Skip to main content

The Big Picture

Love can be commanded, or stated as an expectation for continued relationship. In fact, the covenant with Israel established loving YHWH as a condition for continued blessing. The essence of love however, love the thing we call love, cannot be coerced or manipulated. It cannot be produced as a result of a command. Love, to be love, must be freely given. Ultimately, loving someone "because you have to" is nonsensical.

The ultimate desire or intent of God is what it always has been. That is, a community of voluntary, self-denying lovers, with God in their midst as the chief lover, the life giver, the sustainer.

YHWH has demonstrated a desire that the people he blesses (but more importantly and by extension the people he has created) should both acknowledge his graciousness toward them, and use that divine grace as a model for their own lives. The location of this community (earth or Heaven) is irrelevant because the expectation is the same - an expression of the economy of God. We aren't waiting for Heaven to pull this together - it's supposed to be reality now, just as it is in Heaven.

Reconciliation or redemption (salvation) is not primarily about sin or damnation. It is rather, about restoring the object of the redemption to a previous state. That is accomplished by the gracious, unforced act of God. Having been restored or redeemed, or saved, the expectation remains as it always has - gratitude toward the redeemer, and a life modeled on the redeemer's life. Forgiveness of sins is a consequence, not a prerequisite for salvation and no longer being damned.

The cosmic redeemer says, "I have set things right, come back to me." As has been demonstrated through Scripture, life with God then becomes an open question for those who have been redeemed or reconciled to God. Deuteronomy 30 and Jeremiah 18 provide two examples of God's urging people to remain faithful to him and live in the world of his blessing. The relationship they have with YHWH exists because he wants it to exist, but they have the opportunity to reject the relationship. Similarly, we can accept the reality of redemption and reconciliation, or we can reject it. If we reject it, we separate ourselves from God and his life. There are natural consequences to choosing to not live with God, but they remain the result of our choice, not an imposition by God.

Why would God want you to live with him, as a cosmic lover yourself? Well it seems there are two interconnected reasons:

That is the best sort of life for any sentient being, and
That is the purpose and design for which you have been made. To become such a lover is to become most fully your true self.

God has created people in his image. We have, as our core values, desires, wants, drives, and ultimate satisfaction, to live as God lives - in his character; reflections or icons of God himself. Sin, at its basic level, is not behavior, but character fault. Sin is a failure to live as love itself. In Scripture, we can be both saved from our sins (having God reconcile us to him) and saved from sin (returning to live as the image of God we are).

This is the offer of God - return to me and live the most satisfying life possible for you. Salvation isn't primarily about sin, but being restored to real, full life. That life is the ultimate life for which you are made and is lived with the same characteristics as the very life of God. It is simply, the most natural for you and is the purpose or telos of your creation.

The ball's in your court.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Freewheeling

Merton never disappoints. Here's an excerpt from "Love and Living," a collection of individual writings collected after his death in 1968: "Life consists in learning to live on one's own, spontaneous, freewheeling; to do this one must recognize what is one's own—be familiar and at home with oneself. This means basically learning who one is, and learning what one has to offer to the contemporary world, and then learning how to make that offering valid." This short passage is pregnant with meaning and spiritual insight (would we expect anything less?). Let's start with the last few words: "…make that offering valid." The offering of ourselves, of our lives is our calling. We offer ourselves to assist the re-creation of Creation; the reconciling of Man to God. The validity of our offering is measured in how closely we mirror the work of God; to what extent our motivations are based on knowing who we are rather than a slavish obedience to p...

Wineskins II

       In chapter 16 of Matthew, Peter ‘makes the great confession’ - Jesus he says is the Son of the Living God. At Covenant, when someone wants to become a member or to be baptized, we ask them who Jesus is and we expect this response. Peter is correct when he says this, but it is not clear that Peter (or the other disciples) understood the ramifications of his statement. Following Peter’s statement we find a series of incidents that make us wonder just how much Peters actually believed what he had said.      In the first instance, Jesus compares Peter to Satan. Jesus tells his disciples that he is going to Jerusalem and there he will die. Peter exclaims that he will not let that happen; Jesus will not be killed. Peter is expecting great things from Jesus as the Messiah, the Son of God on behalf of Israel and he cannot fit Jesus dying into his hope for a greater Israel under this Messiah. This cannot happen, he reasons. Jesus’s response is a harsh re...

Where’s the Church Building?

This past Saturday morning was spent at the Children's Home in Albuquerque. The summer clean up was in preparation for the two week nigh annual open house and barbeque at the home. This day there were about sixty people from a local congregation helping weed, move rock, and generally spruce up the entire campus. Great folks all, and I'm sure they were a bit sore come Sunday morning. One of the people who came to help was a boy of about seven years who helped clear some of the larger weeds from a fallow section of the campus. As we worked on removing Russian Thistles, he said that tomorrow is church. Having sixty of his fellow church goers on campus, in turn assisting a Christian organization accomplish tasks too large for the staff to do by themselves, I observed that he was in church right now. Understandably, his retort was "where's the church building?" As I was readying a short instruction on "church" and community, someone yelled that it was time fo...