Living Relationship
When you have a connection with
someone what do you call it? You might say you have a friendship with that
person. Or you have a relationship with them. My Fiancé and I have a
relationship, but what does that mean? Well, we communicate, we spend time
together, we hold each other, and we laugh together. We are in a growing,
developing, and loving friendship. The concept of a relationship is an abstract
idea. We use the word to refer to something that is alive, it can grow and die,
it can feel, be strained, and hurt. Yet, it is not tangible. A relationship
cannot be touched, or heard, or seen. However, it is an intangible description
of something real, something that really does exist, but its existence is
housed in our relationship with each other. If our relationship stumbles on
rocky ground and we end up breaking up (God forbid) than that is the end, we
have killed the relationship, it has died, it ceases to exist.
I believe God gave us the ability to
enter relationships with each other to reveal another layer or dimension of His
character, a living, and growing experience between himself and the Son and
himself and us. This is where the Holy Spirit is explained. The Spirit of God
is not a person, or a created being, just as God is not a person or a created
being. The Holy Spirit is a complex idea that represents something about the
One True God. Bear with me as I walk through some scriptures that prove this
point. Romans 5:5 says,
“And this hope will never
disappoint us. We know this because God has poured out his love to fill our
hearts through the Holy Spirit he gave us.”[1]
So
God’s love is somehow tied together with the Holy Spirit. Now read Romans 8:16,
“And the Spirit himself
speaks to our spirits and makes us sure that we are God's children.”[2]
The
Spirit of God is a surety that we are connected to God in a way. It gives us
confidence that we are not alone. 2 Corinthians 1:22 states,
“He put his mark on us to
show that we are his. Yes, he put his Spirit in our hearts as the first payment
that guarantees all that he will give us.”[3]
The
Holy Spirit is a mark distinguishing a relationship. Now move to 1 John
5:14,15,
“We know that we have left
death and have come into life. We know this because we love each other as
brothers and sisters. Anyone who does not love is still in death. Anyone who
hates a fellow believer is a murderer. And you know that no murderer has
eternal life.”[4]
The
Holy Spirit gives us the confidence that we are alive in God and not dead. And
we know we have the Spirit when we have healthy relationships with other
people! How did God teach this to us though? God taught it to us through His
love, manifested in His Holy Spirit, just as Romans 5:5 said. Paul says in 2
Corinthians 13:14,
“The grace of the Lord
Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Ghost, be with
you all. Amen.”[5]
The
Holy Ghost is communion with God! It is that living, growing, experiencing
relationship between two individuals. This is where the Holy Spirit begins to
exist in our own life, when we have a relationship with God. The Bible says in
James 4:5,
“Do you think the Scriptures mean nothing? The Scriptures
say, "The Spirit God made to live in us wants us only for himself."[6]
This doesn’t sound right. God made the Spirit to
live in us? Does this mean that unless we allow a relationship with God, the
Spirit does not exist? In a way, yes. The Spirit of God is not something to be
grasped, or to be “poured” out per se. The Spirit of God is a living, breathing
relationship. The Spirit has always existed in the universe because the Spirit
is God. When Jesus was on earth, that relationship with His father was hampered
by humanity. He was no longer in contact with the divine mind of God because
the finite human body cannot house the infinite mind of God. Jesus had to rely
on the finite human relationship He could develop with God. Thus Jesus spent
time alone, and much time in prayer with His father, seeking to develop that
relationship as closely as He could. Jesus was nurturing the Holy Spirit.
This was so because God was revealing to humanity
how we can relate to Him, that though we have frail intellects and created
existences, we can have a real relationship with God. Jesus was answering the
charge of Satan. Satan assumed that God was being unfair, that He was
withholding power from the created. Jesus came to reveal that God had indeed given
to all of creation the ability to be one with Himself. It was most drastically
seen in humanity since we had fallen and deserved it least. The Holy Spirit is
friendship with God, what Jesus had with His father, is available to all.
This explains why a loving, forgiving God cannot
forgive the sin of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, because blasphemy against
the Holy Spirit means, purposefully engaging in actions that destroy the
relationship you have with God. Remember our discussion about Lucifer in the
last section of this chapter? Satan could not be forgiven, not because God did
not wish to forgive him, and not because God wanted him to suffer, but because
Satan rejected the relationship he had with God, a relationship that was
present since the dawn of creation.
God cannot force. Force is against
His character. Everything ever created was given the choice of being in a
loving relationship with their maker, or choosing to reject that love and
destroy the Spirit that existed between them and God. This is the truth of
freewill. God cannot force individuals to love Him, for if love were forced, it
would cease to be love. Love is given out of a willing heart. When Satan became
jealous of God, and desired equality with the creator, he severed his relationship
with God. It was not that God was withholding equality from Satan, but simply
that God cannot make a creation in to himself, anymore than Steve jobs could
have made his iPhone a clone of himself. By existing, Satan was already in the
highest form of equality with God that a created being can attain, for
existence is contained inside the intellect of God. Instead of recognizing
this, Satan rejected the love of God. Of his own freewill, Lucifer killed the
relationship, destroyed the Holy Spirit and sought to over throw the peace of
heaven. God was forced to allow Satan to leave, because God could not force
Satan to love.
Can the unpardonable sin be
rectified? Yes, you have no fear that you have committed the unpardonable sin.
The sin is only unpardonable so long as you continue to reject the call of God
to enter a relationship with Himself. God can do nothing until you give Him
permission to work in your life. And for those of you praying that God would
“pour” His spirit out on you, stop! God has already given it freely! He is
waiting for you to develop what is already waiting. The Spirit is not something
to all of a sudden be given, at which time you will be given power and ability.
No! The Spirit is a relationship developed with a loving creator! You must see
God as He is. You must discover Him for who He is. He is not a God to be
appeased, or feared. If God exists, He is love, and by that revelation of His
character, you will discover a friend, not an authority, a trusted confidant,
not a judge.
The story of Elijah illustrates this
point very well in 1 Kings 18. Israel had turned their worship to ba’al, and
thus, at the prayer of Elijah, God withheld the rain in all the Middle East for
three years. “Why was the worship of ba’al such a bad thing?” I ask. “That’s
easy!” you might think. “After all ba’al was a false God.” Let me explain to
you who ba’al is. Ba’al, in Hebrew, means husband. God calls himself ba’al many
times in the bible. Speaking of himself as Israel’s husband, God calls himself
ba’al. Ba’al was the son of El, the almighty God, and creator of the universe.
Ba’al fought with the great serpent, who was the father of death, destruction,
and storm. In that fight with the serpent, ba’al was killed, but was raised to
life by El, and brought with him healing and life to all. Does this sound
familiar? What was wrong with the Israel essentially worshiping Jesus? It was
this, the people had lost sight of the character of God. They began to see God
as a God of anger, who was mad at the sin of the world and had to be appeased.
Thus they offered sacrifices to appease god’s wrath and anger.
Through Elijah, God says, “That is
not me! I am not a God who must be appeased. I am not a God who requires death
for sin.” God requires a relationship. He requires that you allow Him to give
you the greatest gift of God, the gift of the Holy Spirit, the gift of
relationship. That is why God would not answer the prayers of the priests of
ba’al on Mt. Carmel. He desired to show that what was required was the simple prayer
of faith in a friend. Elijah prayed to God as though he had a relationship with
Him. He was not seeking to appease the wrath of an angry God, he simply spoke
to God as a friend, and fire came down from heaven and consumed Elijah’s
sacrifices. So I ask you once more, to put aside your misconceptions of God,
throw out the idea of a wrathful, vengeful God, and discover with me the
character, not of something imaginary, but of the real, loving, creator.
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