The Bible is a love story between God and humanity, an intricate narrative about our evolving relationship across millennia. In the opening three chapters of Genesis, God creates humanity, after creating everything else. And in the final two chapters of Revelation, closing out the Bible in a glorious display of transforming power, God marries humanity, possibly including the cosmos itself. It turns out we are created in the beginning for the sake of a marriage union at the end. The hidden purpose of our creation and final union issue directly from God’s inscrutable will. It is all “God’s thing”, regardless of whether we happen to agree with and desire such a union. In our coming destiny, what will matter most, if not exclusively, is our relationship with God. Heaven, as we shall see, is our entrance into “The Relationship.” Heaven is less a place than a relationship, less a realm to be in than the Persons to be with.
A whole lot happens between Genesis and Revelation, just as between our creation and consummation, and only God knows how far we have come and how far we have yet to go. At the center of the Biblical story about the journey between our beginning and our end, are the peculiar covenants God forges with humanity and with the Jewish people, who naively walk into a string of solemn promises made binding by an oath. They say yes to the mysterious God of their ancestors without really understanding what they are getting into, and from which they will subsequently discover there is no way out. The Jewish people unknowingly get to represent all humanity — no different from, no better or worse than the rest of us — in God’s public stage presentation of the struggle of humanity to do and be as God desires in the love relationship of God’s design. While God comes off as amazingly gracious and long-suffering, humanity does not come out so well. It turns out we will need perpetual assistance; we simply cannot be what God wants us to be without divine help. And I am talking about always, not just sometimes.
Complications upon complications take place between Genesis 1-3 and Revelation 21-22. At the risk of oversimplifying the story, the major problem surfaces early on concerning how to bring humanity from creation to consummation. The problem is the human heart. We do not love God the way God wants us to love, to say nothing of the way God loves us. Humanity turns out to be a real disappointment to God. Rather than openly receiving, sharing and giving back to God this love with which God loves us, we inexplicably deny and deflect it, choosing instead to be self-seeking, serving and aggrandizing. Self-interest is at the core of our problem with God.
God soon realizes that the human heart evidences evil rather than good, self-interest rather than God interest: “The LORD saw that the wickedness of humankind was great in the earth, and that every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts was only evil continually. And the LORD was sorry that he had made humankind on the earth, and it grieved him to his heart” (Genesis 6:5-6). So upset is God that God first resolves to blot us all out; but then, fortunately for us, God decides instead to let Noah and his family survive an enormous flood, so as to start the human experiment all over again.
Yet it soon becomes clear that humankind after the flood is no better than before it. The human heart continues to remain the primary impediment to an enduring love relationship with God. The heart, which is less the center of emotions than of our will and freedom, our “secret self,” keeps on sinning in God’s sight. What does it mean to sin? Since the term “sin” comes originally from archery, to sin means literally to “miss the mark.” God sets out the mark of what God desires of us in relationship, and if we fail to reach it, we sin. Sin always relates to God, and signifies the conscious, willful violation of the law of love, the love God has for us, and the love God seeks from us – which includes how we love one another.
What our hearts secretly desire is to be as God. And we all need to face that. We want to be in control and charge of our souls and destiny. We want to be “autonomous,” which means “self-ruling.” Hence, a battle of wills ensues between the heart of the Creator, the Lover seeking to be loved, and the heart of the created. Rather than God, humanity seeks self-satisfaction wherever it may be found, from pleasure to power, plenty to prestige. A stalemate ensues, which continues on a heart to heart basis unto the present hour.
To better understand this dire stalemate, imagine what it would be like to fall hopelessly in love with another and not have that love returned or reciprocated. As humans, you and I cannot change the heart of another who for whatever reason does not love us as we love them. For example, I knew I was in love with the woman who would become my wife a couple of months before she did. Let me tell you, those were difficult months! I did not want to do the wrong thing and blow the relationship. Once she finally came around to loving me, we could at last enter the kind of mutual love relationship which love ever seeks, without which love will never be satisfied or fulfilled. Love yearns for reciprocity.
As humans, we cannot force another to love us as we love them. Yet God is not human, and as both Jesus and the archangel Gabriel said, nothing is impossible for God. From God’s unfathomable, long-suffering will come forth a prophetic vow: “I will change your heart, so that you will love Me with all your heart” (see Deuteronomy 30:6). As God loves us, so shall we yet love God – through God’s own love. Indeed, we can only love God because God loved us first.
What will the God-desired relationship look like, and how will God pull this off? That is at the heart of the Bible story. And that is where Jesus will eventually enter into the narrative, though much precedes His entrance into history. And in fact, it will take more than a thousand years after Jesus’ arrival, death and resurrection, before the union between His heart and our hearts will begin to be show up with dramatic clarity. We are so slow to change; yet God is ever so patient with us. Fortunately for us, a thousand years is as a day to God (2 Peter 3:8).
There is of course a great deal going on in the thirty-nine books of the Hebrew Bible and the twenty-seven books of the New Testament in addition to this theme of romance. Fortunately, you do not have to be that familiar with the Biblical particulars to grasp what is essentially at stake. All you have to do is to identify with God as the long-suffering Lover seeking the Beloved to love back, and become the kind of marital partner God desires for an eternal life together. Is God asking too much of us? Well surely we all want to be happy in love? Should God “settle” or be satisfied with anything less?
Let me emphasize that being God’s Beloved refers both to us as persons and as an entire people. The Bible story concerns you and me in our personal union with God just as much as it concerns God’s covenanted union first with the Jewish people and then with the church established by Jesus Christ, to be culminated in the “New Jerusalem” coming down from heaven, prepared as a Bride for her Husband, as visualized at the end of the Bible.
One final note of importance. The God of my personal knowing is beyond male or female, both of which issue somehow from God, in accordance with the Genesis narrative. And both are equally made in God’s image:
“Then God said, ‘Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness; and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the wild animals of the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.’ So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:26-27).
God is called “He” in the Bible due to the patriarchal nature of the ancient society. Yet as the Apostle Paul says, “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). That also signifies that the resurrected Christ is beyond gender, which accords with my experience. In short, God is greater than and outside the limiting categories of male and female – which is in the end merely a temporary biological distinction, anyway.
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