- It makes a great, pithy slogan. I'm being light here but this actually has some value. Many people have bad experiences with authority figures or even church. Since our earliest expectations of God are usually based in our relationship with our parents, it helps to understand that we can "get personal" directly with God. We don't need our images and impressions to relate to him
- It's yet another fine example of ALL doctrine originally being framed as response to heresy. This is a real important idea that I'll likely feel compelled to write about at length at some point. However, for now I'll only hearken back to the early creeds (Apostle's, Nicene, etc). Each one of these was formed in response to heresies both real and perceived that were prevalent at the time they were written. In the case of "personal relationship," this gradually achieved common acceptance with the advent of Protestantism. It was one of the responses to the mistaken idea that a human priest was a necessity as an intercessor with Christ and God.
Paul did go on at some length though about a picture of the relationship between God and his body however. He paints this as being Christ as bridegroom and "the body" as being the bride. And actually in the passages where he does this, he's expanding on a number of earlier such comparisons.
If this image is a picture of living truth, what does it mean to us?
It means that the relationship is fluid. It means that there are times of perceived closeness and times of distance. It means that there are times when one or the other of us is feeling ignored or even hurt. It means a lot of other things too. In fact, it means as many things as one can encounter in a lifetime of marriage...and after 30+ years of marriage, I can tell you that looks to be a lot of stuff. It even means the relationship is emotional...on both sides.
I'll add that my experience of God's emotions, including impatience bordering on anger, are a good deal more measured than anything I've encountered in any person. These emotions can be quite long lived, occasionally taking many years to express in a way I understand. However, he does have them. We're wrong to imagine otherwise because scripture states this plainly and repeatedly. Spousal test: Does our spouse have emotions that we live in concert with? Yes. Okey doke - there you go.
We're also wrong to imagine that we can contain God's emotions in any way at all, but particularly through doctrine of our own invention. My "favorite": "God was that way back then because man was that way back then and that's all man could understand so that's what man wrote down." That might work if you took the prophets and the Psalms out of the bible, but those writers clearly understood that the breadth of God was comprehensible although still not fully understandable. Spousal test: When's the last time you successfully fully understood and controlled your spouse's emotions? (If you give an event and a date here, you must also give your name and spouse's email address...just sayin')
Spousal test beyond emotions: Does each spouse always do what the other asks? No. Sometimes? Yes. On the human side and in theory at least, this decision is based on: Love for the other. Love for the kids. Love for brothers and sisters and family. Love. The one difference is that in relationship with God, where there's difference of opinion, we should yield.
We don't necessarily have to though. God does let himself be talked into things that don't represent the best possible outcomes. One book of the bible was written by a guy that talked God into changing God's plan. That episode wound up as a good example of a bad thing. Spousal concept: We, both collectively and individually, are the bride of Christ, not his footstool.
There's much more. However, the bottom line is that this is relationship, personal and corporate relationship. This isn't doctrine, imagination or metaphor. This is life.
No comments:
Post a Comment