Theology 101

As I travel through this life, I find religious folk who do not really grasp what they are supposed to be doing and non-religious folks who do not quite understand Christianity as well as they think they might. So here's a layman's introduction to God. Well, what our response to God is to be. 

The Commandments can be broken into two types: Those that deal with God and those that deal with other people. We see that we are to have no other gods before God and we are to be considerate and kind to other people. The Commandments though are not arbitrary rules this God of ours dreamed up some Tuesday morning. No, they illustrate (granted, negatively) the very character of God. Why is this important? Because as we will see later, the Christian's job, the Christian's mission on this planet is to let God mold them into His likeness. As such, God has provided for us in the Commandments views of His character. We can detect that God is concerned that we honor Him as God and be concerned about other people. The reason we are to be concerned about other people is simply that it is God's character to be concerned about other people. If we are to be like Him, we must be concerned about other people. Why should we not murder? Because there is some cosmic rule that says we ought not? No, but because if our character is like God's, if we are concerned about other people, we cannot murder them. It seems impossible that if we are putting other people's interests ahead of ours, we could wantonly kill them. Why should we treat God and only God as the only god? Because He said so? Again, no. We worship God as God because of the kind of God He is: compassionate, giving, loving, and faithful. That kind of God deserves our following simply because of who or what He is. 

Let's look at a couple other ideas. In the Prophets, we see the prophetic message containing two themes. The first is that the audience has not been honoring God as God and have either corrupted their worship services or have failed to conduct them at all. Secondly, especially in the Minor Prophets, the prophetic message includes charges that the people and their leaders had themselves become corrupt. They sat in church and conceived ways to cheat their brothers. They violated every social rule and became only concerned about what was in it for them. 

In the Gospels, Jesus tells us what His mission was. In a nutshell, it was composed of three interconnected themes. The first was to glorify God by directing all the attention and praise that Jesus received back to God. Secondly, Jesus came to reveal God in more detail than had been previously given. Jesus says on more than one occasion that "if you have seen me, you have seen the father." His life was spent showing us what kind of character God has, what God thinks is important, and the kind of people we are to be. Thirdly, Jesus came to set us free from our sin which is another way of saying from ourselves. If we can surrender ourselves to Him, we become free to become the people God intended for us to be - those that reflect Him to others. Lastly, Jesus came to relieve suffering in this life. Jesus reads a scroll and applies it to Himself. That scroll says He came to relieve the oppressed, heal the sick, and a few other things. So Jesus' mission was not just to save us (John 3.16), but to provide release now. We see then that in the Gospels, God's concern is for the same two issues. We must recognize God as God and in so doing, we must become like Him in character. Anything less is not what God wants. 

In the Christian Epistles, we see the same progression. Paul's letters include observations as to who God is and then apply that to his readers' lives. The other writers follow similar themes. Paul writes letters for the same reasons that the Prophets spoke to Israel and Judah. The recipients had either forgotten who their God was and/or had become hard-hearted, inconsiderate, or abusive of each other. We see then that the Christian's purpose in this life is not to get to Heaven, but rather to become the kinds of people God would have them become. Those people are characterized by thankful worship of God and the desire to become other-focused. If we can grasp that lesson of Theology 101, most if not all of the world's problems would vanish.