God, Friend, or Both?

I've been thinking a lot lately about how "friendly" we're supposed to be towards God. He's this unimaginable power hovering above us (and all around us) that created everything in the universe, and yet we're allowed to talk directly to him. Jessica was telling me the other day how a primitive baptist (the denomination that both Daniel and Jessica belong to) would never talk to God in a very familiar way. She said that it would probably always have a sense of formality and total reverence. I remember my own youth pastor at my (presbyterian) church, talking at a youth group meeting about how he thought that most people try to be too "buddy-buddy" with God.

For the longest time that idea has bothered me. The idea that God may get mad at me if I try to be too casual of a friend towards him. This has caused me to do a lot of thinking lately about what it really means to have a relationship with Jesus. One day a while back, I realized that if I imagined having Jesus as my physical friend on Earth, to be honest I wouldn't really be that crazy about hanging out with him. I'm mean he's a pretty serious and kinda scary dude if you look at the gospels. But if I imagined one of my really close Christian friends, like Nathan or Ben Dicks, as Jesus instead, I would ironically want to be around Jesus all the time and be his best friend! That's when I realized I had it all wrong. My close Christian friends have faults and are nothing compared to the awesomeness of Jesus, and yet I would rather be friends with them because I'm scared of Jesus.

My point is Jesus was a real person and had a real live personality. If he didn't have a great sense of humor, then no humans would either because we are made in God's image (and humor is definitely not a abomination caused by sin). We would not enjoy taking life lightly and just enjoying time with friends if God didn't put that desire in us and if it wasn't from him.

That's when I realized that my relationship with Jesus truly should be a relationship — more accurately described as a friendship. A real human-to-human, person-to-person friendship. Just as close and casual and life-changing as my relationships with my close Christian friends. Many Christians might say they have a relationship with Jesus, but they still picture him as this guy that's really far away and has a permanent solemn look on his face. That's kind of the view that I had. But why in the world would God be like that? Where does it say in the Bible that God has no personality? If God is permanently solemn and never laughs, then we'd be the exact same. But we aren't like that at all. Humans are funny! We like to spend time with each other take a break from all the seriousness and stress that life is. Didn't that side of us come from God too?

Now to address the reverence part of the equation. If we are supposed to be buddy-buddy to God, then doesn't the lack of formality also causes the reverence and respect to go away? I don't think so. I think it actually increases it. Think of it this way. Pretend that there's some political figure out there that you absolutely admire to the highest level. Let's say you see this person as very wise and level headed and you think they're doing a great job in their position and you truly look up to them in every way. Now let's say you finally get to meet this person in real life. You'd probably approach them very formally and show them the respect that you feel they deserve. But you don't actually know them as a person yet. Now let's suppose further that for some circumstantial reason, you actually get to spend some serious time with this person - your role model. You get to know them so well that you call each other on a first name basis and all formality eventually leaves your interactions. Now let me ask you this, would all the respect you had for that person just have vanished? Would you see them now just on the same level as yourself? I think not. In fact, I wouldn't be surpised if you didn't have more respect for this person now that you know who they truly are as a person. Even though all formality is gone, just the fact that they allow you to feel comfortable around them and address them casually would probably give you more respect for them.

The same goes for parents or parent-figures. Would you have more respect for your dad and honor him more if he was a well-mannered, highly thought of business man, but that you hardly knew as a person, or someone you could talk to about anything anytime and someone that would always support you?

That's just the way humans are built. We want to know people. We want no less than to know at least our close friends inside and out. The more we know a person the more we are able to show and have more respect for them as a person. So if that's the way our earthly relationships are set up, why should our relationship with God be any different? I know for a fact that my relationship with God is in fact not any different. The moment I realized that God really wanted to be my friend, just like all my other friends are my friend, probably the greatest sense of awe and humility flowed over me. That's when I knew that we are supposed to be friends with God. I mean, the god of the universe wants to be your real friend! Have you ever heard of anything more amazing? Does that not make you want to be friends with God?

There is also much evidence in the Bible for the closeness of the relationship that God wants to have with us. Almost everything about the Bible is informal. Many people have the Bible associated with the King James version, which sounds very formal and aristocratic to our modern-day ears, but that form of speech was actually the common language of the day when it was translated. It's really funny that some people think you should say "thee"s and "thou"s when praying because it's more formal, but "thee" and "thou" were the informal way of addressing the 2nd person in English back then. The Bible was also written in the common language of the people (Hebrew for the old testament and Greek for the new testament). The whole point of Jesus is that God came down to be with us like any other human for crying out loud, could he make his point any clearer? If the disciples got to be best friends with God, then I want in on it too.

I think this whole idea of what it really means to have a relationship with God also ties in very closely with legalism. That's a whole other topic, but I think that you will always be bound to the law and merely following the rules as long as you see God as a distant arbitrator that you never really get to know. I think there's an direct relationship between how distant you see God and how much of a "religion" and legalistic your Christianity is. The more you feel you have to be uber-formal and careful what you say when talking to God, the more distant he is going to seem. And the more you see God as far away and impersonal the more you become like the people of other religions who only know how to be afraid of their God and follow a set of rules. On the other hand, the more you truly believe God is your friend, the more your faith is a relationship. And a relationship with God makes you want to follow the rules not because you feel you have to follow the rules, but because God is your friend and you do it because you love him.

I'd love to get some feedback on this post, so bash me, support me, or say anything you want. I'm all ears. But before I let you loose, I would like to go ahead and point out that I do realize that I made no direct biblical references here. I have discovered lately how I do not know doctrinal specifics near as well as I should (or at least as well as I would currently like) and that's something I am jumping on as soon as I can. But I feel for the first time in my life, I have really figured out what it means to be friends with Jesus and that, I must say, was a much bigger concern to me than to know the difference between "justification" and "sanctification" and the mechanics of predestination. Now that I'm on the right track though, I want to know as much as a can about the nitty-gritty too. So if you do have direct biblical references supporting or some that seem to disagree with what I've said in this post, feel free to post those too.

posted by Robert Lee at 12:16 am on Thursday, March 23, 2006