Guest Series: The Heart of Being

I shared before publishing this guest series a 'taster', to whet the appetites of my readers. This was followed by the first post in this Guest Series: a first for this blog! In that first post we looked at Friendship being at the heart of being human, today we go big and look at relationship as being a part of why we are made.

Recently, a good friend from my old uni sent me an honest and insightful e-mail about how unsatisfying he was finding he was finding his constantly changing social scene. He was meeting so many interesting people, learning about so many lives, living so many memories - why, he asked, did these leave ‘some sort of melancholy about not having someone by my side but only "people", tangential moments, experiences’, why was he left with only a sense of ‘depression?...[G]ranted these will surely shape my future to come...but what about now?’ His powerful words made me really think about what friendships are, why we need them, and what sort of friendships we need. What that led me to, which I’ve fitted into 3 posts here, is that they are part of who we are, they’re part of why we’re made, and they’re at the core of the universe. You can judge if I’m overstating my case. Last time I looked at friendship as at the heart of who we are. Now let’s look at relationship as part of why we’re made...

Last time, I dropped in the idea that ‘[a]s a Christian I believe that we are created - perhaps primarily - as 'relational' things’. I should probably explain that. That’s what I’ll do now.

And I’m keen to, because it - along with the next post - is a fundamentally different way of viewing life from either an evolutionary or overly individualistic, market-driven view of life [don’t worry - this won’t be a socialist rant: I work for the Conservative party!]. Those conceptions of life say (respectively) that life is either: about species survival, and that relationships are merely there to boost the longevity and strength of your wider species; or about personal gain in the ‘race’, and that relationships are still all about you, the individual. But this goes beyond it: life is not about the faceless collective of humanity, or about isolated individuals. It’s about individuals dignified in relationships.

The story of the Bible reveals God to be exactly like this in how he creates us and relates to us. There are two key things right at the start, in Genesis. When God creates man, everything in the world is 'good'. But there is only one thing which is not good - 'it is not good for the man to be alone.' So God creates woman. He doesn’t create thousands at once. He doesn’t leave just one. He makes two for relationship with him and each other. God creates Eve because it is bad for Adam not to be in a friendship with another human being.

The second key thing in Genesis - a little detail that is often missed - is a little phrase in Genesis 3:8 'the Lord God as he was walking in the garden in the cool of the day...called to the man, "Where are you?"' It is (I think) a wonderful picture of God. God is not a CEO, who tells man to run the earth, and then leaves him to do it, until the annual board meeting. He creates man so that he can know him, love him, and live with him. He comes down to the Garden, and walking through to see Adam and Eve personally, to have that friendship - and I think that the text presents this as a regular occurrence.

This is a God who is that close, loyal, loving and sacrificial friend who we all desire. And in that context, 'sin' is us rejecting God's friendship and going our own way (and, for that matter, 'hell' is God letting us make that choice to live without him for ever).

And what is the storyline of the Bible? It is the story of God pursuing humanity, as a friend - of God being continually rejected by his created people (though some turn back to him), but continuing to extend the hand of friendship. Ultimately, this loving pursuit leads to the moment of ultimate love, and of ultimate rejection - Jesus Christ, who claimed he was God, is rejected by his created humanity, and they kill him on a cross: the ultimate rejection; AND YET it is the moment when Jesus, God, takes the price and punishment for humanity's rejection, and saves them from the consequences of what they have done (to anyone who will accept it): the ultimate love. Isn’t that the most beautiful thing you’ve ever heard of?

I saw an episode of American Dad recently, which I can’t help referring to as I close. In one scene, the two kids go to heaven, and are escorted to two doorways to their own ‘personal heavens’. And off they go, on their separate ways to enjoy themselves and gorge their desires. And perhaps that is how society would now describe heaven: everything I ever wanted; in some ways, it’s not dissimilar to the Islamist terrorist who look forward to a harem of virgins in heaven.

But the Bible’s picture is very different. Heaven isn’t about things we get, or experiences we gorge on. We weren’t made for that. Heaven is about the perfection of those relationships we were made for: our God, and our fellow man.