What does God have to do with us? God is with us

Emmanuel

The best way to determine what God has to do with us is to listen to God’s own testimony in Scripture. The first and most important of those testimonies is this: God is with us; “I will place my dwelling in your midst, and I shall not abhor you. And I will walk among you, and will be your God, and you shall be my people” (Leviticus 26:11-12). These verses from Leviticus are one of many examples of God’s promise to Israel: God will be their God. God will remain close to them. The people of Israel will be a blessing to all the earth (cf. Genesis 18:18). And
the promised one, the one who is to be a savior to his people, will bear the name Emmanuel: “God with us” (Matthew 1:23).

God is close, but God remains the Other. God’s closeness does not at all mean that God is subject to our control or will submit to our comprehension. The God who is our God, the God who is close to us, remains God: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts” (Isaiah 55:8-9). God is utterly near, yet utterly transcendent.

This nearness of God to the world is not a matter of necessity. It is God’s choice. It is a choice made out of love. The well-known (almost too well-known) passage, John 3:16-17, makes this clear: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life.” We are so familiar with the last half of this verse that we tend to overlook the first. God loves the world. God remains near to the world because God loves it. All of God’s dealings with the world, including God’s dealings with us, are shaped by this love: “For I, the LORD your God, hold your right hand; it is I who say to you, ‘Do not fear, I will help you’” (Isaiah 41:13).

The threeness of the love of God

God’s love reflects God’s being. The God who is Father, Son and Holy Spirit is the God who creates, redeems and sustains. The doctrine of the Trinity, as it is found in the Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds of the early church, is not only an expression of who God is, it is also the result of the perception of what God does. It describes God’s nearness to us.

The nearness of the creatorThe Bible starts with the declaration that God created the heavens and the earth — that is, everything. This assertion (along with the first three chapters of Genesis) has become the rope in a tug of war between religion and science as to what is taught in our schools.

It need not be so. Already in the third century, the Christian theologian Origen of Alexandria argued that God intended the creation story in Genesis to be interpreted symbolically — that there were teachings about creation in the text that transcended the
literal level.

Whether one interprets Genesis 1 literally or symbolically, there are two very plain lessons in the text, lessons that are the result of faith rather than empirical investigation. First, creation is on purpose. Second, creation is good.

Creation is on purpose. It is not the result of chance or accident. The step-by-step story in Genesis 1, the story that begins with light and finishes with humanity, stresses that each step was the result of the will and work of God. Moreover, each step receives God’s benediction. Over and over again, God’s blessing and approval is reiterated: “And God saw that it was good.” When God perceives the whole, the blessing is intensified: “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). The creation was made by God, and it was well-made.

Moreover, creation is ongoing. God’s work and God’s blessing continues:

You crown the year with your bounty;
your wagon tracks overflow with richness.
The pastures of the wilderness overflow,
the hills gird themselves with joy,
the meadows clothe themselves with flocks,
the valleys deck themselves with grain,
they shout and sing together for joy.
(Psalm 65:11-13)

The God who creates, then, is near to us in the ongoing goodness of creation, which is the very expression of God’s purposeful love. We exist because God loves us.

The nearness of God the redeemerBut why is there sin in God’s good creation? This question is inevitable and unavoidable. The story in the first three chapters of Genesis is not just the story of creation. It is also the story of the entrance of sin into that creation: The man and the woman disobey God and eat the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. That is precisely what they get. Rather than knowing only good, everything they (and their children, the whole of humanity) know is a mixture of good and evil.

Just as in the story of creation, the story of the rise of sin in creation does not have to be literal in order to be accurate. Each of us, every human being, at some point in life, ingests the knowledge of good and evil. We do well and we do ill. The anguish that Paul expresses is woven into all of our lives: “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do” (Romans 7:19).

But God did not leave it there, for the God who creates is also the God who redeems. Christians understand the entire Old Testament, which recounts the history of the people of Israel, to be the story of the redemption that culminates in Jesus Christ. God did not allow sin to have the last word or death to triumph. The entire New Testament is summarized in these words of Paul: “In Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us” (2 Corinthians 5:19).

The nearness of God the redeemer is expressed in the story of Jesus Christ, the incarnate Lord. He is near to us because he is one of us: “a body of our body, flesh of our flesh, and bone of our bone,” as the Scots Confession puts it. This means that Jesus experienced every human experience except that of deliberate sin. He knew grief and joy. He knew suffering. He knew friendship. He knew love. He knew exhaustion and rest. He ate, he drank, he slept, he prayed. Above all, he knew the feeling of having been abandoned. Jesus’ cry from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46) is the cry from the hospitals and prisons and graveyards and battlefields and all the other places where humans suffer without solace.

But Jesus was not forsaken, and neither are we. The cross did not bind him and death could not hold him. He was and he still is Emmanuel, God with us. Even when we do not recognize him or fail to be aware of his presence, he is with us. The story of the disciples on the Emmaus road, who encountered Jesus as an unknown stranger (Luke 24:13-35), is our constant story. The redeemer is near to us, even when we do not know it. In his suffering and in his glory, he is our salvation.

The nearness of the sustainerThe Westminster Confession, following the Nicene Creed, calls the Holy Spirit “the Lord and Giver of life.” There follows a long list of activities ascribed to the Holy Spirit. Notable among them is the Spirit as unifier: “By the indwelling of the Holy Spirit all believers being vitally united to Christ, who is the head, are thus united one to another in the Church, which is his body.” This is somewhat ironic, since the understanding of the Holy Spirit has often been a point of division among Christians. Some, notably in charismatic congregations, emphasize the Holy Spirit almost to the point of exclusion of the other persons of the Trinity. Others, particularly in the so-called mainline denominations, seem to regard the Holy Spirit as something not quite nice to talk about.

A valid understanding will not separate the Spirit from the rest of the Godhead, nor will it see the Spirit as something that separates Christians from each other. It will regard the Spirit as the presence of God in our individual daily lives, in the life of the church and the life of the world. The Spirit is in all and present to all.

“The Spirit helps us in our weakness,” wrote Paul (Romans 8:26). He was talking about prayer, but it is true across the board. We are often weak, and sometimes weaker than we know. Yet the Spirit of God supports and sustains us, giving us the strength to endure and persist, and uniting us to our redeemer and our creator. The ancient prayer, “Come, Holy Spirit,” should always be on our lips and in our hearts, for, as the hymn reminds us, when we confide in our own strength, our striving is but losing.

Life in the presence of God

God, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, is our creator, redeemer and sustainer. Without God’s help, we would flag and fall, mired in sin, our very existence in doubt. We know this in theory, but in practice we tend to cry out for God when we fail and congratulate ourselves when we triumph.

One of the fundamental disciplines of the Christian life is this very simple thing: remembering that there is a God. At least, it is simple to say. Doing it can be rather difficult. We live with so many distractions and temptations that we ignore or forget the fact that we are living in the presence of God, and that God is not just observing, but is constantly creating, redeeming and sustaining.

The presence of God in our lives does not depend upon our awareness of the presence of God in our lives. We can and should give thanks for that. The God who is God, the God who is beyond our comprehension and at the limits of our awareness, remains ever near and nothing can separate us from that God. What does God have to do with us? Everything.

DAVID W. JOHNSON is associate professor of church history and Christian spirituality at Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary in Texas. He is an ordained teaching elder and author of “Trust in God: The Christian Life and the Book of Confessions.”