Let’s Relate to God
Dear Friends,
This blog deals with some extremely important issues,
beginning with the mystery of worship. Mystery of worship is such that once you
start exploring it, at every stage of your progress in worship, you will be
awed by its greatness. Let’s take the first step toward it.
To begin with, what is worship? Sounds strange, isn’t
it? But, I assure you that once I move on in this brief discussion from where
we are now, you will understand why I ask this question. It is written in the
Gospel according to St. Matthew, chapter 8 from verses 2 to 4:
“And behold, a leper came and worshiped Him (Jesus),
saying, “Lord, if You are willing, You can make me clean.”
I had read this verse right from my childhood but never
understood its hidden meaning until very recently. The thing to be noted in
this verse is that a man suffering from leprosy comes to Jesus in order to get
healed from his disease. That is his purpose for approaching Jesus. I failed to
notice the import of the phrase ‘worshiped Him’. Where does worship
reside in his action? It is exactly in his attitude and speech. This is what he
says: “Lord, if You are willing, You can make me clean.”
What exactly he is doing here? He accepts that God’s
will is above all…it is supreme. That, exactly, is worship! …Accepting the
supremacy of God’s will. God’s will doesn’t fail. With His will goes His powers
and authority. Very often we hear some people say, “If I don’t do what I say that
I will, I am not Samuel or Suleiman or whatever it is.” Here, they emphasize their
capacity or ability to do what they say, and on that capacity depends their
real identity. But it is a fact that we fail at one time or the other. We are
bound to. That proves that we are human.
By the same token, the fact that God never fails in
fulfilling what He wills proves that He is God. Therefore, when this leper says
that if Jesus wills it to heal him, He will certainly heal him. Of course, the
sick man himself wants to be healed from his disease; but he accepts that his
own will doesn’t matter. He also accepts that what really matters is that Jesus
wills it to heal him. If Jesus wills, He will certainly heal him.
In other words, he asks Jesus to fulfill His will in
his life. That’s prioritizing God’s will in his life. God is glorified in his
acceptance of the fact that the will of God (Jesus) alone does not fail - no
matter what. It is this kind of faith that makes worship. It is this
kind of faith that pleases God.
Indeed, this man has a very peculiar way of declaring
his faith in God. He doesn’t talk about his faith in God. He doesn’t
tell Jesus how bad is the problem he is suffering from. Rather he says that if
Jesus wills, He can heal him. It glorifies Him. Glorifying Him is worship.
But this is not all! When we talk about God’s will, we
need to know His will. But how can we know the will of someone that we cannot
know? In the same way, how can we glorify God in a manner that befits His
Person if we don’t know Him?
This is THE question.
If we don’t know God, we can’t know His will…we can’t
glorify Him. That, exactly, is the reason why God wants that we know Him. The
point is, He is not unknowable. And knowing Him doesn’t mean knowing
that He is God and lives forever in a place called Heaven outside the ken of
one and all. Rather He wants us to be acquainted with Him, be familiar with Him
and, finally, be related to Him. Yes! He wants us to become His relatives. He
wants to build a family and have us as part of His family. He wants us to enjoy
Him for what He is and He literally enjoys our company. He loves us. And,
He loves it to see us love Him.
Now, we all know what family means to us. But if we are
to learn how God sees His family, it would literally humble ourselves by dint
of its greatness and uniqueness. Our understanding of a family is not even a
shadow beside the conception of family that God has. Please note that He wants
us to grasp His conception of a family.
Jesus puts it in simplest terms in the parable of the
prodigal son. I’d like to quote it whole from the Bible. It is found in Luke
15: 11-32. Here…
“A certain man had two sons. And the younger of them
said to his father, ‘Father, give me the portion of goods that falls to me.’ So
he divided to them his livelihood. And not many days after, the younger son
gathered all together, journeyed to a far country, and there wasted his
possessions with prodigal living. But when he had spent all, there arose a
severe famine in that land, and he began to be in want. Then he went and joined
himself to a citizen of that country, and he sent him into his fields to feed
swine. And he would gladly have filled his stomach with the pods that the swine
ate, and no one gave him anything.
But when he came to himself, he said, ‘How many of my
father’s hired servants have bread enough and to spare, and I perish with
hunger! I will arise and go to my father, and will say to him, ‘Father, I have
sinned against heaven and before you, and I am no longer worthy to be called
your son. Make me like one of your hired servants.’
And he arose and came to his father. But when he was
still a great way off, his father saw him and had compassion, and ran and fell
on his neck and kissed him. And the son said to him, ‘Father, I have sinned
against heaven and in your sight, and am no longer worthy to be called your
son.’
But the father said to his servants, ‘Bring out the best
robe and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand and sandals on his
feet. And bring the fatted calf here and kill it, and let us eat and be
merry; for this my son was dead and is alive again; he was lost and is found.’
And they began to be merry.”
This seemingly simple parable contains some very
important information:
1. The
father represents God
2. The
father is someone that both the good son and the bad know. This is important.
It clearly states that both types of people know God. God is not someone
unknown
3. Now
the question is, “If a person knows who the true God is, then why would he
desire to part with Him?” Proverbs 18 from the Bible has this answer to this
question: “A man who isolates himself seeks his own desire; he rages against
all wise judgment.” It means a person who parts with true God is driven by his
desires to follow ungodly ways. He cannot fulfill his sinful desires as long as
he stays with God. So, he chooses to be away from God
4. The
result of having his own way is that this prodigal son gains for a time being
all the fleshly pleasures and loses God’s blessings. He becomes a poor man.
Nobody gains anything when he loses God’s blessings. He only loses. Jesus
clearly states it in Matthew 12:30: “…he who does not gather with Me scatters
abroad.”
5. When
he becomes poor, the time of famine starts. The world, of which company he
enjoyed dearly once, refuses to support him in his bad time. Thus, he gets
firsthand knowledge of the difference between the friendship with the world and
the relationship to God the Father. The world reduces him to the status of a
slave. As a slave, he is given the responsibility to feed the pigs. When he
would grow hungry, he would feed himself with the same pods that he used to
feed those pigs with. As a swineherd, he becomes just like those pigs. Now, he
realizes how stupid he was in rejecting the few responsibilities that he had to
shoulder as the son of the Father. After all, he was rewarded for shouldering
those responsibilities in such a way that it far outweighed the efforts
involved in fulfilling those responsibilities
6. The
positive thing about this prodigal son is that he arrives to a decision to
return to the Father. This is important
7. Significantly,
when this prodigal son is thinking of returning to his Father, he doesn’t know
how eagerly his Father is looking for his return all the time that he is away from
Him. He returns to his Father with a view to be granted a status of His slave
but the Father shows with His attitude that, while all the time that he ceased
to be a son to Him, the Father remained Father. Father didn’t change. Therein
lies the real hope of the prodigal son who represents the mankind that has
forsaken God. If we return to God, He is very much willing to accept us
Now, let’s go deeper into the kind of relationship that
God eyes for us for eternity. Again, it is Jesus who discloses it to His
disciples in John 14:
“At that day you will know that I am in My
Father, and you in Me, and I in you.”
The most obvious meaning of this remarkable statement
of Jesus is that God wants us to be part of His life. When we discuss it
further, we realize how simplistic this meaning actually is. The significance
of this statement is well brought out by the imagery of the body of Christ. The
Church (the believers in Christ) is called the Body of Christ in Colossians
1:18, and Christ Himself is called the Head of this Body. When Christ says that
He is in His Father, the Church also is in His Father.
In other words, we, the believers in Christ are in
Christ and the Christ in God. Thus, we reside in God. The whole thing raises a
vivid picture of God as a building and Jesus and His followers are parts of
this building. To many, this might appear to be an abstract concept which it certainly
is not. I will move on to explain it further…
Please refer to Revelation 3:12 where Jesus is talking
about the Church in Philadelphia (people who belong to this church):
“He who overcomes, I will make him a pillar in the
temple of My God, and he shall go out no more. I will write on him the name of
My God and the name of the city of My God, the New Jerusalem, which comes down
out of heaven from My God. And I will write on him My new name.”
It is very interesting to refer to what Revelation
21:22 has to say about the temple in heaven:
“But I saw no temple in it (New Jerusalem), for the
Lord God Almighty and the Lamb are its temple.”
If there is no temple in Heaven, how can we explain the
reward that Jesus says He would mete out to the members of the Church of
Philadelphia? He says that He would make them a pillar in the temple of God the
Father; how?
The thing is that it is the New Jerusalem that is
called the tabernacle of God in Revelation 21:3. Being pillar in the temple of
God means a place of importance in the New Jerusalem. The person who is made
pillar in the temple of God will never go out of this city. This city is in
Heaven, as we are informed in Revelation 15:5, and it is the same tabernacle of
God. When the New Jerusalem comes down to the New Earth, see Revelation 21:2,
the tabernacle of God takes place among men. That is the time when God will live
with men! And men will be related to God in the same way that a pillar in the
temple of God is related to the temple.
Now, remember, who is the temple in the renewal of all
things? It is the God and the Lamb (Jesus) themselves! The New Jerusalem is no
longer considered the temple of God. Because it is not only the House of God,
it is also our own House. The difference between our house and His is
obliterated when He chooses to live with us. Now, the focus shifts from the
House (Building) to the Relationship.
This is extremely important to understand. It helps us
understand what it means to be a pillar in the temple! It indicates the kind of
existence that the members of the Church in Philadelphia will have when God
starts living with the mankind! They will directly see the face of God Himself...for
eternity!
What are the implications of this bit of information?!
You just have to remember what happens when the believers in Jesus will see Him
face to face when He appears in sky for the event we referred to as the
Rapture.
After Jesus’ Ascension to Heaven, this will be the
first time that they will see Him face to face; but this time they will see Him
in the same glory that He had before the foundation of the Creation. During the
time of His First Coming, He was in the human form; during the time of His
Second Coming, they will see Him in His original divine form. And, when they see
Him as He is in His divine form, they will transform into His image. That
happens because they see Him as He is. How can this happen?
As I have said elsewhere, the body of Jesus represented
the ‘sinful’ mankind. When it was crucified and died on the cross and buried in
a grave, the ‘sinful self’ of the mankind (that believed in Jesus and accepted
Him) also died and buried in the grave. When Jesus was resurrected on the third
day, all the believers (who were dead before Him and those who weren’t dead but
would die after Him) too were resurrected! When the resurrected Jesus returned
to God the Father, so did all the believers in Jesus! There, in Heaven, Jesus
lives in the same glory that was His before the foundation of the Creation.
And, in Him, all the believers also live glorified life.
Hard to understand, isn’t it? Let me explain it
further. Jesus was the fulfillment of all the promises that God held out to the
mankind through Jesus. When we put our faith in Him, and accept Him as Savior,
we possess the promises we have in Him. At the appointed time, we also
shall possess the fulfillment thereof.
To make it even simpler, the glorified self of the
believers is in glorified Jesus. We, the believers, on earth are but shadows of
our real self. When Jesus appears at the time of the Rapture, our glorified
selves will be REVEALED in us, making us also glorified like Jesus. This is a
big, big mystery that not too many people are able to grasp. But, here, you
have it.
This, naturally, brings us to discuss in some detail
the glory of Jesus Christ. According to the Book of Hebrews 1:1-4, we have this
description of Him:
“God, who at various times and in various ways spoke in
time past to the fathers (ancestors) by the prophets, has in these last days
spoken to us by His Son, whom He has appointed heir of all things,
through whom also He made the worlds; who being the brightness of His
glory and the express image of His person, and upholding all
things by the word of His power, when He had by Himself purged our sins,
sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high, having become so much better
than the angels, as He has by inheritance obtained a more excellent name then
they.”
As stated elsewhere, when we become like Jesus, we
become the sons and daughters of the God Most High. It means we shall become gods.
Children of God cannot be human. They are bound to be divine…bound to be
gods. Before we approach God in Heaven, it was must for us to become
like Jesus. That makes us worthy to be presented before God the Father.
When we have glorified existence in Heaven, we acquire
the capacity to be in the presence of God. Because our ‘glorified’ self is free
from sin. Because it is free from sin, it is holy and does not get
destroyed by the glory of His presence. Isn’t that amazing? But, rest assured;
this wonder doesn’t stop here. There is even more to the existence in Heaven
than we have discussed here.
What we gather from this discussion is that the
believers who belong to the Church in Philadelphia hold the promise of being
made a pillar in the temple, that is, God the Father and Jesus Christ. In other
words, their ‘self’ forms part of God and Jesus in Heaven, not the whole.
We are gods; we are not God. I hope you are able to understand this.
The thing is that this particular promise is given to
the believers belonging to the Church in Philadelphia. There are other
believers who belong to other churches. There are Seven Churches in the Book of
Revelation. The believers in Jesus will fall in one or the other of these
Churches in Heaven. And, each of the Seven Churches has a different reward from
God. What kind of reality we would have in Heaven when all these Churches
receive their respective rewards in Heaven from God?!
Well, it will require another blog to discuss it. As I
get time, I write on different topics. I will certainly write to answer the
question I raised here. I hope this discussion helps you in some way.
Please get in touch if you have any query. My Email:
audrephus@gmail.com
BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR
https://www.amazon.com/Bertrand-Hatia/e/B00W7E3BEO?ref_=dbs_p_pbk_r00_abau_000000
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