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.

Calm Deliberate Presentations Or Heated Retorts?

In history, dogmatic theology often emerges from polemics. The two great liturgical creeds, Apostolic and Nicene, appear to the moderns as statements of belief, but were created as replies during debates.

Jaroslav Pelikan notes that “it would be a mistake to concentrate on” doctrine as propositions presented as finished articulations.

It distorts our reading of dogmatic documents to concentrate on texts like Biblical commentaries and definitive statements of doctrine

so completely as to ignore the relation of the theology of the church to the Jewish thought out of which it came and to the pagan thought which is sought to convert.

The contents and formulations of doctrine did not develop in a vacuum. They are the products of disputes and Streitschriften. Texts which in their origins were retorts are sometimes mistakenly treated as if they were presentations for students.

To understand confessional documents, we must consider them in their context as volleys in an intellectual conflict.

The Church: a Servant to All People

The totality of Jesus followers is the church; those who’ve already left this life and gone on to the next life are called ‘the church triumphant.’ Those who are still living in this world have work to do: as Paul writes in his letter to the Romans, “as much as it is possible, live in peace with everyone.”

Servanthood is not the church’s only task, but it is a central one. In his letters to the Corinthians, Paul writes, “although I’m free from all people, I have made myself a slave for all people to win more of them.”

In those same letters, Paul commends the Jesus followers in Corinth for their material generosity: “You will honor God through this genuine act of service because of your commitment to spread the Good News of Christ and because of your generosity in sharing with them and everyone else.”

In freely giving time and possessions, the people who follow Jesus give themselves away. This act of self-sacrifice is paradoxically energizing. Shortly before his death in 2013, Byron Porisch noted several passages in a book coauthored by Hugh Halter and Matt Smay. These authors write that it is

in the essence of being given away that we will find the meaning and reason to keep going.

The people who follow Jesus work to build relationships and friendships in all directions, to all sorts of people. As Paul writes in his letter to the Galatians, “whenever we have the opportunity, we have to do what is good for everyone.”

Realistically acknowledging that this world will never be perfect, people who follow Jesus know that God still reaches into the lives of individuals with His abundant blessing.

This world will never be perfect, but God makes the life of each person better. He gives us the privilege of being the instrument of His blessings, and as Halter and Smay phrase it,

There's just something about this thing called church that captures our hearts and keeps us fighting for a better day.

Paul’s prayer for the Jesus followers in Thessaloniki shows this spirit: “We also pray that the Lord will greatly increase your love for each other and for everyone else.” The ‘love’ which Jesus followers show is practical help, friendly relationship, and spiritual truth.

Those three elements - help, relationship, and truth - are all necessary. The church must avoid the temptation merely to present the truth.

A second temptation is to ignore or cast aside those who don’t embrace the truth; this temptation must likewise be avoided. Paul’s imperative to show love and generosity to ‘all’ people is unconditional.

The metaphor of the church as ‘bride’ gains richness in this light: in many cultures, the bride is ceremonially ‘given’ by her parents to the new husband. But as she is given, she simultaneously decides to give herself.

The content is not about marriage and wedding traditions in various cultures. The content, as authors Halter and Smay report, is about generosity in giving of one’s time, one’s possessions, and one’s self:

The mysterious awe associated with the Bride of Christ is in the character of her sacrificial and missional calling. The church is beautiful because it is endowed with the purpose of giving herself away wholeheartedly to the world God desires to redeem.

So it is, then, that Paul writes to Timothy: “First of all, I encourage you to make petitions, prayers, intercessions, and prayers of thanks for all people,” and “a servant of the Lord must not quarrel. Instead, he must be kind to everyone.” The operative phrases here are ‘all people’ and ‘everyone.’

People who follow Jesus live in communities of believers and nonbelievers, of righteous and unrighteous. Paul tells Titus that “believers shouldn’t curse anyone or be quarrelsome, but they should be gentle and show courtesy to everyone.”

The letter to the Hebrews advises the Jesus followers to “try to live peacefully with everyone.” The ‘peace’ with which they are to live is not mere absence of conflict, but the full wellness and wholeness of the Hebrew shalom. They are to be generous friends to everyone.

To be sure, there is a need that the people of Jesus not be weaklings, and not endure unnecessary abuse. Self-sacrifice is a sacrifice that serves a purpose, not merely to gratify a bully.

So when Peter writes that Jesus followers should “honor everyone,” he is not commanding passivity, and not relegating them to codependence or victimhood. Generosity and friendship, which sometimes entail self-sacrifice, demand courage when carried out authentically.

Creating, and Maintaining, a Clean Heart

Over the centuries and millennia, people have used the famous words, ‘create in me a clean heart’ to seek forgiveness, regeneration, and a fresh start. What are they asking God to do?

God is the one who can reach into our lives and do this amazing work. We can’t do it. It’s no mere adjustment: it’s a ‘creation’ or a ‘re-creation.’ It’s a total reboot.

When a computer is frozen, or when a smartphone is a ‘brick,’ it cannot reboot itself. Only from the outside can the restart be initiated.

God reboots us when we’re totally glitched, or when we’ve run into a ‘hang.’ When we crash, He restarts us.

But even more: after rebooting us, He continues to maintain our ‘operating system’ (OS), which will become corrupt and eventually crash again without His updates. As Martin Luther writes,

It is not in our power to acquire such a heart, but it comes by divine creation. This is why the Spirit wanted to use the term “create” here, for those are vain dreams that the scholastics foolishly thought up about the cleansing of the heart. Just as such a clean heart is not by our powers but by divine creation, so we cannot preserve this creation against the devil either. We see how often we are polluted by sudden troubles and sadness. Hence this prayer for the creation and preservation of a clean heart ought never to stop.

What’s the result of God rebooting us, and then continuing to maintain us? The result is that He uses us to do amazing things. When we’re running properly, which happens only through His intervention, we can be the way He helps other people.

Shortly before he died in 2013, Byron Porisch took note of this passage in a book coauthored by Hugh Halter and Matt Smay:

Whenever I see someone invest time and energy and love into something and then willingly sacrifice it, giving away what they have, it’s powerful!

Halter and Smay point out what it looks like when God has created, and maintained, that ‘clean heart’ in a person. That person is transformed into a blessing toward other people.

For around 3,000 years, people have meditated on the words of the Psalm, which show us God’s action:

Create a clean heart in me, O God,
and renew a faithful spirit within me.
Do not force me away from your presence,
and do not take your Holy Spirit from me.
Restore the joy of your salvation to me,
and provide me with a spirit of willing obedience.

The grammar of these passages reveals God at work. God does, or doesn’t, do the action. The person speaking to God simply asks. God creates, renews, forces, takes, restores, and provides.

What Jesus Is Saying Today: Don’t Worry About Heaven

Jesus is consistent. What He’s saying today is what He said 2,000 years ago. The message He presents in the four gospels, and the in the entire New Testament, is designed to help us not worry about the afterlife.

Looking at the text, Jesus talks much more about how to live in this life than about how to get into the next life. He’s saying, in effect, “Don’t worry about how to get into heaven. I’ll take care of that for you. Instead, use your mental energy to think about how to live this life.”

He’s telling us that there’s no way we could ever work or earn or figure out a way to get eternal life for ourselves. We simply can’t do it. So we should stop fretting about it, since it’s impossible for us to attain it, and simply receive it as He gives it to us.

In fact, it’s probably a lot more difficult to get into hell than into heaven. To get into hell, a person would need to consistently and stubbornly refuse God’s freely-given grace and mercy.

God’s forgiveness sets us free: free to stop being anxious about the next life, and free to devote our energies to serving Him in this life. Luther writes:

In everything we do or experience we should have a happy heart and know that for Christ’s sake we are in grace and that everything we do pleases God, even the fact that out of the needs of the body we eat and drink and do our work. Thus our heart should remain pure in the eternal and sound knowledge of God and in trust toward God through Christ, and it should believe that everything we are pleases God, not because of some merit or worthiness of ours, which is all polluted, but because of the gift of faith, that we believe in Christ.

There are some astounding tensions in Luther’s statement. We are “polluted,” and yet pleasing to God! How can that be? Human reason cannot fully see into the mystery of how Christ’s atoning work clothes us.

Likewise there is a paradox in having “a happy heart” and yet being susceptible to the “needs of the body,” which leave us vulnerable to illness and pain, to grief and depression.

We can only surrender to Jesus: He’s telling us that He’ll take care of us. We can’t thoroughly understand how. Jesus simply directs us to busy ourselves with this life, and to rest in the confidence that He’s arranged something very good for us in the next life.

Natural Justice and Natural Religion: Naturally Wrong

There is a sense of morality which occurs naturally to the human mind. One possible interpretation of Immanuel Kant’s works would even lead the reader to see this system as built into the structure of the human mind.

There is a striking ubiquity to this type of natural law, which presents itself as arising from a natural theology. It is a quid pro quo ethic, consisting of rewards and punishments.

It is also sadly mistaken. Richard Rohr captures this error:

Almost all religion, and all cultures that I know of, have believed in one way or another that sin and evil are to be punished, and retribution is to be demanded of the sinner in this world - and usually the next world too. It is a dualistic system of reward and punishment, good guys and bad guys, and makes perfect sense to the ego. I call it the normal economy of merit or “meritocracy,” and it is the best that prisons, courtrooms, wars, lawyers, and even most of the church, which should know better, can do.

This fallacy, which occurs so easily to the human mind, overlooks the simple fact that all humans are imperfect and flawed. Not only can we say that “to be human is to be imperfect,” but more: “to be human is to be essentially and necessarily imperfect.”

Given what human nature is, any ethic of reward and punishment can only end with more punishment than reward.

Humans, who are essentially unrighteous, can’t work their way up to earning a reward which is given only to the righteous.

A more accurate understanding reveals that an intervention is necessary: humans need help to attain that which they can’t attain on their own. This help has various names: grace, mercy, forgiveness:

The revelation from the cross and the Twelve Steps, however, believes that sin and failure are, in fact, the setting and opportunity for the transformation and enlightenment of the offender - and then the future will take care of itself. It is a mystery that makes sense to the soul and is entirely an “economy of grace,” which makes sense only to those who have experienced it.

Moving from ‘natural religion’ to ‘revealed religion’ is to gain the insight that only a help sent from beyond the self can create the opportunity for humans to receive better than they deserve.

To be surrendered is the notion that the individual can do, earn, merit, achieve. To be gained is a breathtaking gift: unearned, unmerited, freely given. There is nothing to be done prior to the gift: after the gift, the only reasonable response is thanksgiving.

To see one’s self as utterly passive in the face of this gift is to be all the more energized in the thanksgiving offered in response to the this gift. Properly seen, the remainder of life is thanksgiving.

Love God by Celebrating with Friends!

Examining notions of piety, Robert Kolb notes that western culture has, at times, made the definition of ‘devotion’ unnecessarily narrow.

When the distinction between ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’ is understood as unreal, and when implications of God’s ownership of everything in creation are fully calculated, then any task is a part of divine service.

Washing the dishes or managing a global corporation, studying algebra or pulling weeds from a garden, all these activities are, and can be conceptualized as, divine service.

The Western world has generally thought piety consists above all in sacred works, in works which make a display of religiosity and holiness of an external sort.

To the contrary, Kolb informs us, people who follow Jesus

have exercised their piety in child care and making good shoes, in helping fellow workers and neighbors meet crises and endure hardships, in celebrating births and weddings.

‘Good works’ might be a much broader category than some traditions allow. Attending a party could in fact be an act of personal devotion to Jesus.

Properly construed, one’s entire life and all the activities of daily living could, and should, be acts of service to God. Shopping for groceries and washing clothes, playing a game of golf or balancing one’s stock market portfolio are acts of stewardship.

If the earth and everything in it (Psalm 24:1) are God’s property, than every action we take is an interaction with God’s property. God has assigned the stewardship of His property to us (Genesis 1:28).

We are continually interfacing with God’s world, which makes every act a potential act of worship. Our challenge to move from ‘potential’ to ‘actual’ and see every moment of our lives as a moment of piety and devotion.