Tuesday, October 3, 2017

On Clarifying the Role God Expects


Sometimes life seems so complex to me, I have to go back to the basics.

You see, no matter how convoluted our existence may seem, I believe the triune God of the Bible to be the penultimate Source of life, reason, and purpose.  I believe that God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit have created and continue to distinctly control and perpetuate everything in our universe.  I believe that no matter how complex life may be, God's Creation serves only one purpose, and that is to somehow, ultimately, bring glory and affirmation to its Creator. 

For example, I believe that dirt doesn't simply exist.  It's purpose isn't only to help anchor the roots of plants.  Dirt brings glory to God because He made it.  The fact that dirt comes in various colors and consistencies and actually serves a valuable function is gilding the lily, at least in theological terms.  And just because dirt serves a different function in God's Creation than, say, a brain surgeon, that doesn't mean dirt brings any less glory to God than the ability of a brain surgeon to operate on the organ that makes us think.

I know; that's a pretty literal statement, and it paints my belief system as being pretty simplistic.  But does it mean I'm wrong?

I believe that Creation's purpose of glorifying God is achieved in a variety of ways, but I also believe that humankind, regardless of our profession of allegiance to God, tends to focus not on Creation's purpose, or Creation's Originator, or on the variety of ways Creaton represents God's sovereignty.  Instead, I believe we created beings tend to expend excessive efforts on trying to control and perpetuate our own existence in this universe, manipulating Creation to suit our own ends, instead of allowing all of Creation to point us to God.

In other words, regardless of whether we believe that God exists, or that Jesus Christ is His holy Son, or that the Holy Spirit reveals these truths to our consciousness, I believe we mortals tend to use culture, or science, or knowledge, or history, or laws, or governments, or money as ways to frame our human experience and justify our roles in it.

In and of themselves, culture, science, knowledge, history, laws, governments, and money are not bad or evil things.  Yes, they are tools, but God created them all to serve particular purposes, and He expects us to steward them properly as His resources for our journey through this life He gives to each of us.  Yet I believe we have come to disproportionately value them.  We have lost the perspective that God wants us to have of them.

This hasn't happened within our lifetime, or during America's existence, of course.  This has been a problem with humanity since the Biblical "Garden of Eden," which I believe to have been a literal place, during the literal timeframe after original Creation, where Adam and Eve first succumbed to the temptations of the self.

When any of our human constructs comes between ourselves and God, some level of disorder is created.  The degree to which we perceive chaos to exist in our world is the degree to which we've allowed greater and greater levels of human constructs to separate us from God.

Technically, we call this "sin" in theological parlance, but we don't like to believe that sin is as pervasive with our culture and within ourselves as it actually is.  Sin is what evil people do, but we don't like to consider ourselves as being evil.  We acknowledge the chaos festering around us and blame other people for it, rarely wondering how complicit we might be personally in the systems and attitudes that give rise to what eventually deteriorates into chaos.

How does this happen?  Well, again, it's not that complicated.  It happens when we're not genuinely learning God's truths for ourselves, and applying them to His relationship with us.  All of us tend to assume a higher degree of personal importance for ourselves than we ought.  Many don't seem eager to teach God's truth to their children.  We exploit God's generosity when He gives us His Creation to "rule and subdue."  We selfishly presume upon God's grace so we can over-indulge in various aspects of His Creation.  We will readily acknowledge that we are God's children, but we fail to see how we act not like respectful sons and daughters, but often like spoiled brats.

We don't really care about other people, except when doing so suits us.  We covet things God hasn't given to us, we hoard what God does give us, and we presume to have earned what God gives us - even though He's the One who gives us whatever intellect, opportunity, knowledge, insight, physical strength, and aptitude necessary for other mortals to "reward" us with "our" compensation.

We tend to forget that politics is a sordid, inferior substitute for God's expectations of community life.  We tend to forget that while laws can exalt the Creator of order, they can also be tools of biased manipulation by enfranchised power brokers.

We tend to believe that knowledge confers importance, often at the expense of wisdom.  We justify our homage to culture by claiming we need to have a particular identity, even while ignoring the fact that God is Himself beyond any culture.

In fact, we have so many confections of identity that it seems more natural to view God as simply being a component of our lives, instead of being the Source of it.  As a component of our lives, we presume that God can be as important or unimportant as we allow Him to be.  However, as the Source, God should predominate over everything, even to the point where we're willing to give up everything else to follow His Son, even to death.

Life is less complex with God as its Source, but it's a simplicity we don't find attractive or desirable.  Most of us really don't want to live with a worldview in which the various elements of life that we might experience are relegated to lesser levels of importance in the face of God's honor and sovereignty.  Life probably wouldn't be as fun as we'd want it to be, or filled with as many luxuries, or political freedoms.  Political freedom is nice, but it's not the type of freedom for which Christ died.

Life with God as its Source is profoundly counter-cultural, particularly to those of us in the Post-Modern West.  Hardly any pastor or preacher expounds on it from the pulpit.  It is not a component of our evangelical industrial complex.  Lip service is often paid to the concept, but hardly any of us truly understand it, or value it as the best way to live.

Hey - I don't live it.  I'm not preaching to you here; I'm preaching to myself.  I don't wake up each day, asking God to expend me to the uttermost for His glory.  I ask God to protect me from as much adversity as possible.  I plead with God for comforts.  I struggle - often desperately - with pride and cynicism, completely failing to trust in Christ.  I lust, and I envy, and I covet.  I'm deeply disdainful of others, and I'm constantly pegging my own self worth not on Christ's love for me, but on what I see Him doing in and for other people.

In theory, I know that my inferior perspective is vanity - vanity both in the selfish, prideful sense; but also in the vain sense that in the end, it all means so little.  I believe God is sovereign, but my brain and my heart want to think I've got some sovereignty in me, too.  Or I fear that maybe you've got more sovereignty in you - which, of course, you don't.  None of us are sovereign.  That's why God needs to be our Source.  Yet almost always, we don't literally want Him to be.

We don't want Him to be our Source because it means that all of the worldly metrics by which we value ourselves are basically meaningless.  And that is such a bizarre notion for us.  We recite "he who would save his life will lose it" and we think it means that if we're caught in a sniper's gunfire, like Sunday night in Las Vegas, we'd have more honor by staying and protecting others than running for cover.  Otherwise, we really don't give ourselves away.  Because we really think we're worth more than that.

Yes, God values every element of His Creation, from each speck of dirt, to each human being, no matter who we are.  Not because God needs the affirmation of human beings. But because we can't possibly help but give Him glory, even when we steadfastly refuse to acknowledge that our existence actually helps to prove His.

For those of us who literally believe that Jesus Christ is His Son, and that He died to obtain our freedom from sin - the sin that separates Him from us, and creates the chaos in life - God extends to us His holy love and desire for eternal companionship.  If you don't believe in all of this, it sounds so hokey and absurd.  But frankly, some of that absurdity likely stems from the reality that for all practical purposes, many of us "Christians" don't act like we fully believe it, either.

After all, if we did, and God truly was the focus of our lives, we'd probably be living much differently than we are.


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