What happens when we stay
tucked into our familiar comfort-zones, the places and people that look and
sound and feel most like us?
For one, we can stop growing;
if we’re not being pushed outside what’s comfortable, we have a tendency
towards stagnation. We can also stop
seeing the forest and only see the leafless and wilting branches, nit-picking the
theology and practices of those whom we claim as spiritual family. Or like an inverted nautilus, we can wind
more tightly into our own ideas so that our theology begins to more closely resemble
the body which developed it than God himself.
This final tendency being perhaps the most dangerous of all.
There is, within contemporary
Western Christianity a fascination with Love. With Jesus as not so much as
prophet or good-guy-who-had-some-radical-ideas, rather, with Jesus as the
ultimate embodiment of Love. And only
Love. As if the totality of the Divinity
of Christ could be so succinctly summed up: Love, and nothing more.
Yes, God is Love.[1] Yes, Christ did die for Love.[2] And, yes, it is by our Love that followers of
Jesus will be known.
Yet we mustn’t forget from
whence that very Love comes. This Love
can only come from God: the God of the New and
Old Testaments. The God of Christians and the Israelites. The God of Love and the God of the Law. Glennon
Melton’s assertion, in her most recent post at Momastery,
that Love trumps the Law, due to Jesus’ seeming flouting thereof as “Sinny
McSinnerton”[3], is a back-handed
rejection of the God from whither the Law first came. It is the repudiation of Christ’s assertion
that He came not to abolish the Law, but to fulfill it. It is the narrow-minded, Western, one-quarter-world
view that all we need is Love.
What about Justice? What about Righteousness? What about Holiness?
Where do those fit in with the nothing-but-Love
paradigm that is so flagrant and prolific and, frankly, seductive in our
seeker-driven worship? Because if Jesus
(and thus by extension, God Himself) is only Love, then my sins are of no
consequence. My lifestyle, my choices,
my actions are meaningless; because by golly, Jesus loves me. And so long as I in turn love everybody else,
all will be right with the world.
But if my sins (and by
extension, the sins of everyone else) are of no consequence, then why did Jesus
have to die? Why kill Love?
I maintain that Jesus had to
die, because my sins (and yours and those of every
other person ever to live) do matter.
Because my actions, my lifestyle, my human-ness and my very propensity
towards sin twists and perverts everything about me and God’s creation, Jesus
had to die to fix it. To redeem it, to
yank creation and me back from evil, and say, “Oh, no you don’t; this is mine!”
Therefore, Christ wasn’t just a
guy who loved people radically. Yes, He
did that. But he was also the foretold
Messiah, the Savior of the world. He
wasn’t merely a revolutionary who was also an outcast who loved other outcasts
really well. Yeah, he did that,
too. But the Divine-Incarnate Jesus, as Mrs.
Melton posits in her article, could not have come today, or ever, as a black,
lesbian teenager. I do not say this
because I agree with John Piper’s teaching that God is inherently masculine,
and NOT because I believe Jesus hates anyone because their sexual orientation
(I very, very firmly believe that God so loved the entire world—every person of
every race and gender and age and worldview—that he gave his only Son not to
condemn the world, but to save it; so that all who believe in Christ will not
perish but have eternal life); but I say this because Jesus had to be who he
was in order to fulfill the prophecies proclaimed about him in the centuries preceding
his incarnation. Jesus was exactly who
he was supposed to be. And he walked the
earth at exactly the time he was supposed to walk it.
When we forgot or purposely
neglect this, we have in essence forgotten the God who sent his Son to die in
our place. We make the Son greater than
the Father. We bend the Divine human to
fit our worldly human desires. We create
a god who looks more like we want him to look than he actually does.
Had Jesus been anything else
other than a 1st century Palestinian Jew, his very existence would
have made God a liar.
And you can call me a stuffy,
old-fashioned, fuddy-duddy [or you can pick from other, more colorful pejoratives
should you chose; trust me, I’ve both heard and used them before,] Christian.
But I have a knee-jerk reaction when anything we posit about God
could be construed in such a way as to make him a liar. Because doing so makes him not God. And if he’s not God, then from whom was Jesus
sent, and whose kingdom are we proclaiming?
A god of our own making?
Or the Lord God Almighty,
Creator of Heaven and Earth, of all that seen and unseen, whose thoughts are
not human thoughts, and whose ways are not humanity’s ways?
Then ask yourself: Upon which
would you stake eternity?
“What
comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about
us.”
A.
W. Tozer
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