Is Christ Irrelevant?

            A common thread that is woven through the fabric of the human condition is self-interest.  Powerful men do not seek after power for the sake of power itself.  Wealthy women do not pursue riches for the sake of money.  Their agendas are driven, at a foundational level, by the gratification of self.  The particular means chosen to achieve this end by individuals is merely the window dressing on a much larger picture of the internal drive of every human to achieve happiness, or peace, or security, or whatever it is that gives them the most satisfaction.  In this context, it is perhaps inevitable that, in relation to the Christian faith and its master, Jesus Christ, a question that many people may ask is this.  What is the relevance of Christ – a first century middle eastern Jew – to the problems of today?  More specifically, how can someone who lived two thousand years ago and was of an entirely different culture possibly have anything to offer those who pursue modern agendas?  How can Christ understand or relate to the issues of the 21^st century?

            Many would ask this question from the point of view of their own particular social or economic lenses.  In the world of today, everyone seems to have an agenda.  Whether it is feminism, ethnic minority interests, or social liberation the human race is perpetually dissatisfied with their lot in life.  And so, they come to the table of Christianity asking the age-old question: what’s in it for me and how can Christ fix the aspects of my life that I dislike? 

            That being said, stepping away from the disapproving tone of the previous paragraph, perhaps not everyone asks this type of question from selfish motives such as these.  It must be said that the simple interest in practical application to one’s own situation in life is not inherently wrong.  It is perhaps a fair request to pose to God to ask Him to explain how a relationship with His Son will benefit a person.  I believe the answer is of such a foundational nature that it, once understood and accepted, changes everything and renders all of the above considerations irrelevant.

            We begin first with a brief consideration of God.  The Bible unapologetically presents Him as the omnipotent Creator of the human race.  He chose to mold mankind in His own image, spiritually and emotionally if not physically.  As such, it follows logically that this God would perfectly understand the race of living images of Himself that He made.  As a painter is intimately familiar with every brush stroke on the canvas or a software engineer is aware of the hidden loopholes and idiosyncrasies of his code base, so God possesses a microscopic level of insight into the human condition.  In other words, a concern does not exist that God does not have full and complete knowledge and comprehension about.

            Factor into the above consideration the biblical truth that Jesus of Nazareth, the aforementioned first century middle-eastern Jew, was and is God incarnate.  He is literally God clothed in human flesh.  Therefore, what God knows Jesus knows.  His understanding is not bound by the epoch of history He lived on this earth in.  In light of that, the hypothetical asker of our thesis question must understand that individual issues and agendas such as ethnicity or gender are not pertinent when considered in relation to Jesus.

            In fact, this is precisely the point.  It was Jesus who shattered all cultural or societal barriers and opened the doorway of salvation wide to any and every human being to step through into His arms.  Prior to His death, burial, and resurrection, ethnicity, if not gender, was exceedingly important when considering relation to God.  The reason was that God had specifically chosen the Jewish race, the descendants of God’s original covenant partner, Abraham, to be the recipients of His love.  In this context, in order for a person to be allowed into relationship with the Lord they had to either be a Jew or voluntarily naturalize into the Jewish society and religion.

            However, when Christ came on the scene in the first decades of the first century He changed all of that.  He revealed the full New Covenant gospel message of redemption.  He inaugurated this new covenant with His blood on a Roman cross.  And salvation was subsequently offered to the Gentile nations of the world.  The only stipulation then and now became the placing of complete faith in and the total surrender of one’s life to, Christ alone.  When this happened, all concerns of everyday human life suddenly faded into insignificance.  It mattered not whether a person was male or female, Jew or Gentile; they all had equal opportunity to come to Christ and thus be reconciled to God. 

This was the titanic point the Apostle Paul was making in Galatians 3:27-29.  He wrote: For as many of you as were baptized into Christ have put on Christ.  There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.  And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s offspring, heirs according to promise.

So then, what does this mean for our original question?  It means that the foundational issue of the human experience is not financial equity, social standing, gender equality, or anything else.  The item of real import is whether a person is reconciled to their Creator through Jesus Christ.  Not that being joined to Christ automatically eliminates all cares and concerns of life.  In fact, often it has exactly the opposite effect.  Having been drawn out of the wicked world we live in; a Christian becomes a bit of a marked man or woman.  Satan, in a furious attempt to destroy the saints, typically redoubles his efforts to attack the faith of a Christian.  And God sovereignly permits this so as to grow the faith of His newly adopted child.

So, cares and concerns do not disappear.  However, they do attain a greater significance because of their eternal impact in conformity to Christ’s character.  Furthermore, what once seemed of paramount importance tends to lose its luster.  Issues of race and gender become secondary to issues of union with Christ.  And, this unity with Him gives a new clarity of perspective on these same social issues.  They can now be viewed with an eternal, historical, biblical understanding that often causes a person to see that their former stance was inherently self-centered and unworthy of the name of Christ.

I recognize that to someone embroiled in the midst of social agenda and reform, this answer to the question may seem like side stepping the issue.  However, such a charge does not change the truth.  Focusing upon surface issues of ethnicity, gender, or social status is a bit like treating the symptoms of a disease rather than treating the disease itself.  The symptoms are important, to be sure, and must be cared for.  But, such treatment is a complete waste of time if the root of the disease is left unchecked.

In the same way, handling the surface problems of one’s lot in life without dealing with the foundational issue of relationship to God, which transcends all human barriers, is a fool’s errand.  What difference does it make if political goals are achieved if subsequently one’s eternal soul is condemned to hell for all eternity?  Besides, if the ultimate target of social reform is satisfaction in life, and if a relationship with Christ brings satisfaction surer and firmer than any human accomplishment, then has not the objective actually been achieved anyhow?

This Christ, this first century middle eastern Jew, offers you a satisfaction both in this life and beyond that cannot be eclipsed or even approached by any earthly experience.  Will you accept Him as your Lord and Savior today and achieve quantitative change in your life unlike anything you have ever experienced before?  Or will you continue to be distracted by the cares of this life, blind to the horrible abyss of an eternity without God that is looming just a few yards away?

Is God's Presentation of Himself Accurate?

What is the relationship between God as He presents Himself in the Bible and God as He knows Himself?  This question gets at the very core of our understanding of God.  The reason is that all we can know about God comes from the Scriptures.  Therefore, what we believe about how He has presented Himself in them versus what He is actually like becomes very important when we consider that if God is substantially different in His essence from His presentation of Himself in the Bible, then can we truly say that we have come to know Him at all, even if we have studied the Scriptures extensively?  I think the key to understanding this question is found in two biblical aspects: The Imago Dei and the Incarnation of Christ.  I believe these two biblical truths tell us that the relationship between God’s understanding of Himself and God’s presentation of Himself in the Bible is that they are two different levels of the same truth.

The Imago Dei is a Latin term meaning “image of God.”  It comes from the account of the creation of man in Genesis 1:26-27.  In these verses God first presented the concept when He said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.”  Then, in the next verse, He follows through with action: So God created man in His own image.  This was a spiritual image rather than a physical one.  God, at this point in time, had no physical form.  Therefore, His image must be His nature, His spirit, or His essence.  This was the pattern man was fashioned after, albeit at a lesser level.  Just as a painting or a photograph of a person is not the same as that person, so God’s image of Himself in man was not the same as Himself.  Yet, at the same time, it was still a facsimile of the original blueprint.  In other words, although man does not and can never attain to the level of God in his nature, he is still the best representation of God available in the created order. 

Now then, here is the point.  God’s revelation of Himself throughout the Bible is intrinsically tied to human concepts, human relationships, and human understandings.  To be sure, God is not down on man’s level and must condescend to communicate with him.  But I do not think that means that God’s communication is artificial or illusory.  I think that when He states that He made man in His image, that is exactly what He meant, with no obfuscations or circumventions.  And, when God proceeds to communicate with man and reveal Himself in a manner that corresponds to man, I think it is because man is on some levels similar to Him and can come closer to understanding Him through His own faculties than any other created beings.

I think this point is further driven home by the Incarnation of the Son of God in the person of Jesus of Nazareth.  Prior to this, it would have been much more difficult to consider this issue with a satisfactory level of precision.  But, when God clothed Himself in human flesh, all the doors were opened and the curtains rolled back on God’s character that will ever be this side of Heaven.  Consider the following well known passages: Hebrews 1:1-3, Colossians 1:15, and Colossians 2:9. 

In Hebrews 1 God says that in the past He spoke to men through the prophets by diverse means and at varied times.  But now, He has spoken to us in His Son, who is Christ.  So, we know that God has changed the form of communication from human prophets to a divine Son.  But here is the point.  This divine Son is the fullest and most exact representation of God possible.  Verse 3 drives this home when it describes Jesus as “the radiance of the glory of God and the exact imprint of His nature.”

Corresponding to that understanding is Paul’s letter to the Colossians.  In chapter 1 verse 15 we read that He, meaning Christ, is the “image of the invisible God.”  Again, we find the word image being used to convey the idea of a picture of God.  Then, in chapter 2 verse 9 Paul gets even more explicit.  Christ is not merely the best possible picture of God.  Paul says that in Him “the fullness of deity dwells bodily.”

The point is that Christ, in His incarnation, according to the Scriptures, is literally the fullest expression of the character and nature of God that it is possible to have.  Even considering that we still do not understand everything Christ did and said, just as we do not understand everything about God, it must be understood that by seeking to study and learn who Christ is we are literally gaining accurate knowledge of who God actually is.

Now then, because God is infinite in His understanding and His being, and because we are finite in all ways, we can never possibly hope to understand God completely, even though we spend the rest of our lives studying the Bible on a daily basis.  But, I believe the pursuit of such study is a pursuit of the actual and literal knowledge of God.  It is not an illusion or a tangent that is disconnected from the reality of who God is.  To suppose that God does not accurately present Himself in the Bible is, to first of all, fly in the face of the Imago Dei and the Incarnation, and second of all, I think it speaks ill of God Himself.  If God were to interact with mankind in this way it would be a false and duplicitous approach to the issue of communicating with His creations.  He wants us to come to know Him, truly, not some misshapen vision of Him found in Scripture. 

In John 17:3 Jesus defined eternal life in this way: “And this is eternal life, that they know You, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent.” Christ’s Apostle, John, in stating the purpose of his first epistle, wrote the following in 1^st John 5:13: I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, that you may know that you have eternal life.  

John’s use of the present tense of the Greek verb “echo”, or to have, is telling.  He is saying that we have this eternal life now, presently, in this life, after coming to Christ.  And, from the revelation of Christ Himself, we know that to have this eternal life is to know God.  Therefore, the conclusion must be that the knowledge we gain of God now is true and accurate knowledge.  Thus, it follows that God’s presentation of Himself in the Scriptures, the only detailed source of information about Him, must be also be true and accurate.

Two examples have been given of how God’s interaction with man might work; an ant on a computer screen and a dog being walked past a bank.  In the case of the ant, it’s understanding of the pixels behind the glass is nonexistent but the computer operator, even if he does not understand all the mechanics behind it, obviously knows much more than the ant.  With the dog and the bank, the dog can certainly see the walls of the bank, the sign on the outside, and the doors which provide ingress and egress to customers.  But clearly, he has no understanding of the purpose of the building, while his owner presumably does.

I think these illustrations are insufficient when it comes to God and His communication with man.  I believe a better analogy would be a father and his child.  The child is a product of the father’s DNA.  Many component parts of the child are directly influenced by what is within the father’s own body.  However, the father, by virtue of maturation, experience, and education, knows far more about the world around both of them than the child does.  The father desires his child to come, in time, to understand things accurately the way he does.  So, the father’s task then becomes to attempt to distill complex ideas down into manageable chunks of information that his child can deal with.  The father does not tell his child lies about the world around them; that would be counter-intuitive.  Yet, he cannot explain things the way he would to another adult, such as his wife.  So he uses language and terms the child can understand in an attempt to communicate truth.  It is not the complete picture of truth that the father knows, to be sure, but it is still truth at its core.

I believe this is how God communicates to man about Himself.  He cannot fully explain Himself because our minds do not have the capacity to either comprehend or contain the information.  But He loves us and wants us to understand Him better eventually.  So, He speaks to us on our level, the level of a child as it were, and gives us only what we can handle at that time.