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December 15, 2008
Faith : A Relational God
I wrote previously about my understanding of God being “A Transcendent God” and “A Triune God”. The resulting picture is of God being completely “other” – unlike anything we have experience with. Even God himself acknowledges that the way He sees things is alien to us:
"For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways," declares the Lord. "As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts. (Isa 55:8-10, NIV)
So what hope do we have of ever understanding Him?
There is hope, and it is hidden in one of the things that makes God so alien to us – the Trinity.
If you step back for a moment and consider what the Trinity means to God’s nature, there is one clear conclusion – God is fundamentally relational. Before God created anything, he embodied relationship: Father, Son, Spirit. Three minds in constant and harmonious relationship with each other within one being. Yes, God has power and knowledge and wisdom; but God IS relationship – it is fundamental to His nature, His identity.
I believe relationship is what has driven God’s actions from before creation. It is not possible to understand what God has done or what the Bible says about Him unless you look at it from the perspective of a being who’s most fundamental characteristic is relationship.
Consider the short version of God’s creation of humanity found in Genesis 1:
Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, . . ." So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. (Gen 1:26a, 27 NIV)
A couple of things I want to note here: First, every English translation I have ever seen correctly translates the Hebrew here as “Let US make/create” – using the plural pronoun. God refers to Himself in the plural because He is both plural and singular – He is Trinity. However, almost as important as that is the fact that this is the only place in Genesis 1 where the plural is used – elsewhere God is only quoted as saying “Let the light/water/land/etc.” do something. So why is it important to emphasis God’s relational nature here? Because He is talking about creating another relational being – humanity. We are made in the “image” of God, male and female. Does that mean God is male and female? I don’t think so. I think the message is that humanity was designed by an inherently relational God to be inherently relational as well – that we would be drawn into relationship with each other and with God (more on this in a moment).
The longer Genesis 2 version of the story reinforces the point by a little “street theatre” God employs. First a single human was created, and God allowed that one human to interact with all of the other creatures that God has created; but the one human discovers that there are no other creatures that they can have a relationship with. Once the human understands that, once they see their own need for relationship, God splits the one human into two – a male and a female – so they can have a relationship with each other.
But their relationship is not just with each other; but with God as well. While the events described in Genesis 3:8 are horrific (humanity’s first interactions with God after Sin), there is a hint there as to what things were like before the fall. It talk about God “walking in the garden in the cool of the day” looking for Adam and Eve. You get the sense that this was a common occurrence - that God would show up regularly and interact with humanity. God had a relationship with them.
How could this be? How could a transcendent God have a relationship with simple humans? Because God created us with the purpose of having a relationship with Him. Perhaps not an equal relationship (and Theologians still debate whether there is equality between the persons of the Trinity); but a relationship nonetheless. We may not be able to understand God fully (at least for now); but we were made to understand Him enough to have a relationship with Him.
You could almost look at God having created a new Trinity – God, Adam and Eve; and just as God had a perfect relationship within Himself, He was looking to establish a new perfect relationship with mankind.
Unfortunately, things ended up a bit more complex than that – there was sin, betrayal, broken relationships and a whole lot of mess for many generations; but for now, I want to jump ahead to the descriptions of how this all will end. I’ll started by noting that the ultimate expression of relationship between humans is marriage; where, as the Bible says “the two become one flesh”. Think of that phrase in the context of the Trinity where you have three people who are one being, “of one substance” as the Nicene Creed says. The marriage union is supposed to give us some small, flawed insight into what God has always experienced in its perfected form – multiple persons in perfect unity.
Then in the Christian scriptures, it talks about the Church as a whole as “the Bride of Christ” and how, after this world is transformed into the next one, there will be “the marriage feast of The Lamb (Jesus)”. One way to look at this is that we (the church) are to be made “one flesh” with God. God’s purpose in creating humanity is to create new persons to join Him in his perfect relationship; and while our journey to that goal has not been a direct one, it remains God’s ultimate plan for us.
So, God is by nature the embodiment of Relationship.
God Created humanity with the purpose and ability to join Him in that Relationship.
Our present detour on that process will be a subject of later posts.
Posted by Steven at December 15, 2008 05:00 AM
