Is Your Jesus TOO “Divine”?
Is Your Jesus TOO Divine?
We humans relate more easily to people we can see, hear, touch, and experience, rather than gigantic historical figures like George Washington or Abraham Lincoln.
The Jesus I grew up with in church was sort of like an Abraham Lincoln, someone who USED to exist and was at the center of what we did at church, and whom I abstractly admired even more than Abraham Lincoln. In retrospect, however, He was more of a divine “icon” than a knowable person, a sort of “placeholder” that held a religious system together that we called “Christianity.” We worshiped and prayed in “HIS name,” we were told to do things or NOT do things because of things that He said we should do or should not do but, alas, to my future shame and great damage, the Scoutmaster of my Boy Scout troop personally meant more to me than an abstract Jesus!
But those men and women who walked, talked, and suffered both admiration and scorn with Jesus in the Gospels, and who also wrote about Him – their relationship with Him was very, VERY different! And yet, they first met and responded to Him as a HUMAN being – even with his supernatural authority over disease, demons, and nature, He was another MAN to be known. It seems clear that they started out putting Him into some kind of a “prophet box,” someone like an Elijah or Elisha someone that you highly respected, someone who occasionally mystified and amazed you, but someone to whom you felt free to ask questions (e.g., John 9:1, about being “born blind”; Luke 8:9, about the sower), and relationally relaxed enough to let your egos show near Him (e.g., Luke 22:24, about who’s the greatest), and someone you might even feel free to correct or challenge (e.g., Peter, in Matthew 18:21-22 – “no dying!”, or in John 13:8 – “not MY feet!”). When you pay attention to the sequence of the subjects about which He spoke to them and the deeds that He performed around them, it becomes clear that He sort of let the clues to His divinity “leak out” a bit at a time: “bit, chew, swallow, digest…”. But even so, the deepest revelation regarding His divinity that He left with them was that rather elastic phrase, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me” (Matthew 28:18). What do you think they did with THAT statement? After all, they did not have John 1:1-3 to consult at that time!
Jesus had been filled and empowered by the Spirit that came from His Father at His watery immersion by His cousin John. It was only after He had released that same Spirit into them in those four Pentecostal events described within the Book of Acts – merging Himself into their spirit, their soul, AND their very bodies – it was only THEN that their relationship with Jesus took a new turn, a turn UPWARD! “Even though we HAVE known Christ according to the flesh, yet now we know Him thus no longer” (2 Corinthians 5:16). It was only then, revealed by His own Spirit Who was now spiritually, mentally and physically WITHIN them, that they received the deeper revelation that “All things were CREATED through Him.” It was only THEN, that His Spirit revealed that this “human” that they had served and come to love deeply is also, “the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by HIM all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created THROUGH Him and for Him. He himself existed before anything else did, and HE holds all things together” (Colossians 1:15-17).
This new relationship with the Jesus whom they now honored as the One whom Moses had known as “the LORD” had been built upon the deeply personal, trusting, obedient, HUMAN love relationship with the man Jesus! Their Jesus was no “divine icon” needed by a religious system, nor was He only becoming known to them as some abstract divinity who needed to be sinless in order to “pay” for their sins! He was a man SOMEHOW from God who had taught THEM how to be the original kind of “human being” that God had created in His own image. He was a man who had both taught, modeled, and SHOWN them what the words “love,” “holiness,” “purity,” “courage,” and “loyalty” meant, by living them out in their presence daily for three years. It was that human relationship that had generated the passion that is so obvious in the way they wrote about Him. John simply considered himself to be the man “whom Jesus LOVED” (John 13:23, 20:2, 21:7,21:20). Peter and the rest of His disciples were certainly passionate in their loyalty and devotion to him: “Jesus told him, ‘I tell you with certainty, before a rooster crows this very night, you will deny me three times.’ Peter told him, ‘Even if I have to DIE with you, I will never deny you!’ And all the disciples said the same thing” (Matthew 26:34-35). These men, who had abandoned their livelihoods in the trust that the God who sent Jesus to them would look after them and their families, were undoubtedly passionate in believing what they had said to him (even if they were later surprised by their own inability to “put their money where they mouth had been!”).
Paul was utterly devoted to and personally bonded with Jesus; read the following as if that “I” was bolded, underlined and enlarged: “I have been crucified with Christ, so it is no longer I who live but Christ lives IN me; what I now live in this body I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved ME and gave Himself for ME” (Galatians 2:20). I cannot imagine a way of describing the intimacy and personal passion of a relationship than that language which Paul used.
Paul’s personal passion is also of great importance for you and me, because he had not HAD any personal relationship with Jesus “after the flesh,” except as an enemy! For Him, Jesus had been a false prophet, worthy of his torturous death (as his attitude at Stephen’s execution showed!). Paul’s ability to be nevertheless drawn by God into such an intense personal and passionate human relation with the divine Jesus holds the key for people like you and me, who – like Paul – never had a chance to have a personal relationship with the first century incarnate Jesus.
It was that Pentecostal event that transformed the relationship of His original gospel disciples from a passionate relationship among humans into one that was also one in which you knew and worshiped Him as your divine CREATOR! Similarly, it is OUR entering into that same Pentecostal filling, receiving, and progressively deepening existential “merging” that makes it possible for us to eventually have the same kind of before-after relationship with Jesus that they did. When we EXPERIENCE His Spirit entering into us and progressively merging Himself with us as He did with them in the Book of Acts – when we enter into our own version of that Pentecostal promise, God’s Spirit brings along with Him EVERYTHING that He is, not just some divine but personally neutral “electrical power”! His Pentecostal Spirit brings along with Him HIS love for Jesus and HIS love for the Father, and HIS love for His fellow saints! They had undoubtedly known their OWN human love and passion for God and the things of God, but He brought HIS versions of the same! To be “mature” in the Spirit (2 Corinthians 13:9, Ephesians 4:13, Philippians 3:7-13) is not only to be mature in understanding and virtue, but also to be mature in that kind of PERSONAL devotion and loyalty to Jesus that Paul expressed so eloquently and passionately (Make sure to also read that passage from Philippians mentioned above)!
A human example of that kind of passionate personal loyalty tends to be found among people who risk their very lives together. In all of the reading of soldiers in combat that I have done, it is obvious that when actually engaged in life-and-death combat, the loyalty motivating soldiers FAR more than any other loyalty is not to “king and country” or “democracy” or “the motherland,” but to your fellow warring comrades around you. That is why when a grenade lands in your midst some soldiers have thrown themselves on it instead of running away, or why they will risk their lives to rescue a wounded comrade despite deadly fire. You can see an example of this kind of loyalty in the TV series “Band of Brothers.” During the series, there are interviews of the actual soldiers who served under their continuing leader, officer Richard Winters (who went from Second Lieutenant to Major during the series). A number of them describe how passionately loyal they were to Winters. He was personally humble, yet decisive, intuitively competent, brave; AND they knew that he personally CARED for them. As a result they became willing to follow him into virtually ANY dangerous mission: he LED them, not merely ordered them. They grew to humanly, loyally BOND with him, uniting their destinies with his, WHATEVER his would be! And their bond with him seems to have strengthened their bonds with each other.
If that kind of personal loyalty can be achieved between brave but not yet regenerated human beings then it is ABSOLUTELY possible among those who have confessed Christ as the Master and as the One who has rescued them from a tragic and horrible destiny! Major Winter’s men were loyal to a LIVING man, not to some long-gone Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, or the “American Way of Life”! But by faith we confess that JESUS is also very much alive and even more caring, competent, and courageous than Major Winters! But it is sadly quite possible for us to THINK of Him as a living person yet FUNCTION and personally RELATE to Him as we do to long dead men like Abraham Lincoln and George Washington! Given the worldliness, hardness of heart, moral and intellectual laziness within Christendom’s various versions of “Christianity,” we can be FUNCTIONALLY more loyal to and passionate about our Catholic, Orthodox, Reformed or Armenian body of theology and religious activities than to the PERSON of Jesus! But if our personal FUNCTIONAL loyalty to Jesus does not rise to the level of a brave but worldly soldier, does it not scream volumes about our current functional love and loyalty to God, to Jesus, or about our willingness to “contend EARNESTLY for the faith which was once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 1:3)‽ We have God’s promise and descriptions about how His Holy Spirit CAN put us on the path that leads to John’s certain awareness that he was PERSONALLY “loved” by Jesus, and Paul’s confession that even though he still had not “already attained, or [was] already perfected,” he was already “… crucified with Christ, and it is NO LONGER I who live, but Christ lives IN me. So the life I now live in the body, I live because of the faithfulness of the Son of God, who loved ME and gave himself FOR ME!” (Galatians 2:20). Paul was not repeating some true but formal Scriptural “mantra;” he was “merely” describing what He sensed going on within him experientially!
Is that not the kind of relationship that you would like to have with Him? If Paul was at a “PhD” level of Spiritual “merging,” I consider myself to be somewhere between kindergarten and 2nd grade. But I also well remember being a PhD level in the university controlled by the “other guy,” and am more personally grateful to Jesus and His Spirit for my graduation from that demonic PhD to His holy grade school than I can possibly ever describe adequately!
Interestingly enough, I seem to have needed to have my “religious icon Jesus” stripped away from me and have Him become just a “man” before I began to be drawn into any human-level personal relationship with Him at all! I started off with a naïve, extremely Biblically ignorant but genuinely childlike relationship with Him at age 19 while out at sea on the way to Africa in 1960. But by the time that my “higher criticism” (a.k.a, “cynical and unbelieving”) Methodist, Episcopalian, and Roman Catholic Jesuit professors got finished with me, Jesus was just one more of the world’s human “religious giants” to be found, whose “Christian” I had only become by accident of birth, and I was far more excited about the possibility of experiencing Zen Buddhism’s enlightenment (“satori”) than I was about any “resurrection from the dead” sometime in the far distant future! But that highly competent divine Fisherman turned out to be every bit as competent (and compassionate) at RE-capturing His fish as He was in initially capturing him! (Praise His HOLY name!). As I got to examine those other merely human “religious giants,” like Buddha and Confucius, or the Yogi, Daoist and Zen masters, I diligently sought to find out their person characters, what they were like as PEOPLE – their intelligence, wisdom, attitudes toward the needy, compassion and kindness, depth of intelligence, depth and range of emotions – and especially their willingness to get involved in that struggle between “good versus evil”, and their courage in the presence of powerful rulers who were a threat to them and threatened by them.
After three years of such investigation, I eventually realized that when I compared all of these other humans to the “merely human” Jesus, NONE of them seemed to come up to His “kneecaps” (as it were) as a human being! And that was just with Him being a human being, rather than a claimant to divine status. At that point, I realized that even IF the supposedly apostolic writings about His reported amazing feats were a bunch of later “campfire stories,” that man Jesus had too much personal integrity to spin a well-intended “yarn” that was not true. And then it started to grow on me that neither would such a man attract and train others to become spinners of well-meaning yarns – because yarns are actually LIES wrapped with a less offensive name. And Jesus was clearly a PASSIONATE truth teller, even when threatened by the powerful religious leaders who could have people stoned to death, or the barbarous Roman leaders who could slowly torture people to death by way of the hideous and agonizing crucifixion process they had copied and perfected from the Phoenicians (via the Alexandrian Greeks, via the Persians, via the Babylonians, etc.!). NO other “human religious giant” came anywhere NEAR the combative bravery, and passion about truth and justice that Jesus demonstrated. Even though I was by then open to the idea that we might all be merely the produce of a bunch of molecules that had accidentally bumped into each other and then stuck together in ever more complex arrangements for millions of years, I still found that this merely human Jesus was more personally compelling and attractive than I had ever found my Methodist, Episcopalian, and Roman Catholic divine Jesus! Without realizing it, it seems that my invisible Fisherman friend had slowly started to reel me back toward His boat! There was nothing supernatural or divine in his bait yet, but His “bait” sure smelled and tasted much, MUCH better than anything any of those humanistic or religious “giants” were able to offer! My 84-year-old story has too many chapters to recount here, but when He finally convinced me that all that had been written about Him by His first followers was indeed true, and convinced me personally that He was indeed still ALIVE, and kept plowing more deeply into my conscience so that I could literally cry over what He had always seen within me that I USED to find acceptable – when He decided that His plowing had dug a deep enough furrow, He created the event – a retreat event called a “Cursillo” in December of 1972 – at which He had a dozen or so men and women lay their hands upon me so that I also might receive the same Pentecostally promised Holy Spirit to come upon and within me – spirit and soul AND body – and bring a peace and joy that I never even thought possible could come into such a very “life-deformed” human being.
And because of that, I found a new instinct quickly developing within me: some kind of “maternal instinct” to protect and defend what I used to merely study and analyze academically. JESUS needs no such protection for Himself, but what He caused to be written down in order to record what He had taught, promised, and commanded definitely DOES need to be protected and defended! And that instinct came into being because I noticed that I now felt a deep and PERSONAL loyalty to Jesus that I could only ASSUME that I had when He was only a divinity who “so loved the world.” I was beginning to feel about that “man” Jesus a version of what Major Winters’ men felt toward him! Divinities who “so loved the [whole] world” can be a million experiential steps away from “little old Reed Merino;” I had somehow been BRAINWASHED to believe in that personal love, not inspired to believe in Him and His great love! So, to come to the rescue, God saw it necessary to have a close personal friend come up to me one day and surprise me with a prophecy from Him, in which He said to me, “I AM ON YOUR SIDE.” Somehow, it took that prophecy before I could accept that the “little old Reed Merino” who had fallen so VERY far away from that naïve, Biblically ignorant, but genuine “first love” was still the personal subject of His determined “good will.” A life under a demanding and uncompassionate stepfather had created a Reed who could be very sensitive about pleasing those who were in authority over you, but not a Reed with an instinct that those who were in authority over you might actually CARE for you! As I had discovered from several years of therapy, human therapists are often trained to NOT get personally involved with those under their care, so that you do not confuse your therapist with a needed parent. But God is NOT a human therapist – praise God! – and He DOES want you to discover a Father that is greater than any you have ever known!
And that Pentecostal Spirit filling and merging process creates a kind of personal loyalty, emotional bonding, and “protectiveness” about God and the things of God, that even exceed what the brave soldiers under the command of Major Winters knew!
“Examine yourselves as to whether you ARE in the same ‘faith’ within which the Spirit of Jesus has engulfed us apostles! TEST yourselves! Is it possible that you yourselves really do not EXPERIENTIALLY know that it is Jesus Christ who is within you? — or do you NOT experientially know that He is within you‽ Well I trust that you will know that we apostles DO know Him that way” (2 Corinthians 13:5-6, significantly paraphrased).
Do not let the tamed, “mediocre-ized,” cliché-ridden forms of Christianity – whether supposedly “orthodox” OR supposedly “relevant” – satisfy your much deeper and hungry need for a passionate Father who creates PASSIONATELY loyal sons and daughters! IF you let Him work His personal conversion and Pentecostal “magic” for you as He both promised and worked it within the Book of Acts, and IF you let Him make the MAN Jesus “come alive” for you by immersing yourself within His Spirit saturated four Gospels, He will make you more passionately loyal to Jesus, to His Words, and to His people, than even those warriors were who served under Major Winters! And that would be SAYING something!
Come, Lord Jesus! MaranaTHA!
****************************
ReedMerino.com
Blueprint for a Revolution: Building Upon ALL of the New Testament (WestbowPress.com)
Reed K. Merino, M.Div.
