Dear Friends, the writer of Psalm 2 prays, “What is man that Thou art mindful of him?” Don’t we sometimes feel, “Who am I, that anyone cares?” There are times when we feel so inconsequential, at best, or at other times still lower—so despicable or low, so unloved and so unimportant to anyone. People and the world at large can so let us down—or else we can feel we’ve let others down and beat ourselves up about that. But the Psalmist here takes another view and answers his own question saying, “For Thou has made him a little lower than the angels and has crowned him with glory and honor” (Psalm 8:1-2). Surely we long for a place of refuge in which we might be comforted when we feel so small and inconsequential; we long for the crown of glory and honor originally God meant for us. The Bible goes on to say that there is such a welcoming place—“God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble” (Psalm 46:1). The Bible says again and again that we can find compassion and mercy and love—it’s with the God who made us, our eternal refuge. The trouble is that we do fail to be good and loving and just ourselves so often, coming so short of the law of God’s love, that we are only right to feel ourselves condemned. This is why God sent Jesus, who out of love came to bear the just penalty we each have incurred for all our failures to be who God made us to be.
Tintoretto,“Christ at the Sea of Galilee,” 1575-1580 (Public Domain)
Through Jesus, the Father calls men and women even now to eternal loving fellowship, even as He did then, before the crucifixion.
It’s in understanding who Jesus is and what he has done that we can begin to be so very assured of God’s love for us. The heart cry of the Gospel is just this—God does love you, so much in fact, that He sent Jesus, His only begotten Son, into this world to bear in our stead the punishment and shame we each have earned. This is what the cross is all about, for it’s where God made the one “who did not know sin, to be a sin offering” for us, so that we might be made right with God (II Corinthians 5:21).
God’s love is behind it all, but sins—ours and those of others—continually work to make us forget. So how do we reassure ourselves of the fact of God’s love? Look at how God spoke through the prophet Isaiah: “Now this is what the Lord says—the one who created you…" (Isaiah 43:1). He begins with the fact that God is our Maker. And how were we made? It’s important to know that we were made to be in a loving relationship with God. God created you, as the Bible says, “in His image.” This means you and I were created so that we can relate to our Maker, so that we may know Him and enjoy fellowship with Him. In many respects we are like the one who created us “in His image.”
What is the nature of this fellowship God created us to have with Himself? First, it is a fellowship liked to that of a father to a child: “As a father has compassion on his children, so the Lord has compassion on them that fear him” (Psalm 103:13). Being made in the image of God means we’re made in the image of our Father and are invited into fellowship of child to father, even as the prayer Jesus taught begins, “Our Father who art in heaven” (Matthew 6:9).
Then this fellowship to which human beings are called by God is one of friendship. We are told that human beings may be His friends—and to be a friend we must be able truly to relate to one another. God first spoke of a human being as His friend regarding Abraham (Isaiah 41:8). Friends can understand one another—and so, being made in His image and being capable of being His friend, we can see that loving friendship with God is a real possibility for us. And this is part of what it means to be made “in His image.”
God understands us completely and we are capable of understanding Him—though never completely—and so the Psalmist prays, “Give me understanding, and I shall keep thy law; yea, I shall observe it with my whole heart” (Psalm 119:34). Human beings have some understanding of God, being made in His image, but here we see the Psalmist pray for still more understanding that he may know God more and know His love still more deeply—but do we see that this is the very end for which God made us?
We are aware that God is good and just and because we are made in His image we have some understanding of what goodness and justice means, though since disobedience and rebellion against God entered into the human story, His image in us has become tarnished—and yet not so much that we cannot still know our failings, our distance from His goodness and justice, and know that we fall short of it. This, too, is a mark of our being made in His image—we are aware of coming short of how we were made to be. But the word of God here says to us, “Do not fear, for I have redeemed you” (Isaiah 43:1). This refers to the atonement pictured in the ancient biblical system of sacrifices given to Israel through Moses—but above all it refers to the ultimate redeeming atonement—the only one that is finally efficacious—the sacrifice Christ became on the cross, “being made sin for us” so that we might be restored to loving fellowship with God—for God can have no fellowship with unrighteousness, and that is what we are all clothed in apart from the work of atonement accomplished through the one God sent.
Still, our “being made in his image” might lead us to think God could have then left us to ourselves—not particularly wanting fellowship with us. Or we might imagine God has some other disposition toward us than love. But no, the word of God says in place after place that God wants loving fellowship with His creation, or, to be precise, He wants to welcome us into the eternal and loving fellowship with Himself. Did you know that God actually is a “fellowship” into which human beings are invited? Again, how can we know this—that God is “a fellowship”?
In the first words of the Bible, “Beresheet bara Elohim”—“In the beginning God made…”—is a first clue, for this word, Elohim, which is here translated “God,” is plural. In other words, God is hereby shown to be a unity of members: the Trinity, a fellowship of Father, Son and Holy Spirit. They have been in eternal fellowship with one another before the world came into being. Jesus prays on the eve of his crucifixion regarding those who have trusted in him, “That they all may be one, as Thou, Father, art in me, and I in Thee, that they also may be one in us…” (John 17:21). Jesus and the Father and the Spirit (whom Jesus and the Father send to all believers), want to invite human beings into their eternal fellowship, and Jesus came to make a way for men and women to be welcomed into this fellowship, a fellowship of love.
We are capable of such fellowship—we were made for it, and this is what it means to be “made in the image of God.” But here’s how Jesus put it in a prayer to his Father:
I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me…. I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them. (John 17:23, 26).
But the world, having gone so astray from God and from the true love He has for us, works to deprive us of the understanding that we could be beloved of Him. Indeed, darkness in our minds that we inherited from the Fall and amplified on our own has so obscured God that many no longer think that the God of the Bible exists and instead imagine that somehow we are just “thrown” here, that we are accidents of evolution, the products of matter and motion and time which inexplicably exist in some purely material way. Given this view, it is no surprise that we may feel alone and unloved in the world, forced to invent our own purpose, a task beyond daunting and which is finally impossible.
But Jesus came to bring light into this darkness so that as many as will only come to him and believe might be restored to God after having gone so far astray. If we look to Jesus more and more then we begin to see that God’s disposition toward us is love. He alone can enlighten our minds so that we can say, if we are his and learn from his word, “I have more understanding than all my teachers, for your testimonies are my meditation” (Psalm 119:99). But this all seems too much—that the world’s way is not the true way and that God’s way of love is the truth,
But in fact it’s just as the Bible says, “Hasn’t God made this world’s wisdom foolish? For since, in God’s wisdom, the world did not know God through wisdom, God was pleased to save those who believe through the foolishness of what is preached” (I Corinthians 1:20-21).And what is it that is preached? That God sent Jesus to bring us back into the fellowship of love we were made to enjoy forever. But the Bible does say that “the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but it is the power of God to us who are being saved” (I Corinthians 1:18). The way back to this fellowship of love with God is only through the atonement made by Jesus.
”Christ Crowned with Thorns,” by Jacopo Bassano, painted around 1590. (Public Domain)
Pictured above, we see Jesus here being abused of men. He was sent by His Father to redeem us from the penalty our sins have incurred and he came in love, even as Jesus himself said, “Greater love has no man than this, that he lays down his life for his friends” (John 15:13). Hated by the powers of this world, Jesus endured and took the penalty for our sins for us, rescuing us from condemnation that we might be restored to loving fellowship with God.
So with whom are we thus asked to deal? If we consider Jesus with seriousness we find ourselves faced with someone entirely unique—there’s not one person in all history like him: a king who serves the weak and wounded time and time again; a prophet who speaks as no other man ever spoke; a teacher who confounds the wisest men and who delights in the humblest persons being his followers; a friend and defender of women and despised foreigners, promising them that he will give them the kind of water by means of which they will never thirst again; a healer of the most profoundly sick; a sailor who commands the winds and the waves to be still—and they obey him; a savior who purposefully goes to the most hideous of deaths and then asks God, his Father, to forgive his executioners, and one who, in his death, so moved the most hardened of Roman soldiers that their leader declared, “Surely this man was the Son of God” (Matthew 27:54). No, there is no one like Jesus, who was so faithfully testified of by his disciples, who then gave their lives as proof of the veracity of their testimony.
This very same man died and was buried and then was seen alive by many, many witnesses, keeping appointments, eating in the presence of his disciples, speaking to them of his coming kingdom and proclaiming the truth of the love of God that will never die. Here was a man the grave could not conquer, who, having died once, showed himself alive to his followers, promising them they will live forever with him. He came that we might know the love of God.
And yet it is strange that we manage daily to come to places where we are only too ready to believe we are not loved by God and we walk around as though there is not God and as though no one loves us at all. This is because, as the poet once said, “The world is too much with us.” Jesus said he was not of this world and the peace he gives is not as the world gives (John 15:18-19; 14:27). Yet it’s only by God’s grace that we are able to counter the false propaganda of the world which tells us God is dead and that we have no hope beyond the grave, nor hope to escape condemnation in this world even from our own consciences. So how do we remind ourselves of the love of God for us in the face of doubts promoted so powerfully by the world and taking root in our own minds?
Well, let’s ask, Where is the love of God is most wonderfully declared? The answer is plain: it’s at the place where Jesus Christ’s “hour came.” He spoke again and again when he was threatened by those who hated him out of jealousy and pride, of the fact that these enemies couldn’t succeed until “his hour had come.” But at last, the night before he died, he prayed to his Father as he lifted up his eyes to heaven, “Father, the hour has come.” He prayed, “glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you” (John 17:1). The Son of God’s hour was the hours of his dying on the cross, taking the penalty our sins so justly deserve upon himself, completely innocent as he was—a deed which Jesus spoke of in terms of his being glorified and of his glorifying his Father. It’s in this sacrificial love, the only just man who ever lived giving his life, and dying a death, for the unjust and guilty—you and me—that God is most remarkably honored and glorified and reveals His love for us. It’s this manifestation of divine love that characterizes the Father and Jesus and the Spirit and it the proof par excellence of his love. It’s a love we cannot earn and which is freely given, if we’ll only take it, accept it, believe it. Can you believe it? It’s a matter of faith. In the Epistle to the Hebrews we find this:
And without faith it is impossible to please him. The man who approaches God must have faith in two things, first that God exists and secondly that it is worth a man’s while to try to find God. (Hebrews 11:6, Phillips translation).
The Bible tells us this about God’s loving us: God can give us the faith to believe it, and that He sent Jesus into the world to show it; Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father but by me” (John 14:6). His followers gave their lives to tell Christ’s story as we find it in the New Testament; it’s not likely they gave their lives for a story they invented.
Still, our faith is weak and small. What, then, can we do? We must ask, even as people asked in the days of Christ, “Lord, increase our faith” (Luke 17:5-10) and “Lord, I believe, help Thou my unbelief” (Mark 9:23-25). Jesus said, “My teaching is not mine, but his who sent me. If anyone's will is to do God's will, he will know whether the teaching is from God or whether I am speaking on my own authority” (John 7:16-17). If we begin to follow Jesus, Jesus here is saying, then we will find out if his teaching is true, or not.
Regarding his love for us, Jesus said to the disciples on the night of the Last Supper:
As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Abide in my love. If you keep my commandments, you will abide in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and abide in his love. These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full. (John 15:9-11).
The more we seek him, asking the Lord in prayer diligently for understanding, desiring to follow him, the more we’ll know if these things are so, and so our faith will grow, and as it does, the more we will know the joy that comes only from knowing God. May the Lord help us, then, to seek him that we may know his love and the joy of knowing Him! God bless you.
~Paul Cooke
