nature of god

Running from Relationship

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by Linda Rex

Do you ever get the feeling you would like to leave everything and everyone behind and go hide in a forest somewhere where no one can find you? Sometimes we can get so sick of all the human drama in our lives, we would prefer to live the rest of our lives alone on some island out in the Pacific. Indeed, especially for us introverts, being left all alone with just our thoughts and our personal pursuits may sound a lot like heaven.

However well-intentioned our escape from humanity may be, we cannot escape the reality we were created for loving relationship with God and each other. Often the struggle is not with the relationship part of this, but in that we have to do relationship with other people who may be difficult and hard to understand. We may struggle with knowing how to communicate well, or with understanding what to do in certain social situations. These things don’t come naturally to everyone. Some of us really wrestle with the daily necessity to interact with other human beings.

On top of that, we often experience relational hurts, both as children and as adults. Those hurts we receive as children directly affect our ability to form and retain healthy attachments with others as adults. Extremely unhealthy relationships affect our response to healthy ones, whether we realize it or not. What we do to one another as human beings has consequences in our ability to live in loving relationship with one another the way God created us to.

I remember years ago talking with my pastor after services and telling him he scared me. He would really get into proving his point in his sermon and half scare me to death because he would raise his voice while doing it. In the environment of a tiny congregation, it felt as though he was yelling right at me.

I realized after a while the problem wasn’t with him raising his voice to emphasize a point—that can be a necessary part of preaching. The problem was with me—it created a flashback to the times in my marriage when I was yelled at and things were thrown when I didn’t measure up to a certain someone’s expectations. I could not cope with the raised voice in church because I related it to the intense emotional dumping I had experienced in the past in my significant relationship.

Now, I suppose if I had been raised in a family where emotional dumping was the natural course of human interaction, I might have known how to deal with it, or at least how to cope with it. But in my experience, family members kept things to themselves and did not have emotional outbursts. We were a family of introverted nerds, so communicating with others was always a challenge for all of us, with the possible exception of my mother.

In my family’s way of looking at life, we would have all been healthier and happier if we could each have had an acreage in the country where we didn’t have to interact with our neighbors, or worry about property lines or stray pets, or all the other annoying factors involved in human interactions. In fact, in many ways, in our effort to have any relationships with others at all, we avoided any real interaction with anyone.

What I’m trying to say is, we can live in relationship with others while at the same time not really having any real heart-to-heart, authentic, transparent interactions with them. We can have such effective walls in our hearts and minds we don’t allow anyone to really get close to us and find out the truth of who we really are inside. These protective walls are what we create in our effort to survive in a world where people hurt people, and they are magnified by an understanding and belief in a God who is critical and condemning rather than loving and forgiving.

Healing from these kinds of wounds takes time, and can require a wealth of healthy experiences with people who build us up rather than tear us down. Sometimes we need to spend time with a qualified counselor who can walk with us through our wounds and enable us to find the healing which is available for us in Jesus Christ. In other words, the best way to heal from relational wounds is within the context of healthy relationships—with our kind, loving, and forgiving God and with other kind, loving, and forgiving human beings.

I have found over the years God grows us up as his children by placing us in situations where we are forced to learn how to deal with difficult people. And he does this, not just for our own sake, but for the sake of the one who is being difficult. It is in our relationships with one another that we come to see ourselves more clearly.

God’s design in creating us in his image was for us to reflect the image of God to one another. When I’m interacting with another human being, it is an opportunity for each of us to experience in a real and personal way what it looks like and feels like to live in the relationship of love and grace which exists within the Father, Son, Spirit relations in the Godhead. When we fail to live in outgoing concern, compassion, understanding and grace with one another, we fail to reflect the nature of the God who created us in his image. The Light we are to reflect is diminished, and we walk in darkness instead of in the light.

There is no room for hatred of another human being in God’s economy. That irritating ungodly person who is so annoying is our brother or sister who was also made in God’s image to reflect God’s likeness. That person is also a beloved child of God for whom Christ lived, died, rose again and sent his Spirit. That person we wish would go away and just jump off a cliff in the process, is someone God loves just as much as he loves you and me.

Part of the problem with isolationist Christianity is the neglect of the reality we were intended to love one another by rubbing up against one another relationally in such a way Christ is formed more perfectly in each of us and we experience the reality of God’s infinite love and grace in the process. If the divine Word was willing to set aside the privileges of divinity to enter into our human darkness as Jesus Christ to take on our humanity and experience all the negative consequences of such an act, how can we deny this to our brother and sister human beings?

Indeed, we can forget in the midst of all the struggles we are going through today in our world the example forged for us by Jesus Christ. The path through relational healing is often through the crucifixion—it will be painful and difficult and will include dying in some way. Dealing with unpleasant and difficult, and even toxic people requires being willing to die to our preferences, and being willing to suffer uncomfortable conversations and situations. We may need to stand to and oppose those who are doing evil. We may need to tell someone the truth about their abuse or addiction and force them to get help with it. We may need to draw some boundary lines in our relationships and enforce them, lovingly and graciously.

But this is what it means to love, to truly love one another. Exposing the love and grace of God at the heart of all true relationship is a challenge. It is also a process—a journey we take in relationship with the God who created us, and who loves us and who has, in advance, forgiven us for all our failures and shortcomings. Instead of running from relationship, may we take a bold step today and begin looking for safe, caring, respectful people to begin the process of relational healing with. And may we turn to Christ for the grace and power to learn to love and be loved as God intended.

Thank you, Father, for creating us in such a way we are meant for relationship with you and one another. Grant us the grace to open ourselves up to new relationships and to heal our brokenness within the context of healthy relationships. Teach us how to love the unlovely, and to forgive the unforgiveable, while at the same time calling others deeper into loving relationship with ourselves and with you. We know all of this is possible only in through our Lord Jesus Christ in whose Name by whose Spirit we pray. Amen.

“On the other hand, I am writing a new commandment to you, which is true in Him and in you, because the darkness is passing away and the true Light is already shining. The one who says he is in the Light and yet hates his brother is in the darkness until now. The one who loves his brother abides in the Light and there is no cause for stumbling in him.” 1 John 2:8–10 NASB

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Back to the Who of Jesus

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cross

by Linda Rex

One of the hazards of being a pastor, I am learning, is receiving emails from concerned people who diligently attempt to correct what I believe and teach. For the most part, the emails I have received from these people directly contradict sound theology and attempt to persuade me to believe some esoteric prophecy about the end of the world coming at a particular time in the near future. And of course, none of these things have happened as predicted in these emails.

I received one of these emails recently in which the author boldly declared a new prediction of upcoming events in the light of what occurred with the ministry and death of Herbert Armstrong. I won’t go into what he believes or predicts because it is not worth your time or mine to review it, but I was struck by his statement that with Jesus’ resurrection and ascension, Jesus is no longer the Son of Man, but is today only the Son of God.

I’m sorry to hear he believes this. It is a useful belief for him, because in his predictions, saying the Son of Man is Jesus would contradict what he believes. It does away with what he believes is going to happen in the future. Apparently, it seems to me, it is inconvenient for him to believe the risen Jesus Christ is today, both the Son of God and the Son of Man.

Personally, I feel it is very important we understand who Jesus Christ is. Understanding who he is as the Son of God and the Son of Man establishes a basis for our belief in God and who he is, and what he is doing in the world today and will do in the future. If we do not grasp who Jesus is as the God/man who delivered us from sin and death, how can we understand ourselves and who we are? How can we understand who God is, and how much he loves us and desires to have a relationship with us?

Believe me, I cannot be critical of anyone who sees this whole thing differently from me. There was a time in my life when I had no clue of the significance of Jesus being both the Son of God and the Son of Man. I don’t think I even knew what this meant. I had no idea of the fundamental nature of this belief, much less how the early church came, by the Spirit’s direction, to establish the boundaries around this doctrine.

For this reason I am very grateful for my classes at Grace Communion Seminary on the history of the church since the time of Christ. So much I had been taught as I grew up in Worldwide Church of God was not true, or at the least, very misguided. The more I learned, the more I began to see how the Spirit worked to bring the church (and no, back then it was not the Roman Catholic Church or any other specific church. It was just the universal body of believers.) into a unified understanding of the nature of God and Jesus Christ, and the central core beliefs surrounding this truth.

In one of my textbooks, “What Christians Believe: A Biblical and Historical Summary” by Johnson and Webber, the authors quote a rule of faith which appeared at the same time in various parts of the Roman Empire toward the end of the second century. I’d like to quote it here:

“[We believe] in one Christ Jesus, the Son of God, who became incarnate for our salvation; and in the Holy Spirit, who proclaimed through the prophets the dispensations of God, and the advents, and the birth from a virgin, and the passion, and the resurrection from the dead, and the ascension into heaven in the flesh of the beloved Christ Jesus, our Lord, and His [future] manifestation from heaven in the glory of the Father.” (p128, 129)

Even back then, while there were still people who were closely related to those who had known, heard and seen Christ, there was the understanding of the humanity of Jesus continuing on after his death into a glorified humanity. It was important to the body of believers to stress this because of the Gnostic heresy which was pressing in upon them.

The authors go on to say, “The rule of faith clearly affirmed an enfleshed God. Jesus Christ, it proclaimed, is no apparition, but a true human being who lived in the flesh, died in the flesh, and rose in the flesh. In this affirmation the church made a statement that Jesus Christ was fully God and fully man.” (p. 129)

This, of course, was hammered out then in greater detail as the earlier church fathers met and began to clarify just what the incarnation of Jesus Christ involved, and what occurred before and after his crucifixion and resurrection. And fundamental to this discussion was, “Who is and was Jesus Christ?” The conclusions drawn from the Chalcedon council in 451 A.D. clarified the creed, and spoke of Jesus Christ as having two natures present in one person.

Of course, there has always been some debate as to the nature of Jesus’ person—how can someone be both God and man at the same time? What does this mean? Does he only have God’s will, or does he have a human will as well?

These are all great questions and worth consideration, but we need to consider some of these things pertain to the divine mystery of God’s transcendent being. Subsequent councils discussed and hashed out many things. There were disagreements and contradictions, and errors were made. At times, believers, especially those with more naturalistic or liberal interpretations, have drifted away from this fundamental belief about Who Jesus was.

In recent years, Karl Barth challenged these views and called the church back to an understanding of God being present in Jesus Christ in his human flesh, and in this way drawing all humanity up into true relationship in his resurrection and ascension. In spite of the Gnostic and other heresies which continue to raise their heads, there are believers today who hold to the understanding that Jesus was indeed God the Word present in human flesh, who both was and is God and man, and who has not ceased to be the Son of man now that he is risen from the dead.

I believe it was Athanasius who said, “The unassumed is the unhealed.” If Jesus did not and does not bear our humanity now, as he did then, then we as human beings have no hope. I agree with Johnson and Webber who write, “We stand in the historical tradition and affirm that our Savior was fully divine, for only God can save, and we affirm that our Savior is fully human, for only that which he became in the Incarnation is saved (salvation requires one who is fully man to represent us).” (p. 146)

I worship a God who is so holy and pure and just he is able to take on our humanity and transform it into something completely new. If he had and has the capacity to take on our humanity, to “be sin” on our behalf, he has the capacity to remove our sins and to make us new, uniting us with himself in his own being as Jesus Christ, the God/man. And as Jesus himself said, “What God has joined together, let not man separate.” (Matt. 19:6) Let’s not separate God from us as humanity, for he has joined himself to us forever in the person of his Son, Jesus Christ.

Thank you, Father, for your great love, and your faithfulness in fulfilling your covenant with humanity and with Israel. Thank you that in Christ and by the Spirit, you took on our humanity and transformed it, and you have brought us up in Christ’s glorified humanity to participate in your divine life and love forever. Open our hearts and minds to fully grasp and receive the truth of your loving gift to us of Jesus Christ, the Son of God and Son of Man, who lives forever in glory with you, and your precious Spirit, by whom you dwell in us. In your Name we pray, amen.

“You know that He appeared in order to take away sins; and in Him there is no sin.” 1 John 3:5 NASB

“For we do not have a high priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but One who has been tempted in all things as we are, yet without sin.” Hebrews 4:15 NASB

“He made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.” 2 Corinthians 5:21 NASB

“Beloved, now we are children of God, and it has not appeared as yet what we will be. We know that when He appears, we will be like Him, because we will see Him just as He is.” 1 John 3:2 NASB

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The Power of Presence

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by Linda Rex

I recall many years ago when I would sit down at the piano for a few quiet moments with the music, I was never able to finish more than a song or two before I was interrupted. A tiny hand would begin tapping on my knee and one of my children would begin to snuggle up next to me and try to crawl into my lap.

I would try to talk with them while I was playing and avoid the lapful, but soon I would feel both their hands reaching up to clasp my face and to turn it towards theirs. They wanted all of mommy, not just her voice. They wanted my full attention!

This reminds me of a song that I heard again recently—“From a Distance.” It is a beautiful song with lyrics that remind us of the importance of keeping our perspective when looking at ourselves and our lives here on earth. However, there is one phrase from the song that really bothers me: “God is watching us, from a distance.”

Perhaps the reason it bothers me so much is that I feel it contradicts the very nature of God in his relationship with humanity. From the beginning we see God walking in the garden with Adam and Eve, talking with them and building a relationship with them. The Scriptures show God interacting with human beings throughout their history here on earth in a real, personal way.

In Psalm 139, the psalmist reminds us that wherever we go, wherever we are, God is already there. He knows us before we are born and what we will be when we grow up. He knows when we rise and when we lay down, and knows what we are going to say before we say it. In fact, we cannot go anywhere, where God isn’t because God is everywhere. He is omnipresent. It is God’s nature, in the Spirit, to be everywhere in his creation all at the same time, as well as being fully present in his Triune relations of Father, Son and Spirit.

God did not intend to deal with humanity “from a distance.” In coming himself in the person of the Word and taking on human flesh in the person of Jesus, Christ became one of us. Being God “from a distance” was not something he wanted to do. Instead, he wanted to share in our humanity and he took on all that was and is ours, transforming it by his very presence and power into a new humanity in himself. The God who was wholly other than us and who made us became one of us, forever joining himself to us, becoming something he had not been before.

Why would this God do such a thing? His love for all of the humans he created was so great that he did not want to live in eternity without us. He did not want us to return to the nothingness out of which he created us, even though in Adam that was our choice. No, he was willing to do everything he could to prevent it. In this case it meant his very presence in our world, in our humanity. God gave us his full attention! He gave us his one, unique Son, so that we might have eternal life in him.

Recently we celebrated Resurrection Day, commonly called Easter. This day remembers the miracle of the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ from the grave after his crucifixion and death. The death of Christ was a horrific experience that so profoundly affected his disciples that they locked themselves away in fear of the Jews. Closed away, they had great difficulty believing the story of the women who came to tell them of the resurrection. Even when they saw the empty grave themselves, they still closeted themselves away in fear.

One of the first things Jesus did after his resurrection was to appear in the locked room where the disciples were gathered and to greet them with the customary greeting, “Shalom.” “Peace be with you,” he said to his fearful followers. He graced them with the reassurance of his presence and ensured that they would have his presence within them in the person and presence of the Holy Spirit, the “other Helper.” He had promised his disciples that he would never leave or forsake them but would always be present with them, and he kept that promise.

We can be comforted in the knowledge that the promise of God’s constant presence continues for each of us today. God continues to be for us, with us, and in us, as we believe and trust in him to work his saving grace in us and our lives. We may hear the music of God singing over us as we go about our work and play, and at any time we can reach out to him, and we will have his full attention. God is fully present in every way at all times, whether we realize it or not. What a precious and perfect gift from the Father of lights!

Holy God, thank you for your complete and perfect love for each and every one of us. Thank you for your gift of your personal presence in us and in our lives. Thank you for your precious Spirit who is always present in every possible way, and that we have Jesus as well. For you, God, as Father, Son and Spirit are ever omnipresent, always in us, with us and for us, and so you are more than worthy of our praise. Amen.

“So when it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and when the doors were shut where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in their midst and said to them, “Peace be with you.” And when He had said this, He showed them both His hands and His side. The disciples then rejoiced when they saw the Lord.” John 20:19-20

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