Who is God? And what is he like?

A primary answer to this question is that God exists in communion. That is, the bedrock reality of God is his triune existence: he is One who exists eternally as the Father, Son, and Spirit. The Father is distinctly and only the Father; the Son is distinctly and only the Son; and the Spirit is the distinct and only communicator between the Father and the Son. The Father exists only as he has the Son; and vice versa. And the relational bond of God—his communion—is his basis of being.

Let me restate the point with a slight variation: no other true or reliable expression of God, description of the divine, or foundation for life exists apart from the reality of an eternal, communing, triune One.

This certainty is what makes Christianity unique and uniquely true. It is the point where we, as followers of Christ, bring life and light into a world blinded by the Fall. Call it a confessional statement or a creedal commitment if you like, but the truth is more than a sterile or abstract assertion; more than a mere proposition. Instead it is the basis of life. We derive our relational bonding as humans from our creation by the relationally bonded Godhead. He exists in love; as love. We were birthed out of that love and are made to love both him and each other.

The reason for my regularly returning to the theme of God’s triune communion is that I find most Christians to be either blind to it—and therefore sub-Christian in their faith—or at least wary of it because it doesn’t seem to have much basis either in our day-to-day experience or in our training in the church.

By that I mean that we tend in our day-to-day life to think numerically, as in “one and three are separate numbers”. So God is either a “one” or a “three”. The tendency, then, is to think of God the Father as the “real” God—the true “One”—with the Son and the Spirit as his aids, extensions, or add-ons—and sometimes, his “form for the day”: what has been called monarchianism, modalism, or monarchial modalism. I find this informal solution to the numerical challenge of God’s being to be common as I listen to Christians talk about “God” as an exclusive and singular source of power and rule: as in, “I know that only God can help.”

The problem I want to raise here is that the church is all too slow to feel the weight of the problem of a monadic God. In my own experience of training in an evangelical Portland-area Bible college, and later in a Chicago-area divinity school, I was taught to affirm God as a “Trinity” but then we spent almost all our time chasing God’s attributes as if he was a monadic figure who consists in mostly non-relational qualities: in his “omni’s” and in his aseity, his impassibility, his immutability, and so on.

This version of God is, again, monadic in the sense that Aristotle could (and did) say almost exactly what we were saying about God, even though Aristotle was not a Trinitarian believer but a worshiper of a God who exists as the ultimate cause—the great Singularity who moves all else but who is, himself, immovable.

As I eventually came to teach what I had been taught at the same Portland-area Bible college of my undergraduate studies, I began to feel uncomfortable with that content. Why? Because in my continuing cycles of Bible reading I was often finding the God in the Scriptures to be very different in presence and personality to the God of my training. So I quit teaching in order to pursue a doctorate with that question in view: why this difference?

What I discovered in my study of Richard Sibbes and his predecessors—and, to my surprise, also in a cluster of 20^th century figures known as “Trinitarian theologians” who had gathered at King’s College London where I studied—was a more biblical and relational basis for God’s being.

First let me say that a Trinitarian theologian differs from a Christian who simply says “Of course I believe in the Trinity” (as something required of all orthodox Christians) and then goes on to restate views taken both directly and indirectly from either Aristotle or Plato or both. The latter—classical theists—are satisfied to finally mention the Trinity as a subordinate topic well down the line from God’s “more important” issues, i.e. his set of attributes. Yet their conception of God is never dynamically defined by the Trinity. The Trinitarians, on the other hand, take the Trinity to be the sole starting point for theology. They would say that nothing can be said about God that is true unless it begins with his relational Triunity.

Let me add a caveat that there are any number of Trinitarian theologians in print today whose works I can cheer at many points but who make some claims that I have yet to see supported in the Bible! So I would invite every follower of Christ to be like the Bereans (see Acts 17:11) in comparing theological claims made by teachers with what the Scriptures offer.

Back to my concern: what I find striking is that our current issues were also present early in church history. In reading the 4^th century Father, Gregory of Nyssa, for instance (one of the three Cappadocians noted for their role in the Nicene discussions of Christ’s deity) I found discussions about how God exists.

They [Gregory's non-Christian foes] charge us with preaching three Gods, and din into the ears of the multitude this slander, which they never rest from maintaining persuasively. [NPNF 5:326]

What did Gregory then offer as a non-tritheistic response? One answer was to defend God’s triune relationship in writing. His concern in On the Holy Trinity was to insist that the Spirit exists in “community with the Father in the Son” not only in his attributes but also in his place in the Godhead [NPNF 5:327]. Gregory held that it is only in a relational God that we have a transforming relationship from him, with him, and towards each other: “The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit alike give sanctification, and life, and light, and comfort, and all similar graces” [5:328].

Let me extend his point by arguing that without a God who exists eternally in community, as a communion rooted in distinctions, and as expressed through communication, we have no basis for love or full self-understanding. Then without love we become tragic and selfish points of dissolving insignificance. With love-from-God, on the other hand, we are bonded into the fabric of God’s communion.

To elaborate what I noted earlier: love exists between persons, not as a singular capacity or individual-based attribute. There must be at least a lover and a beloved for love to exist. God, then, “is love” and we are created because of that love and for that love to be extended to us and through us to each other—see 1 John 4 here.

We now need to return to the question we started with: what is God like? The answer is that he is a relational being whose communion of love constitutes his intrinsic community and explains all of his communication. Any considerations of God must start here if we hope to make headway. And in the Son we find the clearest expression and invitation to the opportunity to know God as he really exists. He is the Father’s beloved, so that in our union with him through our saving faith we become beloved as well.

The invitation stands before us, then, to know Christ and to make him known as one who loves us with an overflowing triune love. May we pursue it and enjoy it!

Allen Bloom wrote The Closing of the American Mind in the 1980’s as a criticism of the growing relativism in the modern academy and in society at large. That relativism has two axioms: first that everyone should be free to hold their own opinion without having others criticize them; and, second, that every viewpoint is equally legitimate.

In effect Bloom was criticizing a new absolute that no claims of truth can be absolute. Setting aside the confused circularity of the claim that relativism is an absolute value, Bloom’s main complaint was that relativism precludes learning. If every member in a classroom has the right to claim special privilege for their personal point of view then no one is ever ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ in what they believe. The teacher, then, is left to offer a forum for students to express their thoughts to each other: they explore possibilities and teachers facilitate the process.

Bloom’s complaint, viewed after some passing of time, was at the same time overstated and astute. That is, despite his concerns some departments of the academy are still anchored in non-relative certainties: the tangible fields of botany, engineering, meteorology, and aeronautics, to name a few. The students are either correct or incorrect in presenting their research—outcomes are measured by stable empirical evidence.

Other fields of learning, however, are indeed susceptible to encroaching relativism. Social studies, for instance—including religious studies and ethics—are often held to be free from any absolute standards. Professors in this milieu are expected to stir new and broader thinking so that individuals have enough colors in their personal palette of life to paint their own unique pictures. The metaphor of the visual arts is particularly apt in such cases because the freedom once reserved to artists is now a freedom granted to historians, theologians, psychologists, and to any others who reflect on the human condition.

As Bloom—a professor at the University of Chicago—shows us, not all academics embrace this relativism but it is a growing presence. I recall, for instance, attending a history conference for University of London doctoral students in the early 90’s. The liveliest event was an animated debate between an historian who viewed his work as a creative art in which he was free to promote his own values. His opponent, by contrast, held that while interpretive variations will always exist in historical studies it is incumbent on the ‘good’ historian to offer an accurate—’true’—portrayal of events. In an earlier era the former view would never have been welcomed in serious company.

So, too, the extension of relativism into many Christian communities is now a fact of life. It plays a role, for instance, in the emerging church movement where personal authenticity and sincerity are often valued more than a concern for biblical or creedal truth. A personal point of view, strongly held, is admired as long as the person who holds it knows not to promote it as an exclusive view that others must embrace. Each participant is seen to have a role in producing a unique community of worship that displays God best through unconstricted multiplicity. Freedom is an ultimate value.

Now let me shift gears a bit. Bloom’s complaint and the flavor of my review to this point can be aligned with the so-called neo-conservatism of today—aligned with those axiomatically committed to the past as superior to the claimed progress offered by modernity and post-modernity. My concern, however, is in a different place: that the great tensions of life need to be framed not as issues of old versus new—of absolutes versus relativism—but as a competition between a relational view of life and a devotion to individualism.

Let me press the point indirectly with a bit of personal narrative. For a time I was an elder at Imago Dei Community in Portland, Oregon—notable to some as the spiritual home of Don Miller who wrote Blue Like Jazz; and the pastor, Rick McKinley, also an author and a conversation partner with leaders of the emergent church movement. While his contact with the latter group may cause some to dismiss Rick I find him to be a breath of fresh air. He is happily devoted to the Bible even as the church he leads promotes the importance of authentic community and artistic, spiritual creativity.

In practice I found that the Imago Dei Community represents a healthy reformation—even if I’ve had qualms at points. Imago differs from more traditional churches: from the behavioral spirituality found in some settings, for instance; or the existentially active but content-modest worship found in other places. Instead Imago Dei expresses a robust relational commitment to Christ. Sundays at Imago offer a spiritual lens that magnifies the biblical Christ without hesitation or apology. The view is often striking, sometimes convicting, and, at the least, regularly encouraging.

Let me say more. At its heart each Imago service invites members to meet with God in every moment of the morning. Not to renew church traditions one more time, but to hear something fresh as offered out of God’s heart through the Word. This takes place as the speaker honors what the Bible offers, not to create experiences for the sake of experience, but to experience God’s love by the Spirit’s presence in the Word, worship, and in sharing at the Lord’s table. It is a time when the events of the week at the office and at home can be reviewed within the divine context of faith and community. Ultimate self-concern—the motor of individualism—loses meaning in the presence of real faith.

With such a relational worship as context, let me return to Bloom on the one hand, and the relativists on the other. The question at stake in their debate must be relocated to a relational context. Per Bloom’s concerns, are there some set of absolute truths that undergird every aspect of education which, by extension, can enlarge the personal capacities of the learner? Or is authentic personal creativity—the stuff of post-modernity—a better measure of education?

Our answer is that if there is no divine-relational context in either case then both are ultimately empty—unable to transcend the coming Day of the Lord by finding a place in eternal communion with a triune God and his saints in the new heavens and the new earth.

The biblical answer, in fact, is that any claims of scientific or social truth are only as absolute as the Creator makes them to be. In Jesus we find the one by whom and for whom all things are created. All patterns, rules, principles, realities, and principles of the creation are located in the one who tells us “I am . . . the Truth”. This is the ever-creative, ever-loving Son who delights the Father with his ongoing good works and offers them to the Father in a relational offering. We, in turn, exist in the fabric of God’s triune relationship and not the other way round! And here it is, I’m sure, that Christ delights to tease us with the mysteries of his unending creativity that stand behind the relativity of quantum physics and the older stability of Newtonian descriptions of the empirical universe.

In this context—of God’s triune eternal, mutual glory of shared love—we find true Creativity as a living companion. The creation is not our final ‘absolute’. Instead we find absolute love, accompanied by an appropriate jealous wrath, in meeting God through the Son and by the Spirit. We were made by him and for him; apart from him we are in hell.

Adam and Eve chose the latter course by turning away from their relationship with God—seeking to be “like God” as independent beings. They loved their own pretensions to morality and meaning. Yet to seek any form of life away from God is like a shadow seeking to exist as its own being. The autonomous shadow-person is only and always a nothing—a moving Lie—of darkness forever linked to, while despising, what is real.

In all of sin, then, there is a desire to create a unique and transcendent reality but this ambition turns out to be nothing more than a Nietzschean act of volition—and ultimately an empty existence. True exercises of human creation are all rooted in faith as worship. Anything else only exists as passing shadows. Even the insistence by Bloom and his kin that truth can be discovered through academic disagreements and debates leads us to a dead end if that learning is separate from worship. Any version of education that is not done as an act of worship only expresses the closing of the human heart—the pathway to nothingness.

Listen, then, to Jesus as he speaks from within his communion of the Godhead on our behalf: “Father, sanctify them in the truth: your word is truth.” It is only in God that we find our way to truth and meaning in a broken world. Let us go there, then, and worship him in every moment of life. There we are truly open-minded and freely creative.

It is my pleasure to introduce Gretchen George as a guest contributor.  A friend told me of Gretchen’s story almost two years ago.  Through that indirect contact Gretchen very graciously sent me a summary of her Bible reading experience.  Here is her story.  May it encourage you as much as it encouraged me.

Those of you who have followed the posts on this website for any length of time know that Ron regularly challenges readers to read the Bible “boldly and relationally.”  Over the years, Ron has directly and indirectly challenged many people to begin reading the Bible in this way.  I am one of those people.  So when Ron asked if I would share a bit about my experience in reading through the Bible cover to cover, I was thrilled for the opportunity!

About 10 years ago, I went through a painful divorce.  I suddenly found myself a single parent of two children, then 4 and 5 years old.  As I was searching through the Scriptures for hope and encouragement, I was profoundly impacted by the words of Deuteronomy 6:5-9:

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.  These commandments that I give you today are to be upon your hearts.  Impress them on your children.  Talk about them when you sit at home and when walk along the road, when you lie down and when you get up.  Tie them as symbols on your hands and bind them on your foreheads.  Write them on the door frames of your houses and on your gates.

Although I have been a Christian since I was a small child, read the Bible regularly, attended Bible studies, etc., I was confronted with the fact that I didn’t know the Bible nearly well enough to teach my children the way these verses describe.  I began to pray that the Lord would show me how I could begin to know the Scriptures—and Him—in that intimate kind of way.  About six months later, I got a call from a former coworker, telling me about the Bible read-through, and inviting me to join her and her daughter in reading through the Bible.  I knew instantly that this was the Lord’s answer to my prayers.  I was excited!  We have been reading through the Bible together twice a year ever since.

The impact that this kind of Bible reading has had on my life has been profound.  For one, I have a greater understanding of God’s personal love for me and my children, and His active involvement in our lives.   For example, early on in the healing process, I told a friend that I felt like I was standing in quicksand.  Shortly thereafter, I opened my Bible and saw these words from Psalm 40:2, “He lifted me out of the slimy pit, out of the mud and mire; He set my feet on a rock and gave me a firm place to stand.”

Another time I was telling God that I felt vulnerable and unprotected.  He responded with Psalm 91:4, “He will cover you with his feathers, and under his wings you will find refuge; his faithfulness will be your shield and rampart.” Time after time I have opened God’s Word and been enveloped in my Heavenly Father’s loving arms.  It’s a marvelous experience!

I have barely begun to touch the edge of who God is—-His glory, power, holiness, and wisdom—and it compels me to know Him more.  Take the time to read through the last few chapters of Job.  The God Job encounters—my God—is awesome!  Reading the Bible in large portions at a time gives you a picture of how this awesome God has worked through the generations and carried out His plan for salvation in a way that you don’t see when you pick out chapters and verses here and there.

Reading through the Bible has helped me to understand the sinfulness of my own heart.  It has deepened my love for Christ and given me such thankfulness for my salvation.  Because I became a Christian at such a young age, I don’t think I grasped the depth my sinfulness.   Luke 7:47 says. “But he who has been forgiven little loves little.“ It is our understanding of the deceitfulness and wickedness inside of us that causes us to love our Savior so much.  Our deep love for our Lord results in a desire to please Him and to want to avoid anything that doesn’t bring glory to Him.  And, when confronted with the temptation to sin, we can fight back with the Sword of the Spirit.  Even Jesus did that!

Each time Satan tempted Him in the desert, He responded with God’s Word!

Seeing the holiness of God and my own sinfulness in a fresh way played a vital role in my being able to forgive my former husband for the incredible grief he caused me and my children by his choices.  Early on following the divorce, I received what may be the best advice I have ever gotten in my life.  The person said to me, “Gretchen, whenever the pain hits, whenever the anger comes, get down on your knees and ask God to give you a heart of forgiveness, and keep doing it until the sting is gone.”

As I did that, the Lord was so faithful and gracious to meet me right where I was.  The pinnacle of those experiences occurred one day as I was crying out to God and telling Him that I wanted to forgive, but I didn’t know how.  I then opened my Bible and saw the words of Psalm 130:4, “If you, Lord, kept a record of sin, O Lord, who could stand? But with you there is forgiveness; therefore you are feared.” It suddenly dawned on me that the grief I felt over my former husband’s offenses was but a small taste of the grief that my Lord feels over my sin.  How could I not forgive?!   It was the turning point for me in healing.  Oh, the blessing of God’s Word!

The Bible tells us to seek wisdom, to cry out for it, to search for it as for a treasure.  The thread of God’s wisdom is woven throughout the pages of Scripture.  It’s there for the taking, and yet we so often ignore it.   Having more of the Bible in my heart has helped me to access this wisdom more readily in my daily life.

My children, now ages 14 and 15, are able to take in and accept my decisions and discipline more easily than many of their peers because they know that the Bible is the foundation of my parenting.  As a nurse on a cancer surgery unit and the leader of a single parents’ ministry, I regularly encounter people who are hurting, discouraged, and frightened.  To be able to share God’s wisdom and love as expressed in Scripture is such a blessing.  Ten years ago, I would have stood by and wished I could help but would have had little to offer.

Over these past 10 years of reading the Bible in this way, I have developed a love for it, and for the Lord, that I never had in all my years as a Christian previously.  I recall reading in I Chronicles and being bogged down with what seemed to be an endless list of unpronounceable names.  Then the Holy Spirit reminded me, “I know you by name, just as I know these people by name.”  Those lists of names no longer seemed tedious!

I so enjoy books of the Bible that I’m sure I hadn’t opened previously in years.  When was the last time you read Zephaniah?   Look at the message of love you’re missing in Zephaniah 3:17, “The Lord your God is with you, he is mighty to save.  He will take great delight in you, he will quiet you with his love, he will rejoice over you with singing.”  God is waiting to pour out His love to you on every page of the book He has written!

There is much more I could say, but this has already gotten longer than intended.   The bottom line, though, is this:  You have a God who loves you so much.  He desires a deep, intimate love relationship with you.  His love is etched into His Word.  I urge to open it up and begin reading as you never have before.

Let me return here to a guiding theme of the Spreading Goodness site: the role of the heart in directing all our conduct.  I revisit it in part because it invites ongoing reflection and also because for many Christians the primacy of the heart in the soul seems at the same time obvious and improbable: it bears a regular retelling.

I know the challenge involved in seeing the point because when each year as a seminary professor I introduced the place of the heart it was only slowly engaged even among the most able and devoted students.  That even though many of the same students regularly use the rubric of the heart to express their personal faith and could see the extensive biblical content that sets it out for us.  My strategy was to find a number of voices, both in the Bible and among Christian writers, to unpack the point.

Thomas Chalmers is one of these.  Chalmers, a 19^th century pastor in Scotland, knew that many in his parish were captured by a “love of the world.”  But how is it possible, he asked in a sermon, to stop loving the world?  Is it the function of the will?  He answered, no!  That view, he said, “is altogether incompetent and ineffectual.”  Instead, the way to overcome sin is “to exchange an old affection for a new one.”

His sermon title, “The Expulsive Power of a New Affection”, expressed his key to an authentic spirituality [Select Works of Thomas Chalmers, 4:271-390].  Sin lives in the heart and sin can only be cured by a new heart with transformed affections.

Chalmers held—along with Augustine, Martin Luther, John Calvin, Richard Sibbes, Jonathan Edwards and others—to an affective spirituality in which biblical faith is heart-based: a response to God’s love that changes our deepest orientation of life from being self-centered to Christ-centered.

At some level most Christians will say, “I’m in favor of God’s love and so is every other believer I know.  What’s new here?”

What is unique is not the affirmation of God’s love but the assertion that God’s love is the sole basis for launching faith.  Faith as a response to God’s love is not one option in coming to him; it is the only way anyone comes to him: faith works through love (Galatians 5:6).

Faith, in other words, is not birthed out of human will or by an intellectual assent to certain truth claims, but as a fruit of the Spirit’s love poured out into our hearts.  The will and the mind are only instruments of the heart, never its directors, so that once a love for God is present in us our thinking is reoriented and our choices are redirected.  It is in this affective primacy that spirituality takes a very different pathway to other spiritualities.

What are the alternatives?  A commonly held spirituality—the rational-volitional model—relies on one’s own ability to believe in God in an informed choice of the free will.  Another is the self-emptying call of mysticism—based on an ascent into God’s being through steps of purgation and illumination in the pursuit of an ineffable sense of union.  The former treats Christianity as the pursuit of proper knowledge; the latter pursues pure experience.  Let me set aside any reflections on the mystical option for now—it calls for a separate essay—and follow Chalmers’ focus here.

What Chalmers opposed as “incompetent and ineffectual” are the claims that faith is a rational-volitional event that can bring about self-transformation.  The basis for this approach is certainly rooted in our commonsense perception of thinking and choosing as a self-moved, uninfluenced, process.  A more sophisticated expression of this view is offered in ancient Greek (and later Roman) Stoicism.

In the Christian adaptation of Stoicism the human “act” of believing is the instrument God gives us for entering into faith—making it, ironically, a faith in the human act of believing.  Commonsense or not, the problems with this notion are obvious.  Some of the 17^th century affective Puritans, for instance, disparaged this as “will worship” because the human initiative is treated as the motivational basis for faith and, by extension, for salvation.  Our capacity to choose, then, is made to be even greater than God’s work in us.  Among the many counterclaims of the Bible we find Jesus and John responding: “apart from me you can do nothing” and “we love [God] because he first loved us” [John 15:5; 1 John 4:19].

The actual basis for faith is our newfound affection for Christ birthed by the Spirit’s illumination of the Son that “expels” our former love of self and autonomy.  It is God’s attractiveness that captures hearts and then transforms behaviors.  And before we are captured by that attractiveness we were entranced by other forms of worship.  Even the notion of a free will is nothing more than an axiomatic commitment to human autonomy.  We were made, in fact, to be lovers of God. To insist instead on Stoic autonomy is to embrace, unaware, a form of self-love.

What’s the difference in practice?  Stoic faith gives primacy to human responsibility; affective faith centers on God’s goodness and beauty that draws our gaze of faith to himself.  One is a human activity—despite claims of God’s assisting work—while the other is as one-sided as being born is to a baby.  Only the Spirit’s illumination, by opening the eyes of our hearts, brings about the change.  Yet the response is fully ours.  One creates a faith of unending duties; the other a faith expressing our new desires.

How common is this polarity?  And how much reluctance is there among Christians in facing it?

Think of what many worshippers experience.  On a given Sunday the church service begins with worship songs that express and invite a response to God’s gracious love.  Then the sermon shifts the worshippers’ emotional and cognitive gears into reverse by offering lessons on finding and obeying God’s will.  The first movement features desires; the second elevates duties.  One treats the desires as wholesome; the next treats desires as detractors that need to be overruled by the listener’s willpower.

You might have noticed this pattern but pardoned it by assuming the two movements are partners—two sides of a whole.  But think for a moment.  Are not the two movements actually opposed?  They travel in different directions with opposite destinations; and they use different motives and foci.  One draws all the attention to God’s greatness; the other to the soul’s inadequacies.  One treats God’s efforts as active and effective; the other treats human efforts as central.  One is positive and winsome; the other is negative and discouraging.

This oscillation of messages leaves many heartfelt worshippers discouraged, if not dizzy, as they find themselves spinning in spiritual pirouettes.  It also helps account for a widespread defection from traditional church ministries by those who hunger for a more coherent and compelling sense of God’s presence.

Chalmers’ sermon, then, offers us a captivating vision: God’s love is what changes us.  As our affection for God grows—as he is revealed in Christ through the Word and affirmed to our hearts by the Spirit—our old and enslaving affections begin to be expelled.  This is a spirituality that grows with a rational and volitional progression, yet it is the heart that moves both the mind and the will to change.  Apart from God we bring nothing to this transformation.  This is the good news of God’s love in Christ.  May we all respond accordingly.

Glory in the Bible is a many splendored term. It speaks of God’s tangible brilliance; of his timeless praise and honor; of our future hope as those who know and love the Son; and much, much more. Most of all glory explains our purpose in life.

Glory invited a pause for reflection today after I walked the beach of Chennai, India, this morning and enjoyed a striking sunrise that expressed God’s creative glory. Yet on the way back to our hotel compound I walked past a number of sacred cows and some statues of Hindu divinities, reminding me that glory—as a function of attribution in worship—is all too often misplaced and misapplied. The Bible offers lessons galore on the subject.

In one of these—see Exodus 32-34—a golden calf displaced God’s proper place of worship. Just days earlier Israel had seen God’s glory as a staggering sound and fire display on Mount Sinai: they were terrified by the experience! The event was part of their ordination as God’s human representatives among the nations. Soon after, as Moses returned to the mountain for more instructions on what this honor involved, his brother Aaron and the people planned a party and a golden calf (recalling their experience of the gods of Egypt) was fabricated in order to be God’s physical stand-in for the occasion. Yet this was exactly what God had forbidden a few days before in one of his ten commands! In his jealous fury he spoke to Moses about abandoning the people. He, after all, as a holy God, would consume his unholy people with his fiery glory whenever they sinned: God and his people were morally incompatible!

Moses then asked God to show him his glory. What was he asking for? He needed to find some quality, some space, in God’s character that would allow an unholy people to have continuing contact with God even when they sinned:

Moses said, “Please how me your glory.” And [Yahweh] said, “I will make all my goodness pass before you and will proclaim my before you my name ‘The LORD.’ And I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and I will show mercy on whom I will show mercy.” [33:18-19]

It is striking that glory and goodness were so fully affiliated by God in his answer to Moses. In this moment of mercy and grace he underscored for Moses that his glory is birthed out of his goodness; yet that goodness is not shaped by human expectations. He went on to reveal that in his goodness he was prepared to offer forgiveness for sin even though certain consequences for that sin would remain active in the heritage of the sinner.

The LORD passed before [Moses] and proclaimed, “The LORD, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and fourth generations.” [34:6-7]

It was on that basis—of God’s steadfast love as context for his forgiving sin—that Moses immediately asked God to forgive Israel and to continue to live among them in his soon-to-be-built tabernacle.

O Lord, please let the Lord go in in the midst of us, for it is a stiff-necked people, and pardon our iniquity and our sin and take us for your inheritance. [v.9]

Now let us turn to the New Testament where the importance of God’s goodness and glory is also central. One of the three apostle’s who were invited by Jesus to see him in his proper glory—on the mount where he was transfigured and showed himself off as divine with all the brilliant light of the Old Testament ’shekinah’—Peter would later speak of the moment: “For when [Jesus] received honor and glory from God the Father, and the voice was borne to him by the Majestic Glory, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased.” [2 Peter 1:17]

Another of the trio of apostles who saw Jesus in his mountaintop glory was John. His gospel makes a special point of tracing glory, beginning with, “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.” [1:14]

John’s exposition of glory is one of the major threads of his gospel. He elevates features that I can only introduce here but that invite further reflection by all of us.

First he sets out glory as something we receive from others: a transitive reality. That is, it always takes at least two—a subject and an object—for glory to be present: one to glorify and another to be glorified. In other words, John treats glory as a relational reality rather than as a non-relational capacity that one owns or accumulates.

In John 5, for instance, Jesus presented himself as equal to God by calling God his Father. Many religious leaders were startled by the claim and opposed him accordingly. Jesus offered support for his own standing but he also made it clear that the underlying obstacle to believing his claim was located in one of two competing loves: “For the Father loves the Son . . .” on the one hand (v.20), and later, “But I know that you do not have the love of God within you” (v.42), on the other. A living love for God opens the heart to believe.

And what was it that these critics of Jesus loved instead of God? Jesus exposed their hearts by comparing two competing sources of glory: “I do not receive glory from people” (v.41), Jesus said. And, by contrast, “How can you believe when you receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?” (v.44).

Later in his gospel John pressed Christ’s point home by exposing those who knew that the evidence for Christ’s status was compelling yet without responding to him.

[Many] of the authorities believed in him, but for fear of the Pharisees they did not confess it, so that they would not be put out of the synagogue, for they loved the glory that comes from man more than the glory that comes from God. [12:42-43]

This mutuality of glory has its eternal basis in the Godhead. Jesus, for instance, was the loving glorifier of his Father in John 12:23-28. This episode begins with a group of Greeks who want to see Jesus but he deferred the meeting until after the time that he is glorified by his death on the cross. At the cross, he promised, he would “draw all men to myself” (12:32)—including Greeks.

How so? By dying in a way that would lead to multiplying returns. He used the analogy of a seed being planted in order to bear many more kernels than what it gave up of itself. This selflessness of multiplication was his Father’s plan for salvation. The Son was prepared to die in order to achieve it. Listen to how Jesus processed this terrible yet wonderful strategy with his disciples.

“Now is my soul troubled. And what shall I say? ‘Father, save me from this hour’? But for this purpose I have come to this hour. Father, glorify you name.” Then a voice came from heaven: “I have glorified it, and I will glorify it again.” [12:27-28]

We must not miss the point here that the Father was also experiencing the pain of the crucifixion by giving up his beloved Son to ignominious death. It was this selflessness that is his glory—the display of his steadfast love as earlier expressed in John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.”

In his final priestly prayer of John 17 Jesus reiterated that God’s love accounts for this plan. Here it is that God’s addresses with eternal finality (”once and for all”) the problem raised in Exodus: how can a holy God dwell among an unholy people?

He solves it by giving the unholiness of his people to his Son—for which the Son then must die—while giving his collective sons and daughters—the Church—his Son’s holiness. In this vicarious exchange (applied by our participation in Christ’s life through faith) God’s love finally wins out over sin. This whole arrangement is to the glory of God: purposed by the Father and accomplished by the Son!

Listen, then, to the Son’s summary prayer.

“Father, the hour has come: glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you, since you have given him authority over all flesh, to give eternal life to all whom you have given him. And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent. I glorified you on earth having accomplished the work that you gave me to do. And now, Father, glorify me in your own presence with the glory I had with you before the world existed.” [vs.1-5]

Glory, we thus discover, is more than the honor that goes with selflessness; it is also the environment of God’s communion: his mutual, selfless, shared devotion of Father-to-Son and of Son-to-Father—all of which is sustained by the communicating work of the Spirit (see 1 Corinthians 2).

So it is that Jesus is willing to die in order that we—his beloved bride—can join him in heaven—all of which is birthed in love: “Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world” (v.24).

Glory, then, explains our purpose in life: to enjoy God’s mutual glory as we are drawn into the love that forms and sustains that glory. Our moral incompatibility ends as we, with the Father, adore the Son (and the Father who gave him to us and for us) above all else.

This is what we were made for!

This entry was completed on January 1, 2010.

This morning I got word that my uncle has advanced lung cancer. It was tough news to receive on the morning of New Year’s day. Very tough. My mother’s youngest brother.

My connections with Uncle Earl over the years have been too thin, yet I’ve always admired him and cared for him. He’s a gifted, sensitive, and self-effacing man whose wry humor always keeps things in balance. What I heard this morning is that the disease has advanced so far that no chemotherapy or aggressive radiation treatments will be used. I’m not beyond having hope, but so far we haven’t heard anything from the medical community that offers human hope.

The news gives a certain perspective to life. It reminds me once again that life is “a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes” (James 4:14). When I was much younger and doing my first Bible read-through this verse in James caught my attention. I’ve now had nearly 45 years of reminders since noticing it: of having national and international figures die as part of the daily news; of losing relatives, friends, and acquaintances. I still miss my father who has been gone for over 20 years. Life is brief and uncertain: a mist.

Even in reflecting on the pain that goes with such losses this entry is not meant to be a lament. There are different ways to view death. Two weeks ago I attended the funeral of a man who touched my life years before at a key moment. Willard Aldrich was then president of the college where I held a short-term staff position. He invited me to shape my anticipated seminary studies with a view to become a college educator. I took his advice. When he died he was 100 years old and his memorial service was a celebration of how his life had touched many, many others.

When my uncle passes from this life—whether sooner or later—he, too, will have touched many lives. Sometimes in very small ways—my enjoyment today of listening to the banjo was birthed in Earl’s lively plucking and strumming—and his two daughters, my lovely cousins Blythe and Lynne, have become significant contributors to two major Seattle-area companies, Starbucks and Boeing. Gifts beget gifts.

So it is that today a double reflection has emerged: of having a new year ahead of us, with all its potential opportunities; and the reminder from Willard, and the news about Earl, that life is only a mist. One reflection is about the near term of today, tomorrow, and this coming year. The other is about the longer term reality of life and death.

Let me start with the longer term future. One of my deepest certainties of faith is that death is not an end but a beginning. As I shared in my last entry, “On Christmas Day”, one of the great motif’s of the Bible is that God the Father determined in the beginning to create a bride for his Son. And all of us who “kiss the Son”—I’m thinking here of Psalm 2—will have the joy of being included in the event foreshadowed in Psalm 45: of the Son being given his bride. This picture of the Son’s marriage with his collective bride—all of us who know and love him—culminates at the end of the book of Revelation with the wedding feast of the Lamb.

The point of this “big” view—extending beyond our present existence—is that this life only raises a curtain on something much, much greater than whatever it is that this life offers. And the Bible regularly reminds readers that this world, despite its moments of joy and promise, has been broken by our deeply rooted alienation from the Creator. It gives us enough promise to make us long for a better place and time, but it never gets us there. Heaven is not a current address for any of us.

And yet we are called citizens of heaven as soon as we embrace the Son who grants us his Father’s eternal life. Our response to him loosens our embrace of other ambitions—all the promises of the pseudo-heavens this world offers us. As the old folk chorus puts it, “This world in not my home, I’m just a passing through . . .” Life is a mist.

The second reflection is shaped by this bigger picture. Today is the first day of the new year. No one knows exactly how the year will unfold but most of us are optimistic about it: we hope to enjoy family and friendships, to make plans for work, studies, travels, and so on. By tradition a new year offers new opportunities: something of a blank slate to begin writing anew. We need that, don’t we! It’s the mercy of a fresh start.

What we must not miss, though, is that in most cases the bigger picture will show a single trajectory of travel from year to year. Our basic ambitions don’t change just because we take down an old annual calendar and put up a new one. Instead our lives are ruled by our greatest desires—or by our “will” as it’s often labeled in our Western Stoicism. Yet it’s actually our hearts that define our directions in life. So even having the clean slate of a new year offers no real mercy unless our hearts are well-directed for the new year. And only a new heart offers promise of a better direction in the new year.

So let me return now to the letter written by James, and the “mist” discussion I noted above. That text comes soon after an earlier discussion of two types of wisdom: one from “above” and a wisdom that is “not” from above! Listen, then, to James:

Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go into such and such a town and spend a year there and trade and make a profit”—yet you do not know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes. Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wills, we will live and do this or that.” (James 4:13-15)

That little addition, “if the Lord wills”, is all that differs between making plans one way or in another way. One is an exercise of human independence from God; the other is an exercise of engaging God’s providence: the certainty that he loves us and is ready to work in all our circumstances for his ultimate and very good purposes. Everything in this life is meant to get us ready for that coming wedding feast.

Embracing the wisdom that comes from above or, on the other hand, a wisdom from the world, will define each of our new years. God wants us to look ahead and when we do, to be among those who see Christ waiting for us.

So, even with whatever jolting news we may find awaiting us in this year, let me wish all of you a “happy New Year” in the embrace of the Son! Only there will we find the peace God wants us to enjoy.

And—with all of what I’ve just written as context—please, pray with me for my Uncle Earl and his family. I love them and still hope for his recovery.

The story of Christmas is too big for us to wrap our hearts around. Yet as we reach the day we celebrate as the birthday of Jesus we should at least press our noses against the window of divine revelation and look once again at the greatest of all gifts.

Where does the story begin? In eternity past. There it was that the Father, who has always loved the Son, determined to find him a bride. And where would this bride be found? Within the creation, a newly conceived realm that was made to host both the bride and the groom. So it was that God made this, our world, to be populated with Man—the male-and-female Man—who are created in God’s own triune image as two who, by one Spirit, are united as truly one.

That a God who is pure Spirit and who existed in the unending past apart from any material composition would both create a tangible world and then enter into that world himself for our sake is a metaphysical event that dazzles us if we pause to think about it.

But I am getting ahead of the story. Before God the Son entered the world he first spoke the world into being out of nothing. In that step he created us to be both physical and immaterial: both flesh and spirit. As tangible beings in the new creation we could be both “not yet” beings, with no prior existence before our birthing; and also those who can now inhabit eternity by the life of God’s own Spirit—God’s Life forming our lives and his Spirit giving life to our spirits. In material terms we are incommensurate to God; in relational terms we have a commensurability initiated with the God who forms relations.

This was the means by which the distance between Creator and created could be bridged. In the physical realm we are finite—localized in space and time with bodies susceptible to death. Yet in the spiritual realm we are immaterial centers of relationality. I am, for instance, the son of Ernie and Hazel; the brother of Bill, Dave, and Susan; a friend of many other people, including Bill, Mark, Jeff, Rick, Steve, & Matt; and a child of God in Christ Jesus as well as a member in Christ’s Body, the church. My point is that the physical side of us—of what I weigh, where I’m located as I write this piece, and how I’m dressed—represents the lesser reality (Paul’s “jars of clay” in 2 Corinthians 4) and the relational reality is the greater aspect of my being.

And, as I noted a moment ago, our physical being is our mortal side. But why, we ask, did God come up with such an arrangement? Why not make us into purely spiritual-and-relational beings and ignore the option of a material universe?

No certain answers are available to such questions but whatever we might think ourselves we find that God refuses to disparage the material world.  In fact, in his work of creation he labeled that work as “good”, “good”, and “very good”. And, even more, his Son has now entered into this realm forevermore. Yet we’re amazed at this, which is why I used the imagery of pressing our noses against the glass of revelation. We get some insights but there are plenty of mysteries that remain!

That’s not to say we can’t make some guesses—some of which are at least partially informed. One is that God allowed for us to exist as people who can be both dead and alive in the same moment: dead spiritually but alive physically. That potential for a paradoxical double status was the point God made to Adam in Genesis when he warned “you shall surely die” if they ate of the forbidden fruit; and what Jesus told Nicodemus in John 3 when he said “you must be born again”; and what Paul said in Ephesians 2 about our being “dead in our trespasses and sins”.

Our bodies, after all, are physical nests for our souls—whether spiritually dead or living souls—and it is in our status of spiritual death that God resurrects us by the coming of the Spirit of Life. By having, after Adam’s fall, a physical body cursed with a progression of decay that leads to physical death we discover God’s “egg timer” so that our pending mortality forces us to weigh our eternal status: one of either death or life—”it is appointed for a man to die once, and after that comes judgment” (Hebrews 9:27).

Let us return to the love story at this point. My best guess is that God arranged all this—the duality of flesh and spirit—in order for a true love to form between the Son and his Bride. God knows that love can never be imposed on us: it is a function of desire and delight—the devotion of a heart. God, then, created humanity to respond to his Son in love. But the love must be a free response, and such a free response can be tested by other competing loves.

So it was that God created Adam and Eve as lovers who were free to love or not to love him. God, we can be sure, knew with absolute certainty that Adam’s free heart would taste other loves. Not the least of these was self love. It was this new devotion that displaced God’s primacy in all our hearts, a devotion that has since unfolded into more focused forms of love: for power, glory, money, sensuality and more.

This was, for God’s tender heart, a betrayal beyond measure. He was grieved as Adam coveted the Father’s status and rejected his word. At that moment the Spirit left Adam to his own devices. Adam, no longer united to God’s life, was spiritually dead although still alive: the material world continued to sustain Adam physically, as one made from the earth.

God, however, also placed the earth—and Adam’s body with that—under the curse of a slowly progressing material decay. It was in this duality that God set up both space and time in which to woo and recapture the heart of the Son’s intended bride. This pursuit is the guiding drama that unfolds in the Bible; and it still shapes world events today.

Now let us return to the importance of Christmas. In Adam all of humanity had been consumed by death. Yet the Father and the Son, with the Spirit, determined to send the Son to share in the material, physical world of Adam, as a “new” man. That is, he was born as a new human yet as a child who did not share in Adam’s death—the Spirit had departed from Adam and the Spirit was now the seed of the new Adam, Christ.

But to woo, capture, and cleanse his immoral and disaffected Bride God conceived of an incredible rescue: to have his Son enter into death on the basis of the Bride’s sins, and to give the Bride his own righteousness. Why enter into death? In order to break its power. Adam, after all, had given himself over to Satan’s scheme of independence. This realm needed to be conquered by one who could enter into death but never be ruled by it.

And the pathway to that outcome was the birth of Jesus in a manger in Bethlehem. He came to die for us, but first he needed to be born with us—to become human. This was the plan of love offered by the Father, a love for both the Son and for us. As the Father sent his Son into the lair of death he knew that it was only this that could break its power for all those who look to the Son in response to that love—a response called faith.  And all who respond in faith are, collectively, his Bride.

So it is that as we celebrate the coming of Jesus into the world and press our noses against the window of divine revelation we discover that Jesus has become the greatest of all gifts by coming to “our side” of the window—by becoming a man in order that we can join him in eternity.

Have a wonderful Christmas—and be sure to embrace the Son!

I welcome Mark Nicklas back as a guest contributor for this Christmas entry. His reflection on God’s gift to us in Christ plays on some of the paradoxical realities of God’s gracious entry into our realm. I hope, on Christmas day itself, to offer my own voice of celebration and reflection in a separate entry that echoes many of Mark’s themes. In the meantime, read, reflect, and rejoice!

The story of Christmas brings us to a baby in a manger: Jesus Christ, born of a virgin in the town of Bethlehem.  It is a historical fact that changed the World forever—the Incarnation of our God. 

Brother Linus Van Pelt appealed to the beauty of the nativity when he uttered those unforgettable words, “Sure, Charlie Brown, I can tell you what Christmas is all about..”                 

Mary shared the birth story with Dr. Luke and the Apostle Matthew in order provide us with an important detail of the advent of Jesus Christ—the miraculous events that surrounded His birth.  It is a glorious story where God bestowed royalty on common people, in common circumstance, in common place. And in so doing, he consecrated his Creation. 

Prior to the coming of Christ, God was approached tentatively and circumspectly in the Holy of Holies and through the Law.  The veil separating God from man was a visible reminder of the great gulf that existed between the God of Holiness and fallen creation.  The veil was as much a protection from the power of the darkness-shattering holiness of God—if exposed to its pure “volume,” our spiritual “Bose speakers” would have been blown from the wattage of God’s presence.  Moses had to wear a veil to speak to people after being in God’s presence, the glow was so powerful.   And yet, in the story of Jesus, God came to be with us: “and the word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14).

This Christmas season I look with awe at how it unfolded.   It helps to have an understanding of the first century anticipation of a Redeemer King in Israel.  The Book of Hebrews looks back at the advent of the Lord in this way: 

Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. He is the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature, and he upholds the universe by the word of his power.  (Hebrews 1:1-2)

The writer of Hebrews draws attention to the expectation—long ago in many times and in many ways—God had spoken of the coming Redeemer King through the prophets.  As we read God’s story from Genesis to Revelation we see again and again the expectations that were set. 

Even at the fall in the Garden, God told Satan that the seed of a woman would crush His head.  He promised to Abraham one of his own descendants would bless the whole world.  Moses promised the children of Israel that One would be raised up from among their own brothers to whom they should listen.  God promised to David that a Son of his own body who would reign forever.  Isaiah said a Son would be given, called Wonderful, Counselor, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.  His light would shine out of Galilee.  A righteous Branch of David would rise up and rescue His people.  One was coming who Isaiah said would swallow up death forever. There would be a Light to all the nations, a Bringer of a New Covenant, who would write His law on our hearts.  Daniel told of One like the Son of Man, to whom is given dominion and glory and a kingdom who all peoples, nations and tongues would worship. 

And all of this all pointed to Jesus Christ, born of the virgin Mary in Bethlehem, to God with us.

First century Israel was alive with expectation that God would begin the emancipation of Israel from Roman rule, but they could not possibly have fathomed how God’s plan would work.  The long awaited Messiah would arrive without trumpets, and would gain victory by His own death.  The kings of our day, the presidents and prime ministers and premiers, always arrive with pomp and circumstance.  Their arrivals are carefully planned and orchestrated and accompanied by public handshakes and banquets.  They needn’t open any doors—doors are always opened for them. 

By comparison this King’s arrival was a mundane event.  He was born in obscurity and to humble circumstance.  Perhaps God considers mundane things to be of royal proportion.  Maybe that is why it is hard for some people to see God in the world in which we live—the miraculous is so often clothed in the ordinary.

Mary seemed ordinary.  Still, she was uniquely qualified to be the God-bearer.  She was a direct descendant of David.  She was also a direct descendant of Aaron (through her mother).  But even given her unique bloodline, her greatest qualification was that God chose her, to which she responded in faith, “Let it be done to me according to Your word.”   And after that confession of trust, at the moment of conception, the eternal Word left His glory with the Father and the Spirit and became flesh, to be the God-man forever and ever.  It was the greatest moment in Heaven and Earth since Creation!

Frankly, when I was set in motion it was initiated in the flesh.  Two humans, my mom and dad, came together and the miracle of life was set in motion.  There is no mystery in that.  But when Jesus Christ’s humanity was set in motion, God was the initiator.  The Incarnation shows that salvation can never come through human effort; it must be by the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit.   And on Christmas day, finally, the King arrived.   

But when the fullness of time had come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law, to redeem those who were under the law, so that we might receive adoption as sons.  (Gal 4:4-5)

This very thought leaves me in awe.  2000 years ago, in a manger in Bethlehem, lay the One promised long ago and in many ways… here was the King.  I’ve held 5 of our own babies right after they were born.  I have looked with marvel at these little creations and was in awe of the life God had given to my wife and me.  No doubt, some of those same emotions were encountered at the manger by Joseph and Mary… but this Child is the One who spoke and the universe leapt unto existence, the One by whom all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him.  

This Child is before all things and in Him all things hold together and in Him all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell. 

This Child is the image of the invisible God who humbled Himself in the form of a servant, the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of his nature. 

This Child upholds the universe by the word of his power.  He would wage a war with Satan and crush Satan’s head  and swallow up death in victory. 

This is the Child in whom all the world would be blessed.

This Child is the light of the nations.

This Child would reconcile to himself all things making peace by the blood of the cross. 

This Child is Jesus Christ, born of the virgin Mary, Immanuel, God with us. 

And in coming to Earth God made the irrevocable declaration that He is all in!  That’s what love does.  Love commits.  Jesus is a part of His creation, and He’s all in.  Love came down in the flesh.  And His flesh became the new veil.  The body of Jesus contained all the fullness of God and in His total connection with His Creation, Jesus is fully God and fully man. 

The earliest witnesses of the church, at peace with His Divinity, affirmed his humanity.  Some people think that the story of the virgin birth developed out of a need to claim that Jesus was the Son of God.  But that was never in doubt to the church—people already knew Him to be God—they understood that in the way they had come to love and worship Him, something that is evident in the very earliest writings of the church. 

Jesus Himself did not turn to His own virgin birth as a witness to His divinity when the Pharisees sought proof.  It is actually the other way around, against the cries of those who said Jesus was not fully human that this part of the story of Jesus is so important for us.  Ignatius of Antioch in the 2^nd century declared in another creed of the early Christian church that Jesus was “truly born, truly lived, truly died.”  Jesus is the God-Man—a miracle of conception.  The Word became flesh—even as an embryo He was fully God and fully man.  The King had arrived and was here to inaugurate His kingdom. 

Getting back to
Brother Linus, it is worth remembering the story he told so beautifully,

“And there were in the same country shepherds abiding in the field, keeping watch over their flock by night. And lo, the angel of the Lord came upon them, and the glory of the Lord shone round about them: and they were sore afraid. And the angel said unto them, ‘Fear not: for behold, I bring unto you good tidings of great joy, which shall be to all people. For unto you is born this day in the City of David a Savior, which is Christ the Lord. And this shall be a sign unto you; Ye shall find the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes, lying in a manger.’ And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God, and saying, ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.‘” (Luke 2:8-14)

Taking up his blanket and walking off the stage to Charlie Brown he said, “That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.”

The Nativity remains an irenic, beautiful picture of the way the King entered His Creation.  Of course, that manger rested under the shadow of the cross.  This same Jesus, in who the fullness of God dwelt, would conquer sin and swallow up death forever.  He would make a way so that the Holy Spirit would come and inhabit the hearts of every believer who calls upon His name.  The Incarnation of Jesus Christ led to yet another Incarnation—the Holy Spirit in the midst of His Church.  The King has established His kingdom, and His kingdom will have no end. 

And He invites us to come.

J. B. Phillips, a British minister in the last century, wrote a book, Your God Is Too Small. I read it years ago and recall being impressed by it, though I don’t remember the particulars in it today. Rather it was the title that caught me. Whatever our view of God, he is vastly too small!

Indeed, as I travel around the Christian world I find miniscule versions of God being promoted. What kinds of tiny Christian Gods, you might ask? Let me suggest a few.

There is the fire insurance God. His greatest concern is to find as many policy holders as possible. His premiums vary, depending on the Christian community that sells his policies, but the payments are usually behavioral: mainly church attendance, a monthly tithe, and a midweek Christian book discussion or prayer group are the cash he requires. This is a pragmatic God, with pragmatic followers. For policy holders the real ambition is to avoid the fires of hell—a negative goal—rather than to know and enjoy God above all else. What God gets out of this arrangement isn’t clear but he seems to be a bit needy, looking for as large a following as possible. Lower premiums are always possible if an additional follower or two can be coaxed into the community that way.

Another much rarer version of God is the brainiac deity. His greatest capacity is intelligence so that his ideas and doctrines are great, complex puzzles. He invites chess champions, debaters, and logicians to compose and compare doctrinal statements about him. He is altogether different to the fire insurance version of God in that he is more interested in compelling ideas than in numbers of followers. His audiences are small but impressive, even if most of what they do is talk and write. Access to this God comes through Christian versions of the Mensa Society—churches, parachurch groups, and theological centers that elevate intellect over practice; a knowledge about God over a love for God and people.

Still another small version of God is the self-absorbed deity. He can think only of himself and wants everyone else to think only of him. The biggest fear for this God is what philosophers call “contingency”—that he is not fully in charge of everything but in some manner has a real involvement with his creation. If, for instance, he actually loves his creatures in a way that causes him to respond to them, he has somehow lost his mojo and is less than truly God. Instead he wants glory at any cost. Access to this God is virtually impossible because we are products of his will and live downstream from his first decrees and plans—a bit like dominoes that are now being tipped over by other dominoes, all started before the creation. He looks on with some sort of pleasure because everything is under his glorious control and control is his greatest ambition.

One additional, and final, version of a miniscule God is what we might call a stubborn Genie. He has a bag of tricks and powers to tease us—offering promises to heal us, to make us wealthy, to make us wise, to make us more powerful—but we first have to learn how to rub him right. What kind of rub is needed? At a minimum he looks for effort from his followers, real effort! Disciplines, devotions, tasks, duties, and best-efforts are needed. Accountability is the name of his game: the harder we work, the more likely it is that we can finally coax a benefit or two out of him. Some seem to get more out him than others, so he is not a very fair God, but ours is not to question him but to keep rubbing the jar of his being and to hope for the best.

Now let me make a confession: I have these false versions of God myself, and even other distortions. Faith for me tends to be an oscillation between bad habit versions of God and the true God I see portrayed in the Bible! So this is not an exercise of finger-pointing but of invitation. The invitation is for us all to open our hearts to let God be truly God to us—in the terms that he reveals to us in his Word. Let us pray to have the eyes of our hearts opened by the Spirit so that the character of the triune God is magnified—made much larger—in our spiritual vision.

This need was reawakened in me as I was reading Matthew and Mark this past week. What jumped off the pages is that Jesus was regularly stretching the boundaries about himself—of who he is as the Son of God—again and again by all that he said and did. The apostles were clueless again and again as Jesus worked to enlarge their vision of him and his Father. He startled them by healing the lame, the blind, the deaf, the speech-deprived, and the demonized. He showed his power over the weather, over the sea, over demons, and over death. He forgave sins and he confronted sinners. Yet again and again his disciples misjudged his purposes and capacities—always seeing him as someone less than he really was . . . and is.

So how do we come to see God in his real size? The answer is, by keeping the eyes of our hearts open!

One way to do this is to thank God in every experience of life for being our God. Thank him no matter what happens to us! The point is this: he really does run the universe! Even Satan is on his leash so that even evil is God’s resource for accomplishing good in the lives of those who love him (see Genesis 50:19-29; Job 1; & Romans 8:28).

Another way is to seek him above every other ambition in life. God is the source of all that is, and there is no other proper priority in “all that is” than to know him. That is, we must never descend into the worship of the creation, but are to find our joy in the Creator. Given that he invites us to love him with all that we are and have, then that ambition is appropriate to the way God made us. Even at a human level it is only when we love someone that we begin to see their beauty and delightful qualities with open eyes. The same is true of knowing and loving God: he gets bigger and better by the moment once we start to gaze in his direction!

A final suggestion for having our vision of God stretched is to listen carefully while we gaze at him. My reading in this past week took me back to the parable of the soils. What was sown, Jesus told his disciples, was “the word” and that word had a variety of responses. Sometimes it was taken away by the enemy. Sometimes it failed to take root. Sometimes it was choked out. And sometimes it bore fruit. The reality of our present age is that God’s word is readily available to us. To get a proper view of God we need to read, to respond, and to worship.

So, given that God is infinite and we are finite, Phillips’ book title will always be true for us: our God is too small! But some of us will acknowledge that as a problem we want to address. So even if many around us are busy with the world and are having that word choked out or lost, let’s go forward with an ever-greater and more compelling God. I know he’ll be pleased and will show us more of himself than ever before!

God’s grace is amazing—he offers it freely to the poor, the broken, the sinful. It is the basis for salvation as Paul wrote in Ephesians 2:8, “For by grace you have been saved through faith.”

The only problem we have with grace is knowing what it is. Is grace, for instance, the quality of goodness offered to us by God—as well as by any departed saints who have a surplus—as something of a commodity that we engage through sacraments? Or is it an energy source—as in an “enabling grace” or “infused grace”—that helps us to start being more godly just as a battery helps to start a car? Or is grace relational—a summative expression for God’s care towards us? Or is it something else?

This is not an arcane question. Differing answers produce very different forms of faith, some of which Christ himself would never believe in. And fights among Christians over the meaning of grace have been never-ending. Yet you may be thinking, “Huh? When and where have there ever been fights over grace?”

Actually, the fights have been about salvation: over what constitutes salvation. But the underlying issue in any salvation debate is a disagreement over how grace is defined. Salvation is, after all, the product of grace. It’s just that the link between grace and faith is not always kept in focus.

So the product of grace—salvation—is what usually captures our attention. And by not keeping the full sequence of sin-grace-faith-and-salvation in view some participants among the competing versions of Christianity then fail to spot the deepest tensions. Indeed, when many people think about salvation their own understanding of grace is assumed to be true and reliable—not something that calls for real reflection. They are wrong.

Even when grace is noticed in some salvation debates the definitions used are not always carefully developed. For instance, the debate of some years ago between John MacArthur and Zane Hodges was, at one level, about grace. But it was ultimately about who is saved and who isn’t—of what it means to have Christ as lord and savior. Yet neither faction was careful in tracing the different definitions of grace used by the church through her history. Some historical awareness would have illuminated for them ways in which their separate readings of key Bible texts had been shaped by assumptions from earlier debates over sin, grace and salvation.

Let me suggest that one big problem is that the definition of grace has migrated through the centuries with the result that competing definitions are now available—with some that are Biblical and some not. So a person’s particular view depends on what definition and what era of history he or she applies.

With that as a warning let me offer a snapshot tour of history.

The early church—in the New Testament era—understood grace to be God’s goodness. Grace was, in effect, a matter of “who” and not “what”. And from the God who is full of grace came graces: in his charis he produced charismata. Salvation was by his grace and that grace was then extended through gifts given to one and all—extended in order to allow each of us to care for others in wonderful and unique ways. We receive grace and, in responding to his grace, we offer our own graces to those around us.

In Romans 5, for instance, the milieu of faith and grace are unpacked by Paul. He starts with faith—the basis for our righteousness before God—as the great benefit we have in Christ. He even wrote of how faith is the entry point “into this grace in which we stand” (v. 2) so that it sounds as if faith precedes grace. Yet it’s clear that the context is that we are justified in Christ—the meaning of “this grace”—and that the prior event that accounts for this justification is our relationship with Christ. And the source of that relationship comes into view only in verse 5: “because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.”

Paul, that is, understood what Jesus had told Nicodemus (John 3:6): “That which is born of the flesh is flesh, and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit.” It is only in the coming of the Spirit that we are “born again”—and that is God’s grace! It is expressed in the great act of Christ on the cross of restoring what Adam discarded: a love relationship with God.

For the young church the wonderful celebration of God’s grace was memorialized in the shared meal each Sunday—the day of the resurrection—as a response to the sacrificial love of Christ and his power over death in the resurrection. This, the “Lord’s supper”, was the proper focal point of church life. Yet it soon took on a hypostatic quality—with a tangible reading of John 6 in view. Hypostasis—the Greek term for “being”—was the label given to the manner in which Christ became incarnate: the Word who became flesh and lived among us. His existence is now acknowledged to be one of “hypostatic union”—of being fully God and fully man while being fully one in that union.

The church began, then, to extend the union of the unseen God to the seen expression of God in the bread and wine of the weekly remembrance. That is, the elements of the meal came to be seen as objects of God’s grace: of Christ’s body and blood hypostatically present. And with that began to grow a notion that grace is “something”—the elements—that we consume and rely on to have more and more grace. And with that there grew the notion of sacramental grace—that all the acts of obedience we find in faith are carriers or instruments of grace.

But that was not all. The question of what is meant by grace became even sharper late in the 4^th century through a debate between Augustine of Hippo and a Brit named Pelagius. In a nutshell the Brit was scandalized by the low moral standards he found among believers in Italy. True faith, he believed, is demonstrated by real godliness and it was time for every so-called believer to clean up his or her act. He even quoted Augustine’s teachings on the human will as offering a way to be godly: start using your god-given free will to make godly choices!

Augustine, however, didn’t buy the Pelagian line even though Pelagius had quoted him accurately. The problem for Augustine was that both his own conversion and his deeper beliefs about sin and salvation didn’t line up with what had once written about the moral power of the human will. So he corrected himself. Sin and grace were, Augustine began to teach, matters of love. Sin is self-love: “concupiscence”. Grace is God’s love that, alone, can overcome self-love.

So while both men held that salvation is by grace through faith alone, Pelagius viewed grace as external: as God’s teachings about right and wrong in Scripture that people are then able to affirm or to ignore. Augustine held that to be nonsense because, biblically, the heart is said to be distorted by sin and will never choose the good. Instead grace is God’s love that draws us out of false love. So God alone gets credit for salvation!

Augustine’s views were affirmed by the church as trustworthy and Pelagius was dismissed. But soon after that debate another teacher, John Cassian, insisted that grace is present in each soul—as a capacity for goodness—that God then matches once it is used. In effect it was a premise that God helps those who help themselves.

Later on, in the 13^th century, Thomas Aquinas dismissed that idea by insisting that grace is a spiritual energy for good that God infuses in the souls of some but not all. This gave room for a continuation of the hypostatic view of grace—of grace as “something”—and it also supported a sacramental theology. In some respects it was similar to Cassian’s view in that it elevated human responsibility for offering God faith in order to be saved. But Aquinas held that only some were given this grace and that, once given, it is certain to be effective. So God “creates” and controls such grace but only certain humans have it and are then obliged to use it.

It was this objective view of grace and its corollary of human-initiated faith that Luther, Zwingli, Calvin and others utterly rejected at the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. Once again they returned to the New Testament premise that grace is ultimately a “who”—the triune God, revealed to us in Christ—and not a “what” that we control. Yet within a few decades a new version of Protestant faith—”federal theology”—reverted to the model Thomas Aquinas had used and grace was again defined by many as a newly created capacity: the enablement of our wills to do good.

So it is that today we happily sing about God’s amazing grace but, amazingly, we have very different views of what we mean by it!

Let me suggest that we all return to the New Testament conviction that grace is God’s love for us, as in Romans 5:8-9—”but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God.” And then in 5:20—”Now the law came in to increase the trespass, but where sin increased, grace abounded all the more . . .”

Faith, then, is our response to the one who loves us and who sets us free from our sin.  His gracious love is, indeed, truly amazing!