2 I and You
I and You
Of the relationships which make our life, some are personal, some not. A personal relationship is with a personal subject, a “you” who says “I” when addressing us. An impersonal relationship is with a nonpersonal object, a thing, an “it.” Our relations with, for instance, cars, houses, ovens, and computers are impersonal, even if we give them pet names; we use them as conveniences, means of expressing ourselves and executing our plans, and rightly so. But to handle persons that way is wrong and indeed destructive, for persons cannot stand being treated as things. Persons have value in themselves and are ends in themselves; they are to be respected as people, not used as pawns.
Putting it positively, persons make claims. They communicate, and ask us to communicate back. In truly personal relations each loves, honors, and serves the other, and response is the rule of life. In this fallen world, where all too often you are your god and I am mine, few relationships, even at home and with so-called friends, are personal enough; we alternately use and ignore each other dreadfully. “Nobody treats me as a person; nobody cares for me” is very much a cry of our time, but the problem is as old as mankind.
Personal Relations with God
Now, the Christian’s relationship with God the Creator is a personal, “I-you” affair throughout. To him God is not, as he is to some, a cosmic force to harness, an infinite “it” claiming no more from him than the genie of the lamp did from Aladdin. Christians know that God has called them into a relation of mutual love and service, of mutual listening and response, of asking, giving, taking, and sharing on both sides. Christians learn this from watching and listening to God incarnate in the Gospel stories, and from noting the words of invitation, command, and promise that God spoke through prophets and apostles. And the twice-stated formula of the Commandments (Exodus 20:1-17; Deuteronomy 5:6-21) makes it particularly plain.
For the Commandments are God’s edict to persons he has loved and saved, to whom he speaks in “I-you” terms at each point. “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out . . . you shall . . . ” The ten directives, which embody the Creator’s intention for human life as such, are here presented as means of maintaining a redeemed relationship already given by grace. And for Christians today, as for the Jews at Sinai, law-keeping (that is, meeting the claims of our God, commandments 1-4, and our neighbor, commandments 5-10) is not an attempt to win God’s admiration and put him in our debt, but the form and substance of grateful personal response to his love.
We have been speaking of our Maker as if he were one person, as Jews, Moslems, and Unitarians suppose him to be; but this is the moment to point out that Christians know the one God to be tripersonal, and know too that the fellowship with the Father and the Son through the Spirit into which they, as saved sinners, are called is to be modeled on the Son’s fellowship with the Father, as revealed in his life on earth. Loving obedience, joyful loyalty, and wholehearted devotion to his Father was Jesus’ way; this same attitude to both the Father and the Son (and indeed the Spirit, save that we do not deal with the Spirit in the same direct manner) must now be ours. Our love-relationship to the persons of the Godhead is thus to be modeled on a love-relationship within the Godhead itself. No personal bond that any man ever knows is deeper or more demanding than this—or (be it added) has more transforming effect.
Into all human relationships that grow, five elements enter on both sides: accepting, asking, promising, pleasing, and where necessary apologizing. Now when God takes us into his family, he accepts us through Christ’s atonement; he asks for the service of our lives; his “precious and very great promises” to us (2 Peter 1:4) guarantee that we shall be protected and provided for; and he commits himself to please us by leading us into the fullness of his joy. (No apologies are ever needed for any of that!—it is all great and glorious grace.)
Our part is to accept the triune Jehovah as our God; to ask, and depend on him daily, for whatever we need; to pledge our loyal obedience, and keep our promise in his strength; to aim in all we do at pleasing him; and constantly to practice repentance, which starts with confessing and apologizing for our sins and ends with renouncing them and asking to be delivered from them. As we attend to the wishes of those we love in the human family, so we attend to the law of the Lord out of love for the Lord of the law.
The Pharisees, thinking that they did God service by lovelessly serving the law, depersonalized all relationships and dehumanized themselves, and Jesus damned them for it. Loving relations with God, and with others for his sake, are what his service, as set forth in the Decalogue, is really all about. Love responding to his love, as he declares “I am . . . you shall . . .” is the real secret of law-keeping. Have we learned this secret yet?
Further Bible Study
Law-keeping with love:
Deuteronomy 11
Law-keeping without love:
Matthew 23
Questions for Thought and Discussion
Why is it wrong to use people? Under what circumstances do we do it?
What is the importance of the “I-you” relationship between God and us in determining our response to the Commandments?
What does it mean to say that the Pharisees depersonalized relationships and so dehumanized themselves?