There are very few chapters in this work that can be considered stand-alone. There is an underlying theme that is being built, rather like building a house or a cabinet. It needs to be built in an orderly fashion. You don’t start with the roof; you start with a foundation.
I’m setting a foundation here so we are all talking and thinking on the same idea before I add to it. Once you have been through the work in its entirety then going back to particular chapters makes more sense and you will comprehend better what I am trying to say.
Two times in the fourth chapter of John’s first letter, John uses the phrase, “God is love.” In verse eight he says this, “He who does not love, does not know God, for God is love.” “…God is love.” I have come to say this is THE prime axiom, the PRIME axiom – a statement self-evident from common experience. From this all else hangs. All aspects of life and learning have something to say about love, how it works, how to (or not to) live it. This phrase is the root, the background, the framework of this study.
Up front I am going to lay down some bullet points which will be further developed later but these assumptions are needed to provide some sort of foundation on which to build our discussion. Our first accepted assumption is simple and I am repeating it just because it is so important:
- God is love. All other assumptions listed hang on that idea. It is the central prime axiom of life.
- The purpose of our existence is to be part of a web of relationships. We were never meant to be alone and we fill a need in God’s love as He fills a need in ours.
- “Doctrine” comprises expressions, descriptions of specific aspects of reality. A simple analogy would be this; white light passes through a prism and spreads into colors. The colors are called a spectrum. Looking at the spectrum tells us something about the source of the light. Each color, each line provides another bit of information. Spectrum analysis is used to determine what a tested substance is made of; doctrine does the same thing. It’s not God; it’s not His Son or Spirit; it’s simply a description of what He is like and what we need to be like. Often it describes how relationships work.
- The Bible is our foundational resource for understanding several qualities of love and reality.
The Bible isn’t just a book. It is a library in a single binding. The Bible is comprised of the work of forty authors writing over a span of 1500 years.
- There are observations we can draw from life, living and language that can aid our understanding of concepts raised in the Bible.
- Words are sound symbols into which we pack ideas. Every field of study has its language and nuances of meaning. Learning what God is about certainly has its lingo. At times it may seem a little tedious or even strange. Unless our understanding of the language we use is in close agreement we can wind up just blowing vortexes of heat and smoke and miss what is meant to be understood.
Numerous “systematic theologies” have been written. Many churches and associated entities have a “creed” and/or “statement of beliefs.” They all read like a table of contents. Occasionally a text is written that is based on a statement of beliefs and expands the statements to make them more palatable. While they are all carefully, accurately and truthfully written, by very well-meaning scholars; in all such statements and books I have seen they are all fundamentally flawed. That flaw tends to lead to a perspective that misses the essential point of the whole exercise. To merely generate a list of doctrines (with their supporting references) found in the Bible is to miss the point of the doctrines. They are not built on the first three bullet points noted above. As God’s love is studied it fans out into an array of doctrines and expressions. Some of those doctrines are going to be addressed in this work but we are going to do our best to cast them as fragment expressions of God’s love. They are a piece of a picture. Taken together, they show a wonderful Creator, Redeemer, Lover.
There is another idea that bothers me about “Christian evangelism.” We approach people as if they have an understanding of what “salvation” is about and assume it is something desirable they want. Why would I want to be “saved” and live forever? For most people there is an innate desire to live. Even so they may wonder why. To some people sitting on a cloud, playing a harp and singing praises to God sounds like head splitting boredom. I prefer a pipe organ to a harp. It doesn’t do clouds. Many Christians look forward to heaven where there is no sickness, old age, death, pain, discouragement and so on. The suffering that we face here won’t be there. Well, that’s all to the good. But once the pain is gone, what now? The idea of spending eons around the throne praising and adoring God is good, but somehow, there has to be more than that. After a while, won’t it sound repetitious and robotic? You can count me out of that one too. Of course there is a place for God to be our god and due adoration presented. On the other hand, He gave us these wonderful brains; He meant us to use them, and singing the Hallelujah chorus every day throughout eternity is not going to keep our interest when there is going to be so much surrounding us. We present a heaven too small to keep our interest. We paint a dim picture. There is more than enough room in heaven’s plan to live, learn, play, work, fellowship with fellow humans, other “people” in God’s creation, angels, in addition to rightful and central fellowship with God. What about travel and sight-seeing? Even if we revved up our RV and went galaxy hopping, it would take a few million years just to get the “lay of the land” and find a few things we would like to come back to learn about. Believe me when I say all the animators in Hollywood and other places could not dream up much of what we are going to visit.
I hope to provide a sensible, delightful perspective on citizenship in God’s kingdom in present and future tense as generally described and experienced from expressions from the past.
In no way is this a definitive study. As a young fellow I climbed a fire observation tower in a state park. The staircase spiraled upward inside the frame of the tower. The entry point was at ground level on the east side of the tower. Each time I came to the east side of the tower I had a different, less limited perspective on the scene around me. When I got above tree level the vista broadened greatly. With this study we enter a tower of knowledge and understanding at ground level. Each time around will build on previous background and see things from new perspective. Even as we walk into eternity this model still fits.