More Than Salvation: God’s Plan for Constant Communion

Why do we want to be in relationship with God? Some common answers might be: to receive blessings from Him; to obey Him; to learn principles for proper living from Him; to help build His kingdom.

While each of those answers contains an element of truth, each of them is complete, and even the totality of them is incomplete. Skye Jethani writes:

The primary purpose of our worship gatherings, preachings, and programs should be to present a ravishing vision of Jesus Christ. When people come to see who he is and what God is like, treasuring him becomes the natural outcome.

We can too easily lose our focus. As the New Testament says, “We must focus on Jesus, the source and goal of our faith.”

Jethani uses specific verbs to speak of the relationship between God and human beings: “unite” and “experience” and “treasure.” Each of these has rich semantic field to unpack.

The word ‘unite’ is used in the New Testament, and also in some mystical traditions. Those who follow Jesus are united with God, and God is working to unite all things. Yet this union is communion; the individual does not lose her or his identity in a mystical merging with God.

The Psalmist encourages experience, urging the reader to “taste and see that the Lord is good.” Our experience is neither the foundation of our doctrine nor the confirmation of our theology, but rather the manifestation of our dogma. If we believe what we say we believe, then our experiences will be shaped by that belief.

The word ‘treasure’ is used by Jesus in some of His parables. We know that God loves us and saves us, but beyond that, He treasures us: He values us, He likes us. And we Him. In some liturgical traditions, the verb ‘adore’ is used.

Jethani offers a quote from John Piper:

The gospel is not a way to get people to heaven; it is way to get people to God. It’s a way of overcoming every obstacle to everlasting joy in God.

It is possible for us to underestimate God’s intent: Yes, He wants to save people and give them eternal life, but He wants much more.

God could have redeemed the human race and given salvation in a much simpler fashion than He did. If His goal was merely to get everyone into heaven, a five-page set of instructions could have sufficed. Instead, He gave us hundreds of pages of Scripture.

The New Testament uses the verb ‘reconcile’ to describe one of God’s goals. God saves us, and then He goes on to reconcile us to Himself. Jethani writes:

God’s focus and desire has been to be with his people. He walked in the garden with the man and the woman and sought to rule over creation with them.

One need only to think of the extensive development of the marriage metaphor among the prophets: God relates to the human race as a marriage man and woman relate to each other.

Such a marriage involves connection and harmony in all aspects of life: finances, eating, sleeping, travelling, working, purchasing, socializing, etc.

God wants to be interwoven with every aspect and every minute of ordinary human life. Jethani points to a text found toward the end of John’s Revelation:

God lives with humans! God will make his home with them, and they will be his people. God himself will be with them and be their God. He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There won’t be any more death. There won’t be any grief, crying, or pain, because the first things have disappeared.

Given the thorough communion and engagement which God wants with us, we must be careful not to limit the scope of His plan to too small a field of action.

Fulfilling God’s desire to be with us is why Jesus went to the cross. He did not die merely to inaugurate a mission.

Yes, Jesus began a great mission. But that was not His only action. He didn’t die simply to start organized evangelization efforts “or to give us a second chance at life.” There was more happening on Good Friday.

He did not endure the horrors of the cross just to demonstrate a principle of love for others to emulate.

Jesus modeled selfless and self-sacrificing love, but that was only one aspect of His work. He didn’t suffer only to set an example “or to appease divine wrath.” Those goals were part of the story, but not the whole story.

While each of these may be rooted in truth and affirmed by Scripture, it is only when we grasp God’s unyielding desire to be with us that we begin to see the ultimate purpose of the cross. It is more than a vehicle to rescue us from death; it transports us into the arms of Life. The cross is how we acquire our treasure. It is how we find unity with God.

God’s desire for community is seen in His very nature: The three-in-one Trinity is a model of extensive engagement. God is never alone, and He wants us to join Him in that state.

Four Misunderstandings: God is an End, Not a Means

Why are we interested in God? Is a relationship with God a means to an end, or it an end in itself? We human beings can misjudge why we’re drawn to Him. And if we don’t know why we’re interested in relating to God, we certainly won’t know how to relate to Him.

As Skye Jethani writes, there are four common misperceptions. The first “sees the world as governed by the capricious will of God.” The second “places immutable natural laws at the center.” The third “assumes the world orbits around self and its desires.” The fourth “sees a divine mission at the core of all things.”

There are probably other misunderstandings, but Jethani sees these four as the most common. Each of the four can take many different forms.

What the four errors have in common is a mechanization of God. Each fails to attribute full personhood and agency to Him.

Whether a person sees God as an arbitrary despot, a collection of abstract equations in physics and chemistry, the one who provides for individual whims, or the taskmaster who sets quotas and goals for moral strivers, in any case, these visions of God ignore His personal relational attributes.

These misunderstandings objectify God and ignore that a relationship occurs between two subjects, not between two objects. As Skye Jethani writes,

If we peeled back the physical and metaphysical layers of time and space and peered into the very core of the universe, we would not discover divine will, natural law, personal desire, or global mission.

God is the core of the universe, and God is a person. Personhood entails having emotions, memories, plans, preferences, desires, and other aspects of truly sentient agency.

In relationship with human beings, God gives guidance and blessings. Anything good has its ultimate source in Him. God offers His wisdom as we seek meaning or purpose in our lives.

But God’s guidance is not “a list of rules and rituals to follow,” and His wisdom is not “the implementation of useful principles.” God’s way of helping us is not “a genie to grant us our desires,” and not “a task to accomplish.”

Skye Jethani points his readers in a different direction: God isn’t trying to help us reach some goal; He is the goal. God doesn’t help us as we seek something: He is what we seek.

Each of these four errors “seeks to use God to achieve some other goal.”

We should therefore let go of the idea that if we act in a certain way, then God will bless us; we should let go of the idea that God is giving us principles for successful living. God is present neither to grant us our desires, nor to have us grant Him His desires.

God is present so that He may relate to us, and we to Him. That is the ultimate goal.

Words, ideas, and even images only make sense when we have a frame of reference for them. While our problem of relating to God is far more than semantics, it has been my experience that when most people hear or think about God, they have a less than complete, and sometimes entirely flawed, vision of who he is. As a result, they do not tend to desire him. At best they see him as a useful instrument for achieving something more desirous.

Our primary goal is not to understand the universe and apply that understanding in order to manipulate nature to meet our desires. Neither is our primary goal serve a demanding God as mere slaves, hoping that He might notice and grant us a few crumbs of blessing. Likewise, our goal is not to enjoy God’s products and see how many of them we can obtain. Finally, our goal is not to expand God’s kingdom by our own efforts and missionary zeal.

Our goal is to be with God. Jethani titled his book With for this reason. Our goal is to spend time with God, to speak with Him simply for the purpose of sharing our thoughts with Him, not for the purpose of achieving some objective. Our goal is to listen to God, and to hear what He’s expressing to us.