God, the perfect and cosmic eternal being who created the multiverse enjoys community and created human beings to be his friends and to live in community with him. In doing so he gave them free choice so that if they decided to be his friend it would not be as some sort of automata but as a sentient being. Thus, though limited in time and space, being in some ways like him: In some ways reflecting His collectivist nature, God being in some mysterious way one and yet three, and His power, creativity, purity and honour. However, with free choice mankind also had the possibility of being self-centred, oppressive driving fear, destructive, sinful and dishonouring driving shame. With choice to do wrong came death, which appeared to be the end of life.
The early God-centred community, seen around the Mediterranean world was rooted in honour and its inverse, shame. It was also very much a collectivist culture, so honour was not just self-worth but the esteem in which a person is held by the group. Thus, glorifying God was paying Him the honour he was due. While honour-shame was deeply embedded in society later prophets of God sometimes challenged the understanding of external honour emphasising inner ethical virtue. Hence honour has come to have two meanings, firstly social standing within a community and secondly moral integrity when unwatched except by God.
However, even within an honour-bound collectivist culture free choice meant that as well as doing good, people could do evil and people could thus decide to reject God’s friendship. A remnant, a small number of people, throughout the ages, have enjoyed that special relationship with God. One of the first was a man called Abraham with whom God made a covenant to bless him and his descendants. God also commissioned him and his descendants to bless all people throughout the world. The sign of this covenant was circumcision of the male children, carried on by the descendants of Abraham down through the ages.
One of the marks of people doing evil is that some loved power and loved rules as a way of keeping other people in their place. Sometimes this was excused as an attempt to maintain a sin-free community. This meant most people were subjugated and constrained by rules, attempting to honour God in that way. The community offered sacrifices to show they were truly sorry to God for when they went wrong. However, this created a transactional rather than a relational approach to God with some people seeing it possible to pay a price for sin.
Plus, because God made this promise to Abraham and his descendants, the corruption of power meant they focussed on God’s blessing to them rather than communicating the love of God to the entire world. This was a disastrous misunderstanding.
Over the millennia God sent many representatives to communicate his love and to bring Abraham’s descendants back into close friendship with Him. Eventually He sent His son, Jesus who reiterated His Father’s love and a desire for a close relationship. Jesus picked out a group of people, not the most honourable in the community, to demonstrate that He was not interested in worldly power. Though God had the power to create the multiverse, He was interested in everyone whatever their position in society. He initiated a covenant, promising everlasting life to those who followed him on His path of self-sacrifice. Jesus appeared to break many of rules created by people in power but when questioned about it He simplified all the rules to ‘love God with all your heart, mind and soul and love other people as much as you love yourself’.
Since then there have been an increasing number of people following Jesus. Some of them died for their belief in the God who love people rather than power. For each person this was initiated with a call from Jesus to follow him. Having decided to follow Jesus and start this relationship with God as Father, Jesus then asked them to partner with Him in the activities of the Father. In each case it’s different because the relationship is unique and each person an individual. However, because God’s desire is community both with Him and with others who love him, most of those activities are done in concert with others.
Because God is real and communicates, though people have different gifts and roles in the community, the communication is direct not filtered through a man-made hierarchy. The religious leaders didn’t like the idea of direct access between people and God, cutting them out of the power hierarchy. They also didn’t like the simple approach to the rules he stated. Eventually they killed Jesus. But Jesus proved that he had conquered death, and when he said everlasting life he meant it, demonstrating that by rising from the dead.
When Jesus was on earth, 2,000 years ago, people believed that God lived ‘up there’ in the sky (called the heavens) and the world of the dead was ‘down there’ under the earth. There were portals between these realms, one of which was thought to be Caesarea Phillipi and Jesus took His inner circle of followers there to teach that it was more complex than they imagined. But obviously didn’t explain in terms that people with more than 20 centuries of scientific discovery would expect. So, we cannot read the narrative of His life on earth and expect 21st century science, but we do observe, amazingly, how so much of the simplified logic fits with what we understand today.
People also didn’t understand time, almost seeing eternal and everlasting as the same thing. Nor did they understand how time and velocity are related, nor how energy and solid mass are related. They did they understand enough science to grasp many of the ideas of the multiverse. Indeed, most of those are recent understandings, some even within the last decade. However, science doesn’t negate God but rather the more we learn, the more we realise how little we do know, but how great is God. But we do discover it is all a coherent reality.
Over those 2,000 years groups of people have come together to follow Christ. These groups have inevitably become increasingly structured. Often, they develop a hierarchy or a meritocracy or some other structure where there is an expectation of leaders and followers. Usually, they meet on a Sunday and, though it’s not part of the covenant, have come to see attendance at this Sunday meeting almost like circumcision and a rule to be followed. But Jesus never said it was necessary, nor did his early followers, even though they did live in community with each other. The early community was very collectivist, and they shared everything in common almost like a perfect version of communism.
Sadly, some of these groups have fallen into the same trap that the descendants of Abraham fell into, namely seeing themselves as somehow special receivers of blessing and others outside that blessing. In its most severe case this has become what we call a prosperity Gospel.
So where does that leave us today? God still desires friends. God still gives us freedom to choose or reject that friendship. People often still do evil and seek power. Followers still live in community with each other, some being collectivist, some sharing everything in common.
But we see rampant evil, some man made some as natural disasters. So people still ask the question ‘If God exists, why does he permit all this evil?’ And that is a difficult one for those of us who know and love God. From centuries after Jesus’ time on earth this has been discussed and argued about. Some people use this as a logical argument against the existence of God.
If God is all powerful, He could easily destroy evil, He could bring down the powerful oppressors, He could instantly crush those who blaspheme Him. But He doesn’t. And people asked why? There is no easy answer to why God permits the horrors we see daily. However, limiting the choice people have, step by step turns them into automata unable to freely love and freely give. They thus would be unable to truly enjoy the relationship with God He intended.
God loves people so much that he sent his Son as an example to follow and that if they believe in and accept this approach, they will have the everlasting life he promises. He also promised that someday, a day when none of will know, he will create a new earth, potentially a whole new multiverse, for those who do love him, those who are his friends, to live together in peace and community.
But, with all this messy oppression in the world, how do those of us who follow Jesus and love God, people who are God’s friends, communicate the love of God and bless the people of the world? There is so much evil in the world, evil that seems to many people to be increasing. People increasingly struggle to see a God who loves them. It often feels that God is ‘out there’ and we interact with him. But that misses the point. God is here and now and we intra-act with him in a deep and passionate way. He dwells within us.
The words deep and passionate create confusion. Some of the songs sung by his followers have been described as ‘Jesus is my boyfriend’ type songs. Though this helps some people, it puts others off! In the narrative of Jesus life on earth we see a ruggedness about Him alongside a tenderness. We see someone who was passionate and cared deeply for those he met in pain. The world we live on vibrates with the pain, suffering and evil we see every day and God too is alongside us vibrating in sympathy with us.
Communicating this passionate relationship with God as Father is difficult. In the beautiful, often dissonant dance between followers of Jesus and those we love and care for, we cannot pretend that the floor isn’t shaking. We cannot set the communication in a backdrop of abstract purity, which simply does not exist within the world. Instead, we must resonate and undulate with the waves in sympathy with the ground – working as a resonant body to co-create a truer, situational safety where love can flourish. In doing so we introduce people to the one, true and loving God who seeks us as friends. This is because God is the same yesterday, today and forever.
