His (In)visible Presence

For throughout all their journeys, the cloud of the LORD was on the tabernacle by day, and there was fire in it by night, in the sight of all the house of Israel.Exodus 40:38 (NASB)

Throughout their desert wanderings the nation of Israel had the visible presence of God in their midst. Cloud and fire was with them, cloud and fire led them through. It was a visible manifestation of His sovereign presence that gave them the direction they needed to take. Yet still they stumbled, even in His very presence. You could say the nation of Israel stumbled their way through the Old Testament. Complaining about the food, the water, whatever. Gaining their freedom in God's presence by His visible Hand and complaining about leeks and onions. Getting up every morning to pick up the very bread baked by God and grumbling about something.

I am convinced we would do no better than they did, so no smirking or feeling superior.

We do not have His visible presence, but we do have Him anchored in our life. He is not visible, but He is not hidden, not shrouded form us. He can very much be the center of our life. If we have trusted Jesus as our Savior, as the only means of our salvation, we have the indwelt Holy Spirit in our lives. So we have a better deal than Israel, not just God with us but in us. And even with that, we still stumble through our sinful and sin filled lives (I told you no smirking).We stumble, but He is there to catch us.

Good thing, as it is the only way I am getting through it all is that He did and continues to do the work I cannot and never will be able to do; being perfect before a Holy God. Trusting in the Son to reach the Father whom He revealed to us, doing it all through the agency of the Holy Spirit.

Good thing He is who He is, because of who I am and will always be.

A Trinitarian Worldview - Part VII: Love and Forgiveness; Time and Space

The last part of my worldview review deals with areas that can tie you up in knots because of what can appear to be contradictions. But as we have stated before, can we really expect as finite beings to fully fathom the infinitely divine?

Can a perfectly just and holy God forgive? Yet we know Him as a merciful and gracious God. How can He maintain His holiness and yet extend us such grace? If He is holy and just He cannot forgive, but if He is merciful does He lose His moral absolute?

for the demonstration, I say, of His righteousness at the present time, so that He would be just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus.
Romans 3:26 (NASB)

He is God and He is both the just and the justifier of those who believe in Him. He can do it because He has chosen to do so. Rather than question, I would have us be thankful. For quite frankly, the alternative is none too encouraging to entertain.

God is both within and outside of time and space. He was before time and space (that is, he was before the creation that He Himself created). He created all, but His participation and sustaining of creation means that in the end, it has no end, because He has deemed eternity for us.He has entered into history of His own choosing and as such, can give us the everlastingness we need for eternal existence. There can be none without Him.

Can you think of other points you and I need to ponder about the glorious God we serve?

He is the biggest of ideas and well beyond even that. In the scope of all history, He is the metanarrative that makes a short story out of all else.

A Trinitarian Worldview - Part VI: The Imago Dei in Relationships

How does the Trinity impact our worldview of relationships? How are we to take the attributes of the Godhead and candle our actions within our spheres of activity?

Looking at three areas: family, church and society you see some commonalities that enable you to develop a trinitarian worldview in a way that can be used consistently across your relationships.

Starting with family, you need to start with marriage. The marriage relationship most closely models the Trinity of all human relationships. You seek to make the other partner known within the context of the marital bond, which should be the strongest of all human bonds. You look to communicate with each other in the most intimate, honest and vulnerable of fashions. You enjoy each other in companionship, fellowship and friendship. You make audible expressions of love, expressions of pleasure and make known your desires to please each other. You give honor to your mate, you give gifts.You work with and for each other, you seek to submit yourself to your partner knowing the same is being done for you. You become part of each other, learning to trust and abide in each other during good times and bad, pleasure and pain, success or suffering.

You see in the marriage relationship all these coming through when one honors a partner the way the Three within the One give honor to each other. As you step into familial relationships, these become writ large on a family unit, you may lose the marital intimacy between a man and wife, but these actions are still there in a God honoring family situation.

As you move to the church setting you continue to stress the honor of others, less intimate perhaps, but with a continued mutuality. In providing glory to God and a witness to a Christian walk, these continue into societal relationships in general.

In all of these you look to avoid headship abuse, a leader must have a servant's heart, an attitude to servitude in order to effectively model biblical leadership. There should be willing submission to leadership not hostility in having to submit. If the honor and trust inherent in the Trinity are showing forth in human relationships, that should not be a burdensome ask. There should be an honoring of biblically based law and orderliness. Anarchy is not God glorifying.

As you look at your relationships, are you modelling these behaviors. Are you willing to take the first step towards a trinitarian view of how you can be a part of a bigger whole in joy and peace with God?

A Trinitarian Worldview - Part V: Being Relational

Our personaity, or who we are, is grounded in who God is. We are persons, we are relational because God is a personal, relational God. You have heard it said that you are what you eat. It is more appropriate to say we are who He is:

²⁶Then God said, "Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth."

²⁷God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.

²⁸God blessed them; and God said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth."

Genesis 1:26-28 (NASB)

What does that mean for us? We hold certain characteristics as a result of being mad ein His image to rule over the creation He made. As a result of this we are:

• Creative: we enjoy the visual and performing arts, we enjoy making things
  
• Communication: we dialogue in community, speaking and listening to each other
  
• Objective: we engage in the study of science and history
• Emotive: expressing joy, sadness and anger
• Mortal: Unlike an eternal God, we live through cycles of birth and death. But I feel we must in order to look up to the divine form our positions as fragile and mortal and in need of His protection
  
• Friendly: we seek out and engage in community
• Intimate: we look for and cherish romantic and sexual relationships. However, they can only reach the full potential designed by God if fulfilled in the man and woman marraige bond. This comes closer to the intimacy felt within the Trinity than any other human relationship can.
  
• Just: we seek to exercise justice, but hopefully tempered with mercy
• Discerning: we can distinguish between fantasy and reality (well, most of us can most of the time)

As we engage in these characteristics we are more or less like God in how we carry them out, depending on our individual characters and the circumstances we find ourselves in.

Are there one or more of these that really click with you as bringing closer in relationship with God because you feel you model them more as He would have you rather than less?

A Trinitarian Worldview - Part IV: As Long As You End Up at God

One of the things I have been thinking about a bit is the differences in trinitarian views looking at it from the western church or the eastern church perspective:

• The western perspective is to view the Trinity with emphasis on the Oneness of God. Essentially looking at the Godhead from the unified essence that is God, looking out from the One into the Three.
• The eastern perspective is to view the Trinity with emphasis on the three Persons of the Godhead and their relatedness to each other. Essentially looking at the Godhead more from the roles each of the three persons of the trinity take on in constituting the One, looking in from the Three into the One.

That has ramifications on what might get stressed in a worldview one would take. A western perspective would focus more on God's sovereignty and the predestination that is inherent in His sovereignty. An eastern perspective would focus more on human freewill and how it relates to God.

I have to admit there are parts of each view that I like. I like having a totally sovereign God that predetermines the course of events. it allows me to place the utmost value that affords me: my fate and future in the hands of a sovereign God who is merciful, wise, just and gracious. But I also like the focus to be on how I relate to God because it puts some burden on me to explore my feelings to and my obedience with the will of God.

However you approach it, you should wind up in the center with a Triune God, the God of the Bible, our God in all His divine glory. if you do not, I feel you are doing something off kilter.

As you view how you approach your view of God, do you feel more the western or eastern influences of the picture of the Trinity?

A Trinitarian Worldview - Part III: God Before Us or Without Us

One concept I have been pondering is the fact that God as a divine, eternal being, existed before Creation. Even before He created everything ex nihilo, out of nothing, He was.

Tertullian: “…before all things God was alone, being his own universe,
location, everything. He was alone, however, in the sense that there was nothing external to himself.” Adversus Praxeas 5

Tied into the fact of God's self existence is His self-sufficiency. He did not need us, yet He created us. I think it is testament to His love and grace that He would choose to share Himself with us. I wonder if given the chance to create out of nothing, we would do the same? I hardly think so.

It occurred to me that in His eternal existence prior to creation, the proper view would have been one of pantheism. God is everything and everything is God; because God is the only thing. Maybe unitheism? But I digress.

The point I wanted to make was that thinking about the fact that accepting that God always was, and was before creation, is a call to faith in the divine:

• We really do not know how much we do not know about God
• We must believe that, as a gracious and loving God, He has revealed all we need to know of Him as we live our lives on this earth
• Whatever our conceptions about God, we probably color them with our human conceptions, and the divinely infinite can never be totally understood nor explained by the finite.

If you were to describe the reason(s) God created us, what would you say they are?

A Trinitarian Worldview - Part II: Some Groundrules

I'd like to lay out some of the basics of what it means to hold to a trinitarian worldview. At least, what it means to me. Here are a few of my thoughts:

• You have to hold to the Triune God of the Bible. You need to believe in the Imago Dei (see yesterday's post) and that our basic personalities and the dignity of the individual are grounded upon the bedrock of the fact that we are made in the image of God. You have to approach the world believing in Christian monotheism.
  
• You have to hold that God is the center of everything. I am not talking pantheism where God is everything and everything is God. But you have to believe in His sovereignty, His total control of Creation. If He is not your reason for living, you are missing something.
• You have to hold that God is bigger than everything. He is outside of creation in His transcendence, He is within creation in His immanence, but He is not everything and everything is not Him.
• You can never completely emulate Him, but you must not stop trying. We are to run the good race, we are to finish strong. God knows we cannot get there without Him, but He wants us to try anyway.
• While God is the center of it all, our focus is on His Son. He saved us, we are to be like Him to the extent we can.

I'd like to hear what you have for some of the ground rules you may hold on a Trinitarian worldview; a view which I believe is the appropriate Christian worldview that one should hold to.

A Trinitarian Worldview - Part I: Imago Dei

I have decided to rerun a series of posts that I wrote for another blog I was writing for a bit but have since stopped. It is on my thoughts around a worldview revolving around the concept of the Trinity. I think it is would be worthwhile to re-engage some dialogue around this so over the next 7 days I will rerun the series, with some minor modifications. For those of you who read and commented on the series in the other blog, my profuse apologies, but this has been on my mind and I wanted to air it again. I beg your patience and pardon.

The series begins with the concept of the Imago Dei, the Image of God. Simply put, Imago Dei asserts than we are made in the image of God.

²⁶Then God said, "Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule
over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the
cattle and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that
creeps on the earth." ²⁷God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.

Genesis 1:26-27 (NASB)

I believe it is important to start with this fact because if we are created in His image, we should share some of His attributes, even if we are imperfect in our sinful nature. Our worldview should be shaped by who we are in relationship to God.

Who are we? In the broadest of senses we are:

• Capable of thought, reasoning, voluntary activity. We are emotional, we can love, hate, grow angry, happy or sad. We are relational, we seek out others in community, we seek out our Creator in praise and worship.
• Capable of creative activity. We look to learn, to build, to make new things out of old things. We fall short of being able to create out of nothing, but we are driven to create nonetheless.
• Capable of dominion. We seek to control our environment, others and often at our peril, our God.
• Capable of thought beyond this life, Unlike animals who are in the moment at all times, we can look beyond today and even tomorrow. We can plan and anticipate, and even ponder eternity.

These are attributes that mirror, although dimly, our divine Creator. But it is the very things He bestowed on us to make up be in His image that can be the root of our destruction. In our sin, we often think and act against God, taking the gifts He has given us and try to come out from under His sovereign will.

Are there other aspects/characteristics/attributes you see in us under the Imago Dei?

Forget Not The Present

I wrote yesterday about not getting too hung up in current events. The operative word is too. You cannot ignore this world either.

Thus Paul rightly persuades us to use this world as if not using it; and to buy goods with the same attitude as one sells them...Let this be our principle: that the use of God's gifts is not wrongly directed when it is referred to that end to which the Author himself created and destined them for us, since he created them for our good, not for our ruin.
John Calvin - Institutes of The Christian Religion: 3.10.1-2

To ignore what God has given us to work with in the world is almost as bad as ignoring God. Ignoring the world is as bad as obsessing about it. What God wants for us is focus and balance: focus on Him, balance in our doing His will in this world while we wait for Him to bring us to the next.

¹⁹"Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit,

²⁰teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age."

Matthew 28:19-20 (NASB)

You cannot fulfill the Great Commission if you ignore the world; nor can you do it if you obsess on it.

So it is all about balance with the proper focus. Look at the Holy Trinity and how there is perfect balance and focus within that divine relationship.

Taking the steps we can take. Eyes on Jesus, listening to His words, hearing and seeing the world as He did. Going back to the future but not forgetting the present. And how can we do that?

⁸Jesus Christ is the same yesterday and today and forever.

Hebrews 13:8 (NASB)

Balance and focus.

A New Blog!

I started a new blog today, A Trinity of 3, for a seminary project. it will explore people's thoughts and issues with the concept of the Trinity. Please stop by and comment, you would be helping this poor student out on a class assignment if you did.

Get to talk about on of the deepest concepts in religion, and further the cause of education, all in one blog visit and comment.