Originally posted by Adrift
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Jesus may not be our "homeboy", but he is certainly our friend.
The scriptures seem to indicate that, yes, while we are to acknowledge God's glory, and that we should fear and respect his majesty, at the same time, he does want us to come to know him. To love him. To come into a relationship with him that is something like a papa, and a brother, and a friend. Its said that Jesus' use of the word Abba to refer to God was one of intimacy (I'm not sure what the current scholarship is on that though), and the scriptures seem to encourage us to understand God in much the same way.
And not only that, but as New Testament saints, we are filled with the Holy Spirit, the comforter. The one who helps us pray when we don't know what to pray for. I can't imagine anyone closer to us than Him. That's something that the Old Testament saints rarely had access to.
I understand the backlash against the whole Personal Relationship paradigm, especially when Christianity is crowded next to post-modern, new agey spiritualism that wants to make everything nice and squishy for everyone, but maybe we should keep in mind why this paradigm came into being in the first place. It wasn't so long ago that when people thought of Christianity, they thought of screaming pastors spitting damnation and hellfire from a joyless church pulpit, or towering gray Cathedrals that made people feel tiny and insignificant, with robed men reciting a language you couldn't speak.
People were tired of all of that. It was dry, and cold, and dead. By the 60s young people were leaving the church to find a concept of the divine in other places (usually the East). The Jesusfreak movement came up at the tail end of the 60s to remind people, that HEY, Jesus was a man like us. He was tempted in all ways like us. Knowing our suffering, and the consequences of our sin nature, the son of God became a man, who ate, drank, slept, wept, laughed, yelled, hurt, and loved like us. God incarnate, sacrificed his glory for us, and then had that glory restored in his resurrection. The Christian God is about as personal as you can get. Now, this blew people away. This is something they could relate to. This is a God they wanted to come to know. And it changed how so many people actually perceived God and Christianity.
Of course, anytime humans swing one way, we tend to over do it. So yeah, Christ isn't the scary monster trying to send us to hell every moment of our lives, but neither is he the buddy Jesus who wants to toke a doobie with us. Like a lot of things, the truth is someplace in the middle.
The scriptures seem to indicate that, yes, while we are to acknowledge God's glory, and that we should fear and respect his majesty, at the same time, he does want us to come to know him. To love him. To come into a relationship with him that is something like a papa, and a brother, and a friend. Its said that Jesus' use of the word Abba to refer to God was one of intimacy (I'm not sure what the current scholarship is on that though), and the scriptures seem to encourage us to understand God in much the same way.
And not only that, but as New Testament saints, we are filled with the Holy Spirit, the comforter. The one who helps us pray when we don't know what to pray for. I can't imagine anyone closer to us than Him. That's something that the Old Testament saints rarely had access to.
I understand the backlash against the whole Personal Relationship paradigm, especially when Christianity is crowded next to post-modern, new agey spiritualism that wants to make everything nice and squishy for everyone, but maybe we should keep in mind why this paradigm came into being in the first place. It wasn't so long ago that when people thought of Christianity, they thought of screaming pastors spitting damnation and hellfire from a joyless church pulpit, or towering gray Cathedrals that made people feel tiny and insignificant, with robed men reciting a language you couldn't speak.
People were tired of all of that. It was dry, and cold, and dead. By the 60s young people were leaving the church to find a concept of the divine in other places (usually the East). The Jesusfreak movement came up at the tail end of the 60s to remind people, that HEY, Jesus was a man like us. He was tempted in all ways like us. Knowing our suffering, and the consequences of our sin nature, the son of God became a man, who ate, drank, slept, wept, laughed, yelled, hurt, and loved like us. God incarnate, sacrificed his glory for us, and then had that glory restored in his resurrection. The Christian God is about as personal as you can get. Now, this blew people away. This is something they could relate to. This is a God they wanted to come to know. And it changed how so many people actually perceived God and Christianity.
Of course, anytime humans swing one way, we tend to over do it. So yeah, Christ isn't the scary monster trying to send us to hell every moment of our lives, but neither is he the buddy Jesus who wants to toke a doobie with us. Like a lot of things, the truth is someplace in the middle.
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