God's Requirements Reflect His Priorities

The life and death of Jesus reflects God's preference for humans over his own well being. Last week I wrote about God's prioritizing of humans (here). This week I will write about how his requirements of us reflect this.

Micah 6:6 is a well known scripture that summarizes what's in the heart of God; here he tells us what really matters most to him about how we live. It's in response to the questions posed in the previous 2 verses which imply that God must want religious sacrifices (prayer, fasting, offerings, worship assembling, etc). The prophet responds strongly by saying no to the religious sacrifices, but rather:

"He has told you, human one, what is good and
        what the Lord requires from you:
            to do justice, embrace faithful love, and walk humbly with your God." (CEB)

Three things: "do justice"; "embrace faithful love (mercy)"; "walk humbly with your God."

There are many different directions I could go with this, but I simply want to point out that what God asks of us is all about our treatment of others and his desire that we do this humbly with him.

The New Testament backs this up with some overarching instructions: Jesus says in Mark 12 that the greatest commandment is to love God and to love others; all of the scriptures are fulfilled in this one commandment. Later Paul says in Romans 13:8-10:

^"Owe nothing to anyone—except for your obligation to love one another. If you love your neighbor, you will fulfill the requirements of God’s law. For the commandments say, “You must not commit adultery. You must not murder. You must not steal. You must not covet.” These—and other such commandments—are summed up in this one commandment: “Love your neighbor as yourself.  Love does no wrong to others, so love fulfills the requirements of God’s law.'" (NLT)

God prioritizes humans; his requirements of us reflect how important people are to him.

People are God's Priority

Jesus said, 'When you see me, you see the Father'. Through his actions and words he was and is continually reinterpreting what we humans understand about God.

One way in which God has been badly misunderstood is in his relationship with the law. Often Jesus bumped up against the religious system and its leaders because their interpretations of the law misled the people. An example of this was Jesus' teaching about the sabbath: 'the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.' His actions backed up this teaching; he would often break the religious rules about keeping the Sabbath by healing and helping people on the Sabbath.

This simple teaching carries profound meaning for our understanding of God. His priority is the well being of humans while religious systems are preoccupied with keeping the rules at all costs. The commandment to honor the Sabbath as a day of rest was intended to serve humans, not to burden us. But the maintainers of religious systems turn the Creator's loving care for humanity into a heavy yoke by making obedience to the rule the issue rather than the well being of the humans.

In his book, Jesus Before Christianity, Albert Nolan says, "Jesus was not opposed to the law as such, he was opposed to the way people used the law, their attitude to the law. The scribes and Pharisees had made the law into a burden, whereas it was supposed to be a service...They were using the sabbath against people instead of using it for them...for Jesus it (the law) was supposed to be for the benefit of people, to serve their needs and genuine interests...Jesus' attitude led to permissiveness whenever the needs of people would not be met by observance of the law, and to strictness whenever this would best serve their needs. The law was made for us, we were not made to serve and bow down before the law."

Jesus' approach to the law reveals God's approach to the law and shows how important human beings are to God. This not only helps us understand what God is like but it empowers us to approach the law in the same manner, seeing humans' well being as more important than strict adherence to the law. This is a challenge to us who want an easy answer to people's problems because it requires genuine care for people and discernment of what God's care should look like in a particular instance.

God's Power: Not the Kind of Power We Wish He Had

I highly recommend Doug Frank's book, A Gentler God. He presents ways of understanding God that are wonderful and that cut across the grain of some of the church's ways of seeing God. His main point is that we need to move away from the idea of "the Almighty" to understanding that God is like the human man Jesus. The following are quotes from this book that, to me, are worth taking the time to consider and to ponder:

"Occasionally...I reach for...some kind of explanation for or defense of the ways of God...Sooner or later, they all force me to choose among five dubious alternatives: 'there is no God'; 'the Almighty is not good'; 'the Almighty could prevent evil, but it would cost us our freedom'; 'Satan causes evil'; or 'trust God, his ways are unfathomable.'

"An answer that makes more sense to me is: 'God is small - a child, like Jesus said. God simply does not have the kind of power we ourselves crave and project onto him - the power that could fix our lives by tinkering with the laws of the universe. In that sense, God is a child.

"Which does not mean that the God whom Jesus is revealing to us does nothing at all...Such a God would not only be powerless, but unresponsive and uncaring. No - God acts, but in the only way that pure love can act: God is continually present in the world, a living spirit that invades reality at every moment and at every place, that speaks as love does - in whispers, unceasingly - into each and every human heart. God's whispers may be heard in our dreams, in the voices of our friends and enemies, in the cries of our hearts, in deep silence...

"If God cannot straightforwardly micro-manage human events so as to rescue the abused child, the tortured prisoner, the cancer victim, neither can God rescue God's very own self, incarnated in Jesus...God can and will hang on the gibbet in utter solidarity with the son, helplessly receiving the cruel blows rained down on the naked, dying flesh of the beloved.

"There is a kind of power in God's whispers. But it is the power of powerlessness. It changes things, but invisibly, unpredictably, unaccountably and, from our point of view, unreliably. It is not the kind of power we imagine, or wish, God to have."

God Does Not Oppress Us with His Will

In his book, The Politics of God and the Politics of Man, Jacques Ellul looks at accounts from the book of II Kings and presents a case for a God who values human dignity so much that He allows us to freely be who we are. In chapter one Ellul writes about the healing of Naaman, saying that God used many different agents in Naaman's life. He points out that none of the people involved in the healing (Hebrew slave girl, king of Syria, Elisha, Naaman's servants) acted under coercion from God but they acted according to their own "bent", at their own "level" and with their own "personal decision." Ellul goes on to remark, "If the story wanted to show us God crushing the will of man and forcing man to do what God wants, then things would have been very simple."

God takes the dignity and freedom of human beings seriously and will not "crush the will of man" and force us to do what He wants. He allows us to be who we are and to act according to our bent, and He takes our small free actions, combines them with the small actions of others and somehow works to produce beauty and goodness.

George MacDonald puts it this way in his book, Knowing the Heart of God:

"God does not, by the instant gift of his Spirit, make us always feel right, desire good, love purity, aspire after him and his will...The truth is this: He wants to make us in his own image, choosing the good, refusing the evil. How could he effect this if he were always moving us from within? God gives us room to be. He does not oppress us with his will. He 'stands away from us,' that we may act from ourselves, that we may exercise the pure will for good."

The marvel and genius of God is not that He is able to get things done because we finally "get our act together" but that He is able to get things done through broken vessels who never really get our act together but who freely move and act according to our bent and personal decision.