Relationship
This is the third entry in a mini series in which I’m trying to clearly and specifically name what I believe and why.
“Christianity is about having a relationship with God.” This is a simple statement, that most Christians - certainly most in charismatic evangelical circles - would agree with. And although I’ve wrestled with the idea before, I’ve come to the conclusion that I agree with it too! But I’m currently in the process of trying to clearly and specifically name what I believe and why. And the idea of having a relationshipwith God or a relationship with Jesus is one that is hard to get your head around:
How do you relate to a being or person you can’t see, or touch, or have a face to face conversation with? What do we mean when we talk about having a relationship with God? What does it look like?
Recently I’ve been thinking about how our relationship with God is a whole new category of relationship. We know that different relationships naturally look different and we’re used to adapting to this. So the way we relate to our parents is different to how we relate to our siblings. The way we behave around our friends is different to how we behave around our teachers. The kinds of conversations we have with our colleagues are different to the ones we have with our bosses. The ways we contact and speak to our local MP’s, are different to the ways we contact and speak to our pets.... etc etc etc
I believe our relationship with God is different to all these other relationships. But this leave us with the difficult task of trying to explain or define it. And when we try, we naturally end up drawing on our understanding of lots of other relationships to help us. There’s nothing wrong with this because we absolutely need to use these things we do understand to help us understand what we don’t. The authors of the Bible did this. They used the following relationships people understood to help them understand what our relationship with God is like:
He is our Friend
He is our Master
He is our Husband
He is our Father
He is our King
He is our Fortress and Protector
He is our Helper and Provider
He is our Judge
He is our Shepherd
Some of these parallels are helpful. But in using them to describe our relationship with God we often fall into the trap of relating to God in just one or two of these ways. For me, I find it really easy to think of God as my Father, but not so easy to think of Him as my King. But we only get a decent understanding of what our relationship with God should actually look like when we pull all of these different ideas together, and we don’t have one single parallel relationship in our lives that helps show us what that looks like... Or do we?
God = dog backwards... Coincidence!? Well, yes. Obviously! But someone I know made a really interesting observation the other week that I haven’t been able to get out of my head: Perhaps the best parallel we have for describing what our relationship with God looks like, is the relationships of a dog to its owner. You might be thinking right now that I’m absolutely crazy, or I’m pulling your leg here. But think about it.
Imagine that we are a dog, and God is our owner:
The starting point of the relationship is that God loves us. We are drawn into loving him because he first loved us, and we can’t help but mirror that. On one level we are best friends. On another level though he is very much the master and in charge so a healthy level of respect and reverence is important! He is like our king in that he is leader of our pack - in fact he is Alpha male of all packs. He gets to set the culture we have to learn and live by.
He is a good master and loves us deeply so of course He will take care of us: he feeds us and provides for us and protects us - even if we’ve been bad and dug up the carpet! We might get disciplined by him but we don’t get rejected. We look to please and serve him out of our love for him - because to make him happy makes us happy. We share in each others joys and sorrows.
The reality is that he is independent from us, he is other, a different species (Holy!). But there is a deep connection between us - we’re part of his family. We will never speak the same language - but we can still communicate with and understand one another. We can learn to “sense” what God is thinking, feeling, or saying. This just takes time and practice. The more time we spend together, the more we will understand him. And unlike us - he is constant, so he always responds the same way to us which means we don’t have to second guess Him.
He constantly calls us to him because he wants to spend time with us. If we’re not in the mood or we don’t come, he leaves it be.
Like all the other relationship parallels, this one isn’t perfect. Of course not everyone will understand it. Of course you can stretch it and manipulate it. Of course some people will have had a bad experience of dogs or pets and so will be put off it. But I personally found it really helpful! It certainly helps frame our relationship in a new way that names more specifically what it actually looks like.
The truth is, however you understand it, our relationship with God is always going to be different to any other relationship that we have. It will always be slightly mysterious. Whatever parallel helps you work out what it looks like, I’d love to hear it. But one thing we hopefully all share in common is this:
Isn’t it amazing that God is interested in having a relationship with us!?
