Spirituality Column #734

December 8, 2020

Common Christianity / Uncommon Commentary

Keeping It Together

By Bob Walters

“As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts,” – Isaiah 55:9

This verse is as plain as anything in the Bible: God is not something we will completely understand because we are not built to.

That said, we can know Him through Jesus Christ and the illumination of the Holy Spirit.  It takes faith, obedience … and some knowledge certainly helps.  But folks work harder at Christianity than they really need to because they constantly try to split, divide, and specifically define things that – I’m pretty sure – God intended to be understood as “whole cloth,” not random remnants.  He’s the whole ball game; not innings or quarters.

In a religion of unity, Christianity is often a religion that divides.  For example …

God - The complete undivided God is the Father-Son-Spirit Trinity.  God exists as this all-in-all relationship of love. No need to pursue three goals.  God’s math doesn’t just add, it multiplies: 1 x 1 x 1 is still 1.  Pray to one, you’ve covered them all.

Love – C.S. Lewis famously wrote of the “Four Loves” – eros (passion), philia, (brotherhood), storge (parents for children), and agape (God’s love).  As humans we feel the need to decide which love is holy and which love is not.  I’m here to disagree.  In the New Testament’s great passages on love – 1 Corinthians 13, 1 John, and all four Gospels where we are to “love God and love others” – there is not a word about sex or appetites, just warnings about worldly pursuits.  God’s love is best understood as whole.  Humans see love in complex human terms; real love is the simple way God sees it.

Truth – Culture insists we split up truth into as many individual parts as possible.  Then Satan takes the toxic bits and infects all society with confusion and division.  “My truth” and “your truth” are sucker gambits.  “I am the way, and the truth and the life” says Jesus (John 14:6).  Get your facts straight, sure; but God’s truth is the only one.

The Law – Paul was a Pharisee who Jesus told to spread the Truth to gentiles; Jesus never told Paul to teach the Law to gentiles.  Why?  Because the Old Testament Mosaic Law applied to the Jews. Jesus, not the Law, fulfilled Israel’s destiny of saving the entire world.  Christians cling to OT laws, I think, to have rules to follow. The Westminster Confession (England, 1647) famously split the Law into Moral, Judicial, and Ceremonial segments; but neither Jesus nor Paul preached that. Jesus’s “law” tells us to love God and love others, period.  We don’t need the old Law to love Jesus.

Forgiveness – It is OK for words to mean many different human things in many different contexts, but the forgiveness of Christ – our sins covered by the blood of Jesus restoring our divine relationship with the eternal God – is totally a God thing.  We cannot forgive another’s sins against God; but we are called to forgive worldly offenses against ourselves.  That’s not for the sake of the oppressor; it is to maintain our peace in Jesus.

Freedom – Jesus frees us from the Law because He completed God’s promise to Israel that they were the chosen nation God would use for the salvation of “the whole world.”  Israel didn’t realize this made them servants (like Jesus), not masters.  In the Bible “freedom” doesn’t mean freedom from responsibility; it means the freedom to have faith and to love God and others in obedience to Jesus’s command to do exactly that.

Division is the most confusing and destructive thing humanity faces, while the wholeness of God is meant to be the most comforting, creative, and coherent.

We may be flawed and fallen pieces, but God’s love, in Jesus, keeps us together.

Walters (rlwcom@aol.com) thinks puzzles with fewer pieces are easier to finish.