God Uses Whom He Will

The example of Cyrus the Persian is paradigmatic for God’s action on a world-historical scale. As a Persian of the pre-Zoroastrian era, Cyrus would have been a polytheist, and his worldview would have differed fundamentally from that of Hebrews who knew and worshipped the Lord.

Yet a premier Hebrew prophet, Isaiah, tells us that Cyrus is God’s “anointed one” and that “the Lord loves Cyrus.” Isaiah also quotes God as saying that Cyrus is “My shepherd.” Not only does God seem to embrace Cyrus, but the language used is shockingly messianic.

Around 500 B.C., Isaiah’s statements about Cyrus would have been shocking for the Hebrew readers.

From a Hebrew perspective, Cyrus would have been “unclean.” Cyrus came from a culture which had perspectives in direct contradiction to Hebrew society: Persia’s society at that time condoned slavery and failed to see value and dignity in every human life.

Yet God chose to use Cyrus to unfold a segment of his world-historical plan.

This paradigm is found elsewhere in the text. The reader finds that “the Lord had given victory to Aram” (II Kings 5), Aram being a pagan nation.

Likewise, God “led King Pul of Assyria” to take several tribes captive (I Chronicles 5). Subsequently, “the Lord used Nebuchadnezzar to take Judah and Jerusalem away into captivity” (I Chronicles 6).

God uses many different people to carry out His plan. God uses all sorts of people. He does not confine Himself to those who know and honor Him. The entire earth is, after all, God’s personal property. The paradigm is that God can, will, and does use anyone He chooses. God is not limited in His choices. Any type of person can be used by God.

Which might lead one to entertain the hypothesis that God uses not only anybody, but everybody. Such a hypothesis will require further investigation.

Food and Incarnation

The concept of incarnation is central because it demands attention both to the “here and now” and to the “there and then” - and to the connection between the two of them.

If incarnation is central to the Good News of Jesus, then the act of eating is central to incarnation. Scan the text for mentions of eating, drinking, and even feasting, and the numerous occurrences of these vocabulary leave no doubt that these actions are important.

Eating is, in the text, more than merely obtaining the calories and nutrients necessary to sustain life. People eating together reflects the notion of building unity and fellowship, as Paul writes in his letter to the Ephesians:

He also gave apostles, prophets, missionaries, as well as pastors and teachers as gifts to his church. Their purpose is to prepare God’s people to serve and to build up the body of Christ. This is to continue until all of us are united in our faith and in our knowledge about God’s Son, until we become mature, until we measure up to Christ, who is the standard.

Notice that the process of unification is exactly that: a process. Perfect unity is a future goal, not a present reality. People who follow Jesus are in a process of continuous engagement. Over time, that engagement moves, perhaps asymptotically, toward agreement.

Incarnation is the glorious promise that we are in motion toward agreement and unity. Incarnation is also the realistic understanding that we, as fallen human beings, will not achieve total or perfect unity or agreement in this life.

Dining together with those who follow Jesus is a “foretaste of the feast to come.” Sharing meals with unbelievers and heretics is an imitatio dei, inasmuch as Jesus often ate with those who were skeptical of His claims to divinity and of His claims to be the Savior of all people.

In the book of Luke, Jesus gives instructions to His followers: to eat with those who “welcome” or “accept” them. They are not to wait to find those who agree perfectly with them, or are in perfect unity with them. A mere willingness to hear the Gospel suffices.

Stay with the family that accepts you. Eat and drink whatever they offer you. After all, the worker deserves his pay. Do not move around from one house to another. When ever you go into a city and the people welcome you, eat whatever they serve you.

Interestingly, Paul also writes (I Corinthians 5:10-11) that circumstances might arise when it would be necessary to reduce the amount of fellowship one might have with certain people. This passage requires careful analysis. Paul tells us that we should not “associate” with certain people, but adds that we should continue to “have contact with” them.

Who are these people with whom we should not “associate”? Because all people sin, it cannot be that we should break fellowship with anyone who sins. Paul notes that it would be impossible to break off fellowship with sinners, and even if it were possible, it wouldn't be desirable. Rather, fellowship should be reduced, but not entirely cut off, with those who fail to acknowledge themselves to be sinners.

Jesus is interested, after all, in sinners. Jesus “welcomes sinners and eats with them” (Luke 15:2).

If there is anyone with whom we should not eat, then, it is those who consider themselves to be without sin, who consider themselves to be perfect. To be sure, there are many who would never proclaim themselves to be perfect, but whose actions and words imply some attitude of self-righteousness.

But rather than worrying about our supper companions, it is much more relevant that we direct this warning to ourselves: do we “examine ourselves” (II Corinthians 13:5)? Are we willing to admit that we are sinners? To admit that we sin? To admit that we are sinful?

Let us be unambiguous with ourselves about who and what we are. When we confess that we are sinners, that we are sinful, and that we sin, - then we can be certain of God’s compassion and love toward us.

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.

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.