Bulletin March 2021
by Bruce Billington
Is God Our Buddy?
This month, as we continue our theme on exploring who God is, we are going to deal with the theme of God’s majesty and our tendency to treat Him like one of our buddies.
In John 15:14 Jesus said, “You are My friends if you do what I command you.” Now this is quite a statement – we can be a friend of Jesus. The first thing we should realise here, is that it is conditional upon walking in His ways – it is not just a right that we can take for granted.
There is a gap between us and God (known as His Transcendence) that we cannot close. So, He must do that and come to us – which is what the first coming of Christ was all about (known as His Immanence). But this should never be allowed to lessen our “awe” of Him. He remains the most holy, majestic God that no human can ever fully know or understand.
God must be utterly beyond our Universe to have any significance within it. It is the same in His relationship with us as humans. Yes, we can become a friend of Jesus but let’s understand what that really means. It means we can now enter the beauty and affection of the Trinity, in Christ. As a result, we begin to discover things about God and also things about ourselves. But we never unravel all the mystery about either God or ourselves. We just begin a journey with Him, which will continue for eternity.
As humans, we need to be in relationships to grow. We cannot do it alone. We spend the whole of our life on earth learning about ourselves, because, just as God is mystery, so are we. Often, we learn things about ourselves when we meet new people. They bring different things out of us that we were not aware of before.
My dear friend and mentor, Dennis Peacocke, often has people saying to him, “you didn’t teach me anything new – you just connected me to something that was deep inside me that I had never got in touch with before.” That’s what fellowshipping with others can do for us. That is what it means in Proverbs 20:5, when it says,
A plan in the heart of a man is like deep water,
But a man of understanding draws it out.
So, coming back to the topic – we can try and become a friend of Jesus, or a lover of His, or a follower of His, but what we must remember is that we cannot GET there – because there is no place to GET to. We can only BE there. It is here that we encounter the true Triune God. At this point we can start to break away from creating a “god” in our own image.
What does creating a god in our own image mean? If you need revenge, you’re going to love a vengeful god. If you like to fight, you’re going to love a warlike god; if you love mercy, you are going to love a god who overlooks sin and holds no one to account. You will focus on these attributes of God at the exclusion of everything else. This is where making God our “buddy” comes from and just doesn’t cut it. We want Him to be our friend so we don’t have to face other attributes of His character.
None of these gods we create, will suffice in our journey of life. Only the one true God will. The indwelling presence of the Holy Spirit within us already knows God, loves God and leads us into His presence. This is not something we achieve – it is something we must do regularly, if we truly want to get to know Him and ourselves.
Of course, His Word comes into play here too. God will never reveal anything about Himself that is not in His written Word. This is our ultimate safeguard.
So how should we get to know our God and ourselves? We have to join the flow of the Trinity by coming into the presence of God. We do this with reverence and respect, with the heart of a child and with a desire to become like Him. The more we are open to the Holy Spirit’s prompting and invitations the greater the perspective of God we will gain. The more we embrace His ways, the more we will embrace the true meaning of life.
Psalm 17 makes an excellent comment here. The Psalmist says, As for me, I shall behold Your face in righteousness; I will be satisfied with Your likeness when I awake.
The Psalmist claims he will not cease to pursue God until he is truly like Him. We have to discover God as He is with great reverence – not try to make Him into someone we would like Him to be.
God bless you.
Bruce Billington