Why Fostering and Maintaining Relationships Should Be Among Christians’ Core Doctrines
Some of you have been following since the beginning of this series, as I began to trace why relationships are so important to me and why I think they are also important to God. The trick of stretching this theme out over many Wednesdays, though, is that sometimes, readers might just catch one or two installments, and they might not easily connect the pieces from week to week. To help with this, I’m providing some cliff notes today (complete with links) that overview what we’ve covered so far to help you see it all together and to possibly make connections and see some patterns as they emerge.
1. It started with “Us.”
…somewhere in the sequence of plants-and-birds-and-fish-and-rest, there appears a verse in which God casually drops this phrase into the conversation: “Let us make humankind in our image.” Yes, Us.
…The thing I am drawn to, in either case (or even if some other idea I’m unaware of ended up being true) is the US. No matter what explanation you favor, scholarship suggests there was an us.
That all of life began with a God in relationship, inviting other beings to move with him.
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2. We bear the fruit of God to one another.
While I’m sure “be fruitful and multiply” includes the idea of bearing children, then, I’m wondering if it is more than just biological flourishing being commanded here. Does the “be fruitful” instruction go beyond physical reproduction?
Think about verse 27, for example: So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.
Somehow, in some ways, we are like God, right?
…By design, humans bear fruit–images of God–to those around them. And if this is the case, then it makes sense that friendship would be a powerful incubator for how we reflect God to one another.
Read more here.
3. Tending to the earth was an instruction that required humans to cooperate.
If people were charged to care for Creation, then from the beginning humans were not only deeply connected to God and his work, but logically, they were also connected to each other by default.
They would have been nourished by and dependent on the same land for food; they would have relied on the same sources of water; they would have been threatened by the same natural disasters and so on.
Surely in order to flourish–to continue the “good” God saw in his creative work–this required people to band together.
Read the rest of this post here.
4. God directs his people to focus outward.
I was always confused by the story of the Tower of Babel then. Unlike in earlier creation when God is shaping spouses from ribs, at Babel God seems to divide people, not unite them. He stops their construction work by literally making it impossible to communicate with each other
…In surrendering to selfishness, they distorted God’s intentions for them. And so, to re-purpose them for good, God stops their work and forces them to spread out across the earth. He turns them back to an outward course–one of building tribes, of caring for the earth’s many parts, of bearing God fruitfully.
Read the rest of this post here.
5. From the beginning, God’s people carried blessing…sometimes to unexpected outsiders.
Not only does God vocalize an ongoing desire to see families–tribes of related people–flourish, perhaps just as importantly, he continues to identify families/tribes as carriers of blessing.
Like in Genesis, the descendants of Abraham will bless the world. They too, like Adam and Eve, will be image bearers of sorts. They too are sacraments of God for each other.
But it wasn’t only Abraham’s genetic descendants that had the ability to relate to God.
…While the Bible doesn’t spell out to what degree non-Israelites might have been incorporated into God’s people (i.e. were they “saved?”), it’s clear God is concerned with those outside of Abraham’s family. And that non-Israelites were sometimes granted belonging and identity among God’s people.
Read more about that here.
6. The relationship and belonging God fostered with and among the Jews is now open to all who believe.
it’s clear that the relationship that was once open just to Israel (and perhaps a few responsive Gentiles we mentioned last week) is now more broadly, more officially, being extended to all people everywhere.
The early believers seemed clear the children of Abraham are no longer just the literal descendants of his tribe. In fact, bragging about being great-great-however-many-great-grand-children of Abraham is specifically invalidated (Matthew 8:11 and Luke 13:28). According to Paul, in fact, anyone who believes can now be grafted in as “the Seed of Abraham” (Galatians 3:6-29).
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