I often think of what a relationship with God means for me and those I love. I may be something of an aberration, but as far back as 12 or 13 years old I was wondering about my existence in this big vast universe and what it all means. Like many sinners (i.e., all human beings) I’ve always known I fall short, of what I was not always sure. But a favorite phrase of mine lo these many years later has become, we know we can’t even live up to our own standards, let alone a holy God. Why is that? Why do we all know we fall short? Maybe it’s because we actually do! Not a person on earth is immune to conscience, and we are all condemned by it. Even those who claim not to believe in God will admit they don’t live up to their own standards, but they will insist no real objective standards exist by which they can be judged. God’s word says differently.
Here is our dilemma vis-a-vis God: since we can’t live up to his standards, we are judged guilty, and the wages of what the Bible calls sin is death, both spiritual and physical. Like Adam and Eve after the fall, in our natural state when God comes “walking in the garden in the cool of the day,” we hide. By nature, we want nothing to do with our judge, jury, and executioner. The Apostle Paul says, by nature, by birth, we are enemies of God, and objects of his wrath. This is a problem, my friends, because we don’t seek to have a relationship with our enemies; we seek to defeat them, or run away. How can this problem be solved with our Creator? In a word, the gospel. What exactly is it, and how does it overcome the problem?
I’ll get to a bit of theology in a moment, but the Lord’s Prayer offers us a glimpse into the wisdom of God’s plan of salvation from this conundrum we find ourselves in. Jesus says we are to address God as “Our Father.” In Jewish history when Jesus spoke these words it was revolutionary. God for the Hebrews was anything but a Father figure. Isaiah’s response to a vision of God is typical of how the Jewish people viewed Almighty God:
“Woe to me!” I cried. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips, and I live among a people of unclean lips, and my eyes have seen the King,the Lord Almighty.”
Not quite the cuddly version of God that the word “Father” evokes. But Jesus is saying his coming ushers in a relationship with God that will be transformed from what they’ve known it to be, and Father captures that change. If you have children you’ll instantly get it. There is no love or affection on earth that compares with what a parent has for their offspring. I remember bringing home our firstborn, a daughter, from the hospital and just staring at her; whatever I was feeling it was ineffable. By contrast, I’m watching a PBS series called Wolf Hall about England’s King Henry VIII, and anytime Henry is in the scene, people grovel, often in fear. God the Father, in Christ, is no longer a King we need fear.
What Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection (for us) brings is something in the book I call a “radical relational reversal.” We go from from spiritual death to life, and from enemies and haters of God, to his children. God is no longer, in Christ, oriented toward us in his wrath, which has been fully satisfied in Christ. Now for us he is Abba (or daddy), Father. It is difficult to imagine a bigger contrast, especially when we realize sin is serious business, more akin to spiritual genocide than spiritual jaywalking. And it isn’t just forgiveness God offers us in Christ, because then we’d have to start all over again every day thinking we have to “measure up” to God’s law; we can’t. But God has given us in Christ what he requires of us, his very own righteousness. As Paul says in Romans 3, we are given the “righteousness of God.”
You know what this means? No more walking on eggshells, thinking we have to perform to gain God’s favor. No more wallowing in guilt because we know we’re not perfect, and not even close! We never again have to doubt whether God is well-disposed toward us because he always is, in Christ! No more guess work. Our relationship to him, in love, has been signed, sealed, and delivered by a risen Savior. Fear is replaced by trust, and whatever happens in our lives, we know “all things work for good for those who love him . . .” And Jesus says in Matthew 7:11:
If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him!
Think on those words, how . . . much . . . more. Does this mean we get everything we want? Silly question. How do we even know what want. and how many times in our lives have we gotten what we think we want, and then . . . that’s it? That’s all there is? What we want, what we were created for is him! That’s why God in the Old Testament continually rails against idols and idolatry; only God fills the God-shaped vacuum within us. As we daily walk with him, acknowledging our guilt, accepting his grace, and giving thanks that he is now our Father, love is the most appropriate fact of our relationship with him. A genuine affection for him is the inevitable result of the gospel.
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