remains on him.”

So when is human anger proper? Only in the moments where we have our hearts aligned with God’s heart. When is it improper? Whenever our hearts are aligned with the Lie. That’s the realm of God’s wrath.

As we embrace the triune God, then, let’s allow him to make things right in the end. That means we don’t need to take anger to bed at night because we’ve dismissed the Lie. God is still God.

Sleep well!

The post The Gods are Angry! first appeared on Cor Deo.

So what about conversing with God? Do we speak with him in the same way we talk to a good friend or to a beloved spouse? Or do we speak to him reluctantly—without much trust or care?

I ask this because I have the impression that too few Christians think of God as a close and congenial conversation partner. Instead he’s more of a potential resource for special needs, or an iconic figure at church meetings and ceremonies.

We need to acknowledge at least one obvious difference in talking to God. He isn’t physically present in the room so we can’t have the sort of back-and-forth exchange we’re used to when we think of conversations. And most comparisons between normal sharing and speaking to God won’t apply. We even have a separate term for talking to God—“prayer”—that recognizes the one-sided nature of coming to God. Prayers and conversations are not the same thing.

Or so it might seem to us.

The Bible actually portrays God as fully invested in us as potential conversation partners. His presence in all believers is immediate—a Spirit-to-spirit bond as in 1 Corinthians 2 and Romans 8—and is potentially more lively than any human bond. Psalm 139:4 portrays him as intimately aware of everything we ever mean to say, even before we voice our thoughts. God, then, is the greatest of communicators. He wants us to hear his heart and vice versa.

But if that’s the case how do we take advantage of such access? Imagine the benefits of a clear and strong connection with God! And with that vision in view let’s move ahead.

A starting point is to seek him. The term “seek” is Bible jargon for our ambition to start a conversation. Listen to Psalm 28:8—a Psalm attributed to David—“You have said, ‘Seek my face.’ My heart says to you, ‘Your face, LORD, do I seek.’ Hide not your face from me.” And hear Christ’s call: “But seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and all these things [i.e. all our life concerns] will be added to you” (Matthew 6:33).

Next comes a willingness to listen. God, once again, is not a poor speaker. Instead we’re poor listeners. We don’t really want to hear what he has to say.

This conundrum of moral deafness calls for humility and openness. Making the connection work is something only God’s Spirit can accomplish. He alone knows our heart’s true motives. So the starting point for a clear connection with God is an invitation to him to check the connection. Let’s return to Psalm 139 here, to verse 23: “Search me, O God, and know my heart!” David recognized God as the solution to our deafness.

So the heart is crucial as the center of our values and motives. Before our new life of faith we had deadened hearts—wanting to “be like God” as usurpers and users rather than followers—but even in coming to faith our old interests still haunt us. God said as much in Jeremiah 17:9-10—“The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it? I the LORD search the heart and test the mind, to give every man according to his ways, according to the fruit of his deeds.”

And now we come to the main insight of conversing with God: he invites us to speak about important matters and not about the themes of our former rebellion. The near deafness of most Christians remains a problem as long as we make self the focus of our approaches to him. Such efforts represent our past spilling into the present—recalling how we once lived as lovers of self rather than as lovers of God and neighbor.

God’s Trinitarian existence is the ultimate measure here. God the Father wants us to take up our new identity: we are now his children by way of union with Christ. We are now his Son’s eternal bride: as much beloved by him as his Son is. So any efforts on our part to continue with the old values of spiritual autonomy and self-interest need to be crucified just as Jesus was crucified for our former life.

A clear connection with the Father is only made in our devotion to his Son. As we abide—living boldly and overtly—in Christ and in his love for us our values shift dramatically. We now discover the Bible to be speaking about this bond from beginning to end. This lesson that Jesus taught his still-dull disciples on the road to Emmaus in Luke 24 is crucial: everything in the Old Testament was a story about the Father sending his Son, the Servant, to give us life.

Once we get the Spirit’s focus on the Son offered throughout the Scriptures we start to pick up on what’s really important. The story of fall and redemption stands behind God’s answers to all our questions. We then hear the Spirit whispering to our hearts as we read, “Yes, yes, you’re getting it at last!”

The tension of the past came when we tried to force God to treat our own stories as central to life. Now we know better. And we can join the Father in his delight in his Son, which is where the conversation reaches its peak.

The post A Clear Connection first appeared on Cor Deo.

In the background of this ‘universal truth’ is the assumption that relationships are primarily contractual. That is, one party promises to provide certain benefits to the other on the basis that certain conditions are met. If either party doesn’t meet these defined conditions, then the contract—I mean “relationship”—is null and void and the deal can then be terminated. Give and take.

Shouldn’t marriage be about unconditional love? Doesn’t our culture yearn for authentic relationships with that foundation?

Well yes and yes but like the bad advice above, there’s a catch – we want to receive unconditional love but we don’t necessarily want to offer it. Because of Genesis 3 we function on the basis that relational covenant is a contract. We’re primarily concerned about what benefits we get and the conditions we need to meet to get what we want. So if someone doesn’t love us unconditionally, or make us happy, we don’t have to meet the conditions we promised.

What’s amazingly sad in all this is that humans actually want to relate to God this way as well.   We take God’s unconditional promises of covenant and turn them into conditional contracts. Think of Genesis 28, where Jacob leaves the land to escape his brother, Esau, and to get a wife who is not from the Canaanites. Before he leaves the land, God visits him in a dream. In the dream God promises Jacob the same promise that was given to his grandfather and father, which is characterized by the words “I will…” God unilaterally promises to bless Jacob, to be with him, and to bring him back to the land. And Jacob’s unbelieving response to God’s word is to turn the unconditional into a condition. “If God will be with me and keep his promises, then the LORD shall be my God.” Did you catch that? Jacob doesn’t believe God’s word but instead tells God that he has to prove it first.

Jacob isn’t the only one. Because of sin we all tend to morph any relationship into a contract with conditions. Often we project our fallenness onto God, expecting ourselves to prove our belief in him so that he might be gracious to us.

Therefore it shouldn’t be a surprise that theological systems do the same thing. For instance, in New England in the 17^th century, Puritans found themselves differing on this very subject. John Cotton emphatically said that we passively receive God’s free grace and promise, but his colleagues said otherwise:

… But to take our first Assurance to arise from the Spirit in an absolute promise only, is not only difficult for us to believe (and therefore desire your grounds) but seems to maintain, as straightening the freeness of God’s Spirit in working and destroying the comfort of many, whom Christ himself doth speak comfort unto, Matthew 5.3. etc. only we add, That God’s free grace may be revealed and received as freely in a conditional (where the Condition is first wrought by Gods free grace and not trust to, as we desire ever to be understood when we mention conditional promises) as in an absolute promise. For it is grace that works the Condition, it is grace that reveals the Condition, it is grace that makes the promise, it is grace that set on the promise; and what danger is there hereby, to a well instructed Christian of going astray from free grace?

Could I be so bold as to answer Cotton’s colleagues with another question? Which God would require a condition (even if graciously provided) in an unconditional promise? Does God really need to be conditioned to be gracious to us?

Their answer does seem to attempt to ease the tension of a God who’s a walking contradiction. You know: a God who’s one thing BUT also another, as if God has attributes that are seemingly in conflict, but are both true of him. Like the response to the 11th question of the Heidelberg Catechism, “God is indeed merciful, but also just….”

This tension does not reflect the Triune nature of God who exists in mutual relationship. The reality is that God is love and greatly delights in himself – He is a Father loving his Son, and the Son loving his Father, by their Spirit. Therefore all his actions such as creation, redemption, judgment, etc. reflect his loving Triune nature.

The walking contradiction attempts to make biblical the Stoic notion that God is primarily the “Contract God” who can only relate in a conditional contract, or as a Lawgiver. For instance, you’ll find people seeing the prayer of John 17 as a God who relates to himself in a contractual deal. So the church is understood to be the reward for Jesus’ obedience to his Father so that Jesus can have a people to rule over. This is very different than seeing the loving Son going to win a people for his Father so that they may participate in the Family of God.

I think the only one who comes to that conclusion has a God who is a “give and take” God, or a contract God, rather than a covenant God. The whole story of God isn’t give and take; it’s rather a story of the Generous Giver. It’s about the One who pursues his people with “all his heart and all his soul” (Jer. 32:41). It’s about the Father who has given us his only Son that we might be his people and He our God. It’s about the Father who has given all that’s his to his Son, so that the Son may give all that he has to his bride.

Bottom line: the Bible isn’t the story of an a-relational God who cannot relate without a condition. He doesn’t require us to clean ourselves up so that we can then be united to Christ. Rather, we are united to Christ who makes us clean. Or in other words, a pauper isn’t required to make herself a princess that she might marry the prince, but rather the prince marries the pauper, which makes her a princess. It’s all about unconditional relationship and promise as the basis for covenant, not a conditional contract.

The post Conditioned God first appeared on Cor Deo.

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We finished our sermon series in Luke’s gospel on Sunday. Having begun in Advent 2013 with the birth narratives (and having broken off for a couple of breaks along the way to look at other books) it was fitting to reach the resurrection in chapter 24 on Easter Sunday. With all the skill and pacing of a master story-teller, Luke builds his narrative to a great climax through the crescendo to the death and resurrection of Christ in the final chapters of his gospel. It has certainly been a powerful journey.

Looking back over the whole series in Luke, I have so many reflections, but allow me to just dwell on one: the element of Luke’s account that has had the deepest impact on me. It is this, that Jesus passionately and faithfully loves his Father in heaven and those around him, even in the greatest suffering.

So many of the key events in Luke’s account seem to focus on this relationship between God the Son and his Father; Jesus’ baptism, with the great affirmation of his Father in love and the anointing of the Holy Spirit, and the subsequent temptations – all of which seem to tempt Jesus with an alternative path dependent on breaking that love relationship with his Father – to name just two. But this unshakeable love between Father and Son is perhaps seen nowhere more clearly than in the Easter narratives.

Firstly, consider Gethsemane. Remember what is in prospect for Jesus as he wrestles in prayer there. The thought of the physical suffering of crucifixion alone would make a trembling wreck of the strongest of us, then add in the emotional suffering of betrayal, denial and desertion of his closest friends and even this is just the beginning. The eternally beloved Son is about to be separated from the love of His eternally loved Father – for what reason? – to bring rebels and rejecters of the eternal love of God back into loving relationship with him. And when we grasp something of this context, Jesus’ prayer that the Father’s will be done (over and above his own comfort, even his own life) is simply staggering, and can only be an expression of the most staggering love.

Secondly, consider the cross. In the middle of all the pain already mentioned, surrounded by people who simply can’t wait for him to die, who taunt and mock him while he is doing so, and Jesus is thinking about, Jesus is loving, Jesus is forgiving… them. “Father, forgive them…”, “…today you will be with me in paradise…” I say it again, this is simply staggering love, a love so unlike any other love we can or will ever experience. Small wonder that at least two people witnessing the scene, seeing how Jesus dies, come to understand why Jesus dies!

And it is this which is my abiding impression from our little odyssey through Luke’s gospel, this extraordinary love of Christ (for his Father and for us) which remains faithful and true in even the greatest of suffering. Then when we take a moment of reflection to see things from his Father’s perspective, we see also the extraordinary love of the Father (for his Son and for us) which remains faithful and true in the worst of suffering.

So now, may that love which is poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit move us to love in response to the extraordinary love of our triune God!

The post Luke’s Gospel of a Loving God first appeared on Cor Deo.

“I want to reside in your home and for you to treat me as your daughter in every way, as if I were married to your only son. But with the stipulation that I don’t have anything to do with your son! I really don’t like him . . . I want to live my life here.”

I don’t know about you, but I doubt any of us would be surprised to hear a wrathful response full of jealousy for his son.   The audacity to demand the rewards of being his son’s wife without any real connection to him, even blatant hostility against him, would deserve her immediate removal. Even by force if necessary!

Another reason that we’d expect a response like this is that we understand there’s only a few ways to enter into a family. We don’t question that the way into a family is either by birth, adoption, invitation, or by marriage. To say it doesn’t offend any of our sensibilities. Family by definition is exclusive. Some are part of your family and others are not. That’s the way it goes.

With that in mind, have you ever been asked, or have you ever asked, a set of questions like this:

“How can you believe that God is good when he offers only one way to heaven? Don’t you think it’s cruel to keep so many good people from entering into heaven?”

Either as the questioner, or as the one asked the question, I’m sure that the answer included Jesus’ words “I am the way, the truth, and the life,” and that apart from him no one can get into heaven. While these words are absolutely true, it doesn’t seem to reflect the tone or the nature of Jesus’ last words to his disciples in John 14.

Now in our post-modern western culture it’s apocryphal to claim any views on the nature of truth and goodness that may be exclusive in anyway. The logic goes, “Truth is relative, your truth can be your truth and my truth can be mine. And as long as nobody gets hurt, goodness is relative too.” Although the irony isn’t lost on me – the intolerance of perceived intolerance – the context of John 14:6 may allow for a more effective method for engaging objections to the exclusivity of the Christian faith (as well as honoring the intention of Jesus’ words and the nature of God).

Jesus, to comfort the hearts of his disciples, tells them that they shouldn’t be troubled by his coming departure (14:1-3).   Instead, they should believe that he’s going away for their benefit that he may prepare a place for them in his Father’s house. All the disciples would have noticed the obvious betrothal imagery. At this time in a Jewish culture, a man would propose to a woman (which would be treated just as legally binding as marriage) and return to his father’s house to build an addition to the home for the new couple. After his father approved the addition he would then go and retrieve his bride.

And Jesus tells his disciples that they should feel about the news of his departure just as a new bride would respond to her betrothal (14:28). Think about the thrill that the bride would feel as her bridegroom left to prepare a home for their new life and the all-consuming anticipation of his return. This would not have been lost on Jesus’ disciples. They should rejoice and be excited that he’s leaving to go to his Father!

It’s easy to see why Jesus says to his disciples that they know where he’s going (14:4). As they have seen Jesus, they have seen the Father, because he and his Father are one (14:10ff). And to believe the words of Jesus, to follow his way (13:34-5), and to believe on him for life, are the very fruit of abiding in Christ. To love Jesus is to love and know the Father. Therefore, just as the Father has loved the Son, so too the Father loves Jesus’ disciples, his “bride” (14:18-31).

Jesus’ words then, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me,” make perfect sense. There’s no way to enter into the relationship with the Father and Son apart from being united to the Son because the Father and Son are one. To know the Father is know Jesus. To love the Father is to love the Son. This is heaven!

Heaven is to participate, to join the family of the Trinity by the Spirit who has been in the business of communicating the depths of the Father and Son’s love for each other for all eternity (1 Cor. 2).

There’s no other way to reside in the Father’s house apart from his Son, because they are one. Anything else, any other way, is no different than a random woman breaking through the window and demanding all the benefits of the house without any love for the members of the family that live there. Even in our post-modern western culture the exclusivity of the family remains the same. Forcing one’s way into the family apart from accepted modes only leads to removal and maybe even restraining orders.

The post Exclusive first appeared on Cor Deo.

Hopefully, yes, but let’s pause to think about it. And let’s ask the question in light of God as the Father, Son, and Spirit God.

Justification—our engaging God’s righteousness—is a biblical linchpin for Christians. The English terms “righteous” and “just” are two translations of one root word in the original language. The idea of being set right with God seems simple enough but how it happens is more complex. Debates about justification are common as was illustrated by an exchange between Tom Wright and John Piper not so long ago.

In this small space I’d like to consider a narrower aspect of justification that doesn’t get much notice: what does our justification accomplish for God?

To answer I’ll return here to a theme I see throughout the Bible. I now refer to it regularly but I was shy to use it until I found it in the writings of Martin Luther and some of the 17^th century Puritans.

Here it is. God the Father wants to share his beloved Son with others. So he created those who would become the Son’s beloved ones—his collective “bride”—to receive from the Son what the Son receives from the Father: devoted care and creative fellowship.

This narrative starts in the beginning as we meet God in his plurality: “let us” make “him” and “them” in “our” image. Later we discover the Son as the Father’s beloved companion—his “Word”—who reveals the Father to others. Together with the Spirit they are “one.”

Later in the Bible we discover labels for God: He is good, holy, righteous, pure, blameless, just, wise, and so on. These are words that describe his triune communion. And so it is that he is also said to be love—a word expressing God’s mutual devotion and the basis of his overflowing care for the creation.

This love sets up God’s gift of companionship. In love he walked in the Garden of Eden to be with Adam and Eve. Adam, however, spurned God’s love and lost confidence in God as he usurped God’s place.

Adam’s lost confidence was tied to his lost love: for a fallen person to trust God, God must fulfill that person’s will. And God must live under the fallen pretense that humans are autonomous: made to be free.

But God treats this as utter nonsense. He knows that all humans were enslaved from Eden onward by the great Liar and his one Lie: “You can be like God!”

But even after Adam’s fall God was determined to live among us. He chose a people for himself and set up, first, a tent and then a temple as his earthly home among us.

The Father also sent the Son at an appropriate time to offer humanity the ultimate expression of his love—the God-man who was not fallen. His was a life of total dependence on, and unrestrained affection for, the Father and with that a love for his creation.

Sin is a violation of this love: a complete disaffection for God. The bond of the Father, Son, and Spirit is a mystery to fallen people—and the willingness of the Father to send the Son to die and redeem his bride is sheer folly. Life in sin, instead, endorses the Enemy’s ambition to dismiss God.

The Father laughs at this—as the “nations rage”—and refuses to allow for self-love as an alternative to a love for his Son (Psalm 2). God’s love is unrestrained and unrestricted otherness—what fallen humanity can’t begin to comprehend—as in the eternal love of the Father and the Son as communicated by the Spirit.

So the sum of God’s eternal communion is love. The Old Testament refrain, for instance—“his loving kindness endures forever”—sets out God’s motivation. And that warns humans that self-love—the motive behind fallen assertions of freedom and independence—has no future. God condemns sin to a single realm: death.

The Spirit shares this mutual love of the Father and the Son. His role in humanity is to whisper God’s word—expressing his love—in our hearts. Most humans remain deaf in their sin—hard-hearted. But others begin to hear and respond to Scriptures—especially those who have been damaged by the proud and successful god-pretenders. The hearers are the elect: the bridal ones.

There’s much more to be said about God, of course, but this is enough for now. As we return to the question of our being righteous with God—of being justified—we find a lover waiting for us. The Father offers his Son in love. The Spirit woos us with that love and wins some but not all. Faith is a dawning that Satan lied and that God loves us on his terms, not ours. We were made by God, for God. And faith works through love.

Listen, then, to Jesus as he prayed on our behalf:

“Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world. O righteous Father, even though the world does not know you, I know you and these know that you have sent me” (John 17:24-25).

So justification is the culmination of a love story: it is our gazing into Christ’s eyes by faith and saying, as his bride, “I do.”

And with that we become what God meant us to be from the very beginning: his beloved ones who share all that he is, including his righteousness.

The post Justified first appeared on Cor Deo.