our God is socially concerned…
NOTE: This is part 3 in a series -- which I did *not* intend on "politics and social concern." Last week, I ended the post by saying:
I believe there are 5 great confessional understandings of the Church concerning
1. God
2. Humanity
3. Jesus Christ
4. Salvation and
5. The People of God -- The Churchthat will ground, inspire, shape, and commission us. Together, these 5 will provide us with a compelling framework for multiplying God’s Kingdom presence in our world today. While I think any one of the above is reason enough, I think holding all 5 together will compel us to engage our world as an act of worship, gratitude, and love.
This week, I am focusing on the first item on that list, "our confessional understanding of God."
We tend to take our confession of God for granted. After all, we are Christians -- of course, we believe in God—this is a no-brainer! But actually, it is a "brainer." The God we worship and confess before the world is neither generic nor limited by His prior designation as the God of Israel. While we share Israel's confession (The Shema):
Hear O Israel the Lord our God, the Lord is one (Deuteronomy 6.4),
we must not let our confession of God be limited to it alone. Our confession of God is distinct because we confess one God:, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ (Romans 15.6; 2 Corinthians 1.3; Ephesians 1.3; 1 Peter 1.3). In a world of "little g" gods, the first Christians were making the radical appeal that this God, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, is the "big G" God over all the nations, not simply Israel alone.
The God we worship and testify to is concerned for everyone regardless of nation, tribe or tongue and for the entirety of every human life—our brokenness, our joys, our concerns, and our yearnings. This God is passionately committed to our reconciliation with Himself and with one another, our restoration to the likeness He has always intended for us to enjoy, and the renewal of all Creation. If this is true, then I believe it has important consequences for how we think about engaging in social issues.
First, God is comprehensively God! He is the God over all Creation, not just the "spiritual." In Him, there is no division between secular and sacred, marketplace and sacred space, mind and heart, justice and love, spirit and flesh, creation care and soul care. Creation is a beautiful, inexpressible, and unimaginable connection of the organic and inorganic, the liquid and solid, and the imperceptibly minute and the immeasurably grand. Life teams with life. There is interdependency and yet perceptible independence. This is all the handiwork of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, through Whom everything was created and now holds together (Colossians 1.15-18). Everything and everyone comes under His care. In fact, I suggest that the more we may limit Him solely to the realm of the spiritual and "sacred space," the smaller He becomes. Someone once said, "If our God is too small, it is because we have made Him too religious." No wonder James spoke of a true religion that was consistent with God's care for everyone: "Religion that is pure and undefiled before God the Father is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself unstained by the world." (James 1.27) Can we truly think for a moment that the God described, for example, in Psalm 104, could remain indifferent to our neglect and poor stewardship over His creation?
Secondly, the God who creates is the God who initiates Covenant. As Christians, we uniquely believe that God has supremely expressed His covenant intent through Jesus on behalf of all humanity, not a single people or nation. Consider this passage from 2 Corinthians 5.16-21, where themes of creation and covenant present:
From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we no longer know him in that way. 17 So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; look, new things have come into being! 18 All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and has given us the ministry of reconciliation; 19 that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us. 20 So we are ambassadors for Christ since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ: be reconciled to God. 21 For our sake God made the one who knew no sin to be sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.
Covenant is a major theme in Scripture, and we cannot understand God or God's revelation without it. Yet we must be careful not to make the same mistake Israel did and reduce Him to "our God" in a way that dethrones Him as the Lord God over all creation. While the Church is a covenant people, God remains committed to rolling back the brokenness and corruption that sin has polluted creation with. Everything that reflects sin's defilement whether that be individual sin and shame, poverty or injustice, war or oppression, barren wombs or divorce, deforestation or extinction -- all come under His watchful gaze.
Consider this passage from Psalm 33:
The LORD looks down from heaven; he sees all humankind. 14 From where he sits enthroned, He watches all the inhabitants of the earth— 15 He who fashions the hearts of them all and observes all their deeds.
Thirdly, our God is the God of justice and justification. Our God is equally concerned with atonement and with human equity.
He upholds the cause of the oppressed and gives food to the hungry. The Lord sets prisoners free, the Lord gives sight to the blind, The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down, the Lord loves the righteous. The Lord watches over the alien and sustains the fatherless and widow, but he frustrates the ways of the wicked. (Ps. 146.7-9)
God's concern for justice, while expected to be expressed among us, is expected to be expressed through us to all people. Here, the prophet Amos is particularly insightful. In the first 2 chapters of Amos, he rebukes Judah for rejecting God's law and turning to idols and Israel for crushing the poor and denying justice to the oppressed (2.4-8). He also prophesies God's judgment on the nations -- on Syria for their cold-blooded cruelty; on the Philistines for capturing whole communities and selling them into bondage; on Tyre for treaty violations; and on Ammon for crimes against humanity in the waging of their warfare (1.3-2.3). Consider God's rhetorical question posed to Assyria: "Who has not felt your endless cruelty? (Nahum 3.19).
Finally, the ministry of Jesus is the anointed expression of God’s redemptive and social concern. Consider the narrative Luke employs to be the lens through which we are to see Jesus' messianic ministry:
When he came to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, he went to the synagogue on the Sabbath day, as was his custom. He stood up to read, 17 and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was given to him. He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:
4:18 “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, 19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
20 And he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down. The eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on him. 21 Then he began to say to them, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.”
Here, then, is the God we confess. His concern is comprehensive, and His love is all-pervasive. But these do not assuage His passion for justice, liberty, and generosity for the poor and the oppressed. We must not let our Gospel appear to limit God's interests, restrain His compassion, or impede His pursuit of justice. Our Gospel and our expression of it should be as broad-hearted as He has revealed His to be.
Let me close this week with these words from John Gladwin
"It is because this is God's world, and he cared for it to the point of incarnation and crucifixion, that we are inevitably committed to work for God's justice in the face of oppression, for God's truth in the face of lies and deceits, for service in the face of the abuse of power, for love in the face of selfishness, for cooperation in the face of destructive antagonism, and for reconciliation in the face of division and hostility. (John Gladwin, God's People in God's World (Downers Grove, 111.: InterVarsity Press, 1979), p. 125.)
(Next week: our confessional understanding regarding humanity.)
