Chapter 12: Substantial Healing in Personal Relationships
Chapter 12
Substantial Healing in Personal Relationships
As we turn now to the problem of personality, and specifically to the elements of love and communication, the key is the fact that God is a personal God. The Christian system of thought and life begins with a God who is infinite and personal, with a strong emphasis on his personality. Because of this, personality is truly valid and central in the universe and is not just a matter of chance.
Throughout the Word of God it is made very plain that God deals with us first of all on the basis of what he himself is; and secondly on the basis of what he has made us. He will not violate that which he himself is, nor will he violate that which he has made us to be. So God himself always deals with man on a basis of personal relationship. It is always a person-to-person relationship. More than this, because God is infinite he can deal with each one of us personally as though each one was the only man who existed. He can deal with us personally because he is infinite. We also find that God’s dealing with men is never mechanical. There are no mechanical elements to it. His dealing with man is also not primarily legal, though there are proper legal aspects to it which are founded and rooted in God’s own character. The God of the Bible differs from the gods that man makes. He is a God who has a character, and that character is the law of the universe, total and complete. When man sins, he breaks that law, and because that law is broken, man is guilty and God must deal with us in this proper legal relationship. Therefore, since we have been sinners, we must be justified before we can come to God. But though God does deal with us in the proper legal relationship, nevertheless centrally he does not deal with us legally, but personally.
Our theme in this section is true spirituality in relation to the problem of my separation from my fellowman. It is appropriate that the first “other” we must take into consideration is God, rather than another man.
Just as God always deals with man on the basis of what God is, and what we are, we should and must do the same in regard to our thoughts about God and our dealings with him. Our relationship with God must never be thought of as mechanical. That is why a strong sacerdotal system must always be wrong. We can never deal with God in a mechanical sense, and we should not deal with him on a merely legal basis, though there are these proper legal relationships. Our relationship with God after we have become a Christian must always be centrally a person-to-person relationship.
Of course, there is this distinction that must not be forgotten, that he is a Creator and we are creatures; therefore, in all my thoughts and acts toward God I must keep the creature-Creator relationship in mind. This, however, does not alter the person-to-person nature of our relationship. So the command is to love God with all our heart, soul, and mind. He is satisfied with nothing less than my loving him. I am not called merely to be justified. Man was created to be in personal fellowship with God and to love him. Prayer is always to be seen as a person-to-person communication, not merely a devotional exercise. Indeed, when prayer becomes only a devotional exercise, it is no longer biblical prayer.
Now, turning from our person-to-person relationship with God, let us think of the relationship between ourselves, that is, within our own kind. Just as it is centrally important to remember when I am dealing with God that my relationship must be kept on a creature-to-Creator basis, so when I am dealing with my own kind, I must remember that the relationship must be exactly the opposite: equal-to-equal. But though it is equal-to-equal, and not creature-to-Creator, or greater-to-less, still it should be personal. The Bible presents to us no mechanical human relationships; it allows none, because God did not make us as machines. Further, our relationship to other men must not be primarily legal, although there will be proper legal relationships between man. Though this sounds simple, it is not simple at all. Very often the sin of the church has been to forget this very point.
Now who are my kind, when I speak about those with whom I should deal on a person-to-person level? My kind are all those who have come from Adam. In Acts 17:26 we are told, “And he has made of one all nations of men, for to dwell on all the face of the earth.” We who believe the Bible insist on a literal Adam, and if we do, this carries with it something that is most practical: All who come from Adam are my kind. This is as wide as the human race, and I am to have a person-to-person relationship, as equals, with each of those with whom I come into contact.
The Bible is explicit that mankind is divided into two classes, and only two: those who have accepted Christ as Savior, and who are therefore Christians, and those who have not accepted him: those who are brothers in Christ, and those who are not. But this must not obscure to the true Christian’s thinking that his primary dealing on a personal level is to be to all men, and not just to fellow Christians. The church has always recognized this in insisting that marriage is given by God not just to the redeemed, but to all men. This is an ordinance of God to all men. Unredeemed man’s sin and separation from God does not remove him from the human ordinances of God. As an example, when the Lord Jesus Christ was giving us our basic commandment concerning our fellowmen, he used the word “neighbor.” He said, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” At this point there is to be no distinction between Christian and non-Christian. I am to love my neighbor, every man, as myself. And he made very plain what he meant by this in telling the story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:27-37). It is most significant that the last of the Ten Commandments uses the same word; it says we are not to covet anything of our neighbor (Exodus 20:17). Every man is my neighbor and is to be treated in a proper human, man-to-man relationship. Every time we act in a machinelike way towards another man we deny the central teaching of the Word of God—that there is a personal God who has created man in his own image.
Or we can put it in another way. I have said that the last screen in our thinking and in our life must be nothing other than God himself. The last screen, the last point of our thinking, must not be just things about God, it must be a relationship with God himself. The same must be true in our thinking of men. The last screen cannot be anything less than the individual and personal relationship, in love and communication. The command is to love him, not just to think about him, or do things for him. We are not to stop with a proper legal relationship—for example, to think of a man as legally lost, which he is, in the sight of a holy God—without thinking of him as a person. Saying this, we can suddenly see that much evangelism is not only sub-Christian, but subhuman—legalistic and impersonal.
Of course, we must continue to stress the other side, especially in this modern century that has no time for legal relationships. In a period of anti-law, like that in which we are living today, we must always stress that proper legal relationships are important. They are important in the area of sex and marriage; they are important in thinking of the proper legal relationship in the church, and its purity. Nevertheless, we must never lose sight of the heart of these relationships: recognizing the individual as a human being.
Or we can look at it in another way. Man, having put himself rather than God at the center of the universe, constantly tends to turn inward instead of outward. He has made himself the last integration point of the universe. This is the essence of his rebellion against God. Now with God this does not make a problem, for when God turns to himself, he is Trinity, and the members of the Trinity have been having love and communication among themselves before the creation of the world. So when God turns to himself as the center of the universe, there is still communication and love. But when I turn inward, there is no one to communicate with. And so each man in himself is exactly like the bullheaded minotaurus, shut up in his personal solitude in his labyrinth at Crete. This is the tragedy of man. He is not adequate and there is no one there to answer.
This not only leads to psychological problems, but it also destroys my relationship with others. On the other hand, when I begin really to think and act as a creature, then I can turn outward, as an equal, to other men. Suddenly I am no longer mumbling to myself. Once I accept myself as an equal to all men, I can talk as an equal to other men. I no longer have to talk to myself centrally and finally. If I acknowledge that I am really not God, and that since the fall we all are sinful, then I can have true human relationships without battering myself to pieces because they are not sufficient in themselves, or because they are not perfect. The trouble with human relationships is that man without God does not realize that all men are sinful, and so he hangs too much on his personal relationships, and they crush and break. No love affair between a man and a woman has ever been great enough to hang everything on. It will crumble away under your feet. And as the edges begin to break away the relationship is destroyed. But when I am a creature in the presence of God, and I see that the last relationship is with an infinite God, and these human relationships are among equals, I can take from a human relationship what God meant it to provide, without putting the whole structure under an intolerable burden. More than this, when I acknowledge that none of us are perfect in this life, I can enjoy that which is beautiful in a relationship, without expecting it to be perfect.
But most of all, I must recognize that no human relationships are going to be finally sufficient. The finally sufficient relationship must be with God himself. As Christians we have this relationship, and so our human relationships can be valid without being the finally sufficient thing. As sinners, acknowledging that we are not perfect in this life, we do not need to cast away every human relationship, including the relationship of marriage, or the relationships of Christians inside the church, just because they prove not to be perfect. On the basis of the finished work of Christ it is possible, once I have seen this, to begin to understand that my relationships can be substantially healed in the present life. When two Christians find that their relationship has hit a wall, they can come hand-in-hand and bring their failures under the blood of Christ, and get up again and go on. Think what this means practically in the areas of human relationships, in marriage, in the church, the parent-child relationships, the employer-employee relationship.
Or we can put it in yet another way. The Christian is to be a demonstration of the existence of God. But if we as individual Christians, and as the church, act on less than a personal relationship to other men, where is the demonstration that God the Creator is personal? If there is no demonstration in our attitude toward other men that we really take seriously the person-to-person relationship, we might as well keep quiet. There must be a demonstration; that is our calling: to show that there is a reality in personal relationship, and not just words about it. If the individual Christian, and if the church of Christ, is not allowing the Lord Jesus Christ to bring forth his fruit into the world, as a demonstration in the area of personal relationships, we cannot expect the world to believe. Lovelessness is a sea that knows no shore, for it is what God is not. And eventually not only will the other man drown, but I will drown, and worst of all, the demonstration of God drowns as well when there is nothing to be seen but a sea of lovelessness and impersonality. As Christians, we are not to be in fellowship with false doctrine. But in the very midst of the battle against false teaching, we must not forget the proper personal relationships.
Every time I see something right in another man, it tends to minimize me, and it makes it easier for me to have a proper creature-creature relationship. But each time I see something wrong in others, it is dangerous, for it can exalt self, and when this happens, my open fellowship with God falls to the ground. So when I am right, I can be wrong. In the midst of being right, if self is exalted, my fellowship with God can be destroyed. It is not wrong to be right, but it is wrong to have the wrong attitude in being right, and to forget that my relationship with my fellowmen must always be personal. If I really love a man as I love myself, I will long to see him be what he could be on the basis of Christ’s work, for that is what I want or what I should want for myself on the basis of Christ’s work. And if it is otherwise, not only is my communication with the man broken, but my communication with God as well. For this is sin, breaking Christ’s second commandment to love my neighbor as myself.
This remains true even if the man is desperately wrong and I am right. When 1 Corinthians 13 says, “Love rejoices not in iniquity,” it means exactly what it says. When we find another man to be wrong, we are not to rejoice in his iniquity. And how careful I must be, every time I see a situation where I am right and another man is wrong, not to use it as an excuse to scramble into a superior position over that man, rather than remembering the proper relationship of fellow creatures before God.
The next practical question must be, if I am to see myself as an equal to all other men, and I live in a fallen world in which there has to be order imposed, where is this order to come from? Men have wrestled with this through the centuries. But I would suggest that from a scriptural viewpoint this is not really a difficult question, though it is a most practical one. The Bible makes a distinction between man as a creature and the relationship God has set up as offices among men. The central thing is the command in the Ten Commandments, “Honor thy father and thy mother.” This is the core of the whole matter. There is a proper legal relationship between the parent and the child. But that does not mean that when the proper legal relationship is in order, everything is perfect. Far from it. Although my child is honoring me, the parent-child relationship may not have come to full fruition. The children are to love the parents, and the parents are to love the children on a personal level, within the legal framework, and once we see this, we understand all that follows. This is a relationship of office, but between fellow human beings. If we could learn this, we would stop seeing the tragedy of poor parent-child relationships. My child, while he is still a minor, is my fellow creature created on my own level; I am not intrinsically higher than he is. For a certain number of years there is to be this other relationship of office, but I am never to forget, as I look at my child, even when I hold that child in my own arms, that that child is a creature, created on my own level. And more than this, if he becomes a Christian while he is my minor child, I must not forget that then he is not only my fellow creature, but he is also my brother or my sister in Christ.
And the child is not just to have the proper legal attitude toward the parents; he is to work for a personal relationship to them, in love. Anything less than the personal relationship between the parent and child is not only wrong; it is full of sorrow.
Here is the New Testament teaching on human relationships:
And be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess; but be filled with the Spirit; speaking to yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord; giving thanks always for all things unto God and the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ; submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God. Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. . . . Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it. . . . So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself. For no man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as the Lord the church. . . . For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh. . . . Let every one of you in particular so love his wife even as himself; and the wife see that she reverence her husband. Children, obey your parents in the Lord: for this is right. Honour thy father and mother, which is the first commandment with promise; that it may be well with thee, and thou mayest live long on the earth. And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ; not with eyeservice, as menpleasers; but as the servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart; with good will doing service, as to the Lord, and not to men: knowing that whatsoever good thing any man doeth, the same shall he receive of the Lord, whether he be bond or free. And, ye masters, do the same things unto them, forbearing threatening: knowing that your Master also is in heaven; neither is there respect of persons with him. (Ephesians 5:18-22, 25, 28, 29, 31, 33; 6:1-9)
In each case mentioned here there are two parts: the legal framework, and a strong personal relationship within that legal framework. This is true of the marriage relationship, of parent and child, and of employee and employer. It is interesting to notice that the Bible also gives us a legal relationship in regard to those who govern us in the State. But even in this there is a personal relationship involved in our praying for these people.
The church is not to be a place of chaos; it is to be a place of order. We read in 1 Peter 5:1-3: “The elders which are among you I exhort, who am also an elder, and a witness of the sufferings of Christ, and also a partaker of the glory that shall be revealed: feed the flock of God which is among you, taking the oversight thereof, not by constraint, but willingly; not for filthy lucre, but of a ready mind; neither as being lords over God’s heritage, but being examples to the flock.” Here we see in the relationships of the church of the Lord Jesus Christ that there is relationship of office, but in the midst of this Peter pleads with the elders to keep the personal relationship alive and real. Thus there is to be an order in the church, just as there is to be an order in the family and an order in the State. There needs to be an order of office, but in every single office that is presented in the Scriptures there is the personal emphasis within that legal concept. In the church the elder is an office-bearer. But both the preaching elders and the ruling elders are “ministers,” and the word “minister” is a personal relationship, it does not speak of dominance. There is to be order in the church, but the preaching elder or the ruling elder is to be a minister, with a loving personal relationship with those who are before him, even when they are wrong and need admonition.
In the area of office, whether it is in the church, in the home, or in the State, the relationship indeed must be personal. Man is a rebel and there needs to be order in this poor world, but when I use whatever office God gives me, whether it is in the state, the church, or the home, or as an employer, it is to be for God’s glory and for the other person’s good. If I must make legal judgments in my position as having an “office” in one of the relationships of life, I must consciously show that all I can do is let the Bible speak. I have no intrinsic authority in myself; I am an equal creature with the other person, and I too am a sinner. And every time I come into a place of eminence of office, I am to do it with trembling, because I must understand from the Word of God that eventually I will give account of my stewardship, not only in regard to my proper legal relationships but on the basis of my personal relationships.
One of the problems with humanists is that they tend to “love” humanity as a whole—Man with a capital M, Man as an idea—but forget about man as an individual, as a person. Christianity is to be exactly the opposite. Christianity is not to love in abstraction, but to love the individual who stands before me in a person-to-person relationship. He must never be faceless to me or I am denying everything I say I believe. This concept will always involve some cost. It is not a cheap thing, because we live in a fallen world, and we ourselves are fallen.
Now we must ask, what happens when someone has been hurt by my sin? The Bible teaches that the moment we have confessed this sin to God, the shed blood of the Lord Jesus Christ is enough to cleanse the moral guilt. As Christians we insist that all sin is ultimately against God. When I hurt the man, I sin against God. But let us never forget that this does not change the fact that because man has been made in the image of God, the man I have hurt has real value. And this must be important to me, not only as a concept but in my practice and demonstration. My fellowman is not unimportant: he is God’s image-bearer. That is true of the non-Christian man as well as of the Christian. He is lost, but he is still a man. Thus when God says, “My child, this sin is different; in this sin you have hurt another person,” I respond, “What shall I do, Lord?” And the answer is clear from the Word of God: “Make it right with the man you have hurt. The man you have hurt is not a zero.”
But what is the usual reaction when God says to me, “Go and make it right”? It is to answer, “But that would be humiliating.” Yet surely, if I have been willing to tell God I am sorry when I have sinned, I must be willing to tell this to the man I have hurt. How can I say, “I am sorry” to God, if I am not willing to say, “I am sorry” to the man I have hurt, when he is my equal, my fellow creature, my kind? Such a repentance is meaningless hypocrisy. This is why so many of us have deadness in our lives. We cannot just trample human relationships and expect our relationship to God to be lovely, beautiful, and open. This is not only a matter of what is legally right, but of a true relationship of person to person on the basis of who I am and who the man is.
In James 5:16 we are told, “Confess your faults one to another.” We are not told to confess our faults to a priest, not to the group, unless the group has been harmed, but to the person we have harmed. This is a very simple admonition, but in our present imperfect state, very difficult to obey. To go and say, “I am sorry” is to enter by the low door: first in confessing to God, and then to the individual harmed. Let me emphasize, this is a person before me, a human being, made in God’s image. So it is not such a low door after all, because all it involves is being willing to admit our equality with the one we have hurt. Being his equal it is perfectly right that I should want to say, “I am sorry.” Only a desire to be superior makes me afraid to confess and apologize.
If I am living in a real relationship with the Trinity, my human relationships become more important in one way, because I see the real value of man, but less important in another way because I do not need to be God in these relationships any longer. So now I can go up to a man and say, “I am sorry for such and such specific harm I have done you,” without smashing the integration point of my universe, because it is no longer myself, but God. And we do not need to wait for the big explosions, especially among brothers and sisters in Christ. We do not need to wait for someone else to begin. This is being what we should be, and it should be moment by moment.
This is communication. The men of the modern world are asking whether personality is real, whether communication is real, whether it has meaning. We Christians can talk till we are blue in the face, but it will all be meaningless unless we exhibit communication. When as a Christian I stand before a man and say “I am sorry,” this is not only legally right and pleasing to God, but it is true communication on a highly personal level. In this setting, the human race is human.
Of course, confession to God must always come first. It is confession to God and bringing sin under the shed blood of Christ that cleanses us—not confession to man. We must always stress that, over and over again, because men get confused. But this does not change the fact that after there has been confession to God, then there must be real communication in a man-to-man, personal relationship with the person I have hurt.
We must be careful of three things in this connection. First, we must be careful not to do it merely to be seen of men or the church, because then the whole thing becomes worse than it was in the first place; it is a mere show.
Second, we must see that sometimes this will mean going back for years. If we have lost the human relationship, in the church, the family, or in general, almost always it means that years ago we have got off the track in some personal relationship. In talking about the freedom of our conscience in reference to sin before God, we said that we have to go back to where we sinned, to where we got off the track, even if it was twenty years ago. The same thing is true in human relationships. If I know that somewhere back in my life I have dealt with some Christian, or some non-Christian, on less than a really human basis, I must go back if possible, pick up the pieces, and say, “I am sorry.” Many can vouch for the fact that there have been springs of living water and dews of refreshment when they have gone back, knocked on somebody’s door, and apologized—even after many years.
I do not think there are many people with any sensitivity who cannot remember some doors that need knocking on, and some apologies that need to be made.
Third, we must remember that Christ’s crucifixion was real and in the external world. In Philippians we are told: “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus” (2:5). Christ’s crucifixion was on a hill, by a road, where everybody who passed by could not only see his pain, but also his shame. It was not done in a shadow, hidden away somewhere. And when you and I have some concept of really living under the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ, our confession to God and to man must be as open as Christ’s crucifixion was open on that hill, before the eyes of man. We have to be willing for the shame, as well as the pain, in an open place. It is not enough merely to agree with the principle as we deal with these personal relationships; we must put it into practice. Only in this way can we give a demonstration to a watching world, in a way that they can understand, that we live in a personal universe, and that personal relationships are valid and important. Only thus can we show that we are bought by the Lord Jesus Christ not just in theory, but in practice, and that there can be substantial healing of the separation between men in the present life, and not just when we get on the other side of death. And if the other man is not a Christian that makes no difference. The demonstration and the reality is to be on our part, not his.
In two areas above all others the Christian demonstration of love and communication stands clear: in the areas of the Christian couple and their children; and in the personal relationships of Christians in the church. If there is no demonstration in these two places, on the personal level, the world can conclude that orthodox Christian doctrine is nothing but dead, cold words. In a psychologically oriented age people may try to explain away individual results in a Christian life, but love and communication between Christians add a human dimension which, especially in a day like ours, is not easily explained away.
When man sinned, certain legal strictures were placed by God upon man and woman in marriage. In order to give a framework for order in the midst of a fallen world, the woman and man stand face to face with each other as creatures, yet the man has an office in the home. But the man-woman relationship must not only be stated in the negative—either in regard to wrong order in the home or concerning committing adultery, as important as these negatives indeed are—but it must also contain the command and the reason to love. Marriage is a picture of Christ and his church (Ephesians 5:23). How poor is our concept of the work of Christ if we make it only a legal thing. How poor not to understand that we are to have communion with Christ and that there is to be a mutual love between him, the bridegroom, and ourselves, the bride. If human marriage is meant to be a picture of that tremendous union of Christ and his church and of the present relationship of Christ as bridegroom to the church as bride, surely then there should be a showing forth of joy and a song in communication and love between man and woman.
We are finite, and therefore do not expect to find final sufficiency in any human relationship, including marriage. The final sufficiency is to be found only in a relationship to God. But on the basis of the finished work of Christ, through the agency of the Holy Spirit and the instrument of faith, there can be a real and substantial healing of relationships, and thus true joy.
As Christians we understand something more. Not only are we finite, as we were created, but since the fall we are all sinners; therefore we know that relationships will not be perfect. But on the basis of the finished work of Christ, human relationships can be substantially healed, and can be joyous. Christianity is the only answer to the problem of man. Modern multiple divorce is rooted in the fact that many are seeking in human relationships what human relationships can never give. Why do they have multiple divorce, instead of merely promiscuous affairs? Because they are seeking more than merely the sexual relationship. But they can never find it, because what they are seeking does not exist in a purely finite relationship. It is like trying to quench thirst by swallowing sand.
If man tries to find everything in a man-woman or a friend-to-friend relationship, he destroys the very thing he wants and destroys the ones he loves. He sucks them dry, he eats them up, and they as well as the relationship are destroyed. But as Christians we do not have to do that. Our sufficiency of relationship is in that which God made it to be, in the infinite-personal God, on the basis of the work of Christ in communication and love.
The same thing is true for Christian parents and their own children. If we try to find everything in human relationships or if we forget that neither we nor they are perfect, we destroy them. The simple fact is that the bridge is not strong enough. To try to run on to the bridge of human relationships that which it cannot bear is to destroy both the relationship and ourselves. But for the Christian, who does not need to have everything in human relationships, human relationships can be beautiful.
Love is the interplay of the whole personality. The relationship is personal, and the whole personality of man is the unit of the soul and the body. The Bible teaches that there is such a thing as a continuation of the spirit, after the body dies. but we must be careful not to be platonic here. The emphasis in the Scripture is upon the unity of the man, the unity of soul and the body. And with communication—substantial, though not perfect—the body is the instrument. Actually there is no other way to have communication, except through the body. But in marriage this becomes a very special thing to understand. Sexual love and romantic love are both equally out of place if they are extramarital and therefore outside of the proper legal circle. Both are wrong, and equally wrong. And if either is the “all” even with the proper legal relationship, they must dwindle and end in an agony or a search for variety; but if the couple stand as personalities—personality facing personality—within that which is the proper legal circle, then both the romantic and the sexual has its fulfillment in the full circle of what we are, in thinking, acting, and feeling.
In such a setting, the Song of Solomon is a part of the song of triumph, “The Lord has triumphed gloriously.” The enemy, the devil, has been dumped into the depths of the sea. Human marriage between Christians is supposed to be this. There is a ring of life within the legal circle of marriage. There is to be joy and beauty in the interplay of the total personalities.
Sin has brought a division between man and woman, and thus their bodies tend to be separated from their personalities. To the extent that we live thus, we are less than man was meant to be. If we as Christians live with this separation, we are saying that the twentieth-century man is right when he says, “We are only animals or machines.” In the animal world the sexual relationship at its proper moment is enough, but it is never so with man. The personal is needed. The thing must be seen as a whole, as a unity, within the legal circle, but with the reality of communication and love.
If love and communication are not present in marriage, how can there be the next step, the person-to-person relationship between parent and child? This should grow from the substantially restored relationship of the husband and wife. This parent-child relationship too has its legal aspects. But again, it is not primarily legal, it is personal. With husband and wife, and then parent and child, the personal is meant to be central. The legal bonds are first in each case, because we do have a God who has a character and who is holy. But within the legal bonds, communication is to be there and love is to be there. With the addition of a child in the home, love and communication are no longer only reciprocal, but take on profound diversity.
Where the wife and husband are Christians, they are also brothers and sisters in Christ, as well as lovers—“My sister, my spouse!” (Song of Solomon 4:4, 9, 12). And then the children are added, also as brothers and sisters in Christ, as they grow a bit older and accept Christ’s death for themselves. In such a setting what Christian would want to marry an unbeliever?
The call is not to all Christians to be married, but the call is to all Christians to show forth to a watching world the reality of the interplay of personality. There is a relationship of man to man, woman to woman, friend to friend as Christians and in the church of Christ that can also show forth the substantially restored human relationship. There was a oneness of the early church, that, while it was not perfect, nevertheless was a present reality. And as we read of their oneness in the Scripture and hear the words that were spoken concerning them, “Behold, how they love one another,” we see that this was a practical oneness, not just a theoretical unity.
How beautiful Christianity is—first, because of the sparkling quality of its intellectual answers, but second, because of the beautiful quality of its human and personal answers. And these are to be rich and beautiful. A crabbed Christianity is less than orthodox Christianity. But these human and personal answers do not come mechanically after we are Christians. They come only on the level of what God made us to be in the first place, and that is personal. There is no other way to have these beautiful answers. They cannot be achieved mechanically, or by only standing in a proper legal circle, as important as that is. They grow In the light of what we say we believe as orthodox Christians: that we are creatures, and that while we are not perfect in this life, even after becoming Christians, yet through moment-by-moment faith in the finished work of Christ on the cross, beautiful human relationships can and do come forth. There must be orthodox doctrine, true. But there must also be orthodox practice of those doctrines, including orthodoxy in the human relationships.
I hesitate to add, but I will, that this is fun. God means Christianity to be fun. There is to be a reality of love and communication in the Christian- to-Christian relationship, individually and corporately, which is completely and truly personal.