SALVATION BY RELATIONSHIP
For as the Father has life-giving power in himself, so has the Son, by the Father's gift. John 5:26, N.E.B.
Can a light bulb give off light without having a relationship with the dynamo? Can a baby calf live without having a relationship with its mother? Can a plant grow without having a relationship with the soil? Can a God-created human live without being in relationship with Him who has life-giving power within Himself?
The answer to the first three questions above seems so very obvious to all thoughtful people. In each case, if the relationship is broken, the negative results very quickly become evident. But what complicated challenges God faces in trying to tell us that the pattern holds true for the fourth question as well! He did, after all, give us the power to choose to break that relationship. Yet if, when we break from Him, we were to experience the immediate consequences of the choice, we would be in no condition ever to change our minds. On the other hand, when God--in an act of mercy--holds off those consequences, we fall for Satan's deceptions and think that we really can live apart from God.
There is nothing that Satan will seek to do with greater diligence than to get us to ignore that life-giving relationship with God. He will try to distract us with the enticements of the senses or with our handmade endeavours to build our own wall of security against the trouble to come. Or he will coax us to believe that a heavy involvement with religious busy-ness is a good substitute for involvement with the person of God.
But here is a very subtle way that Satan can get us to neglect the vital relationship with God that we call faith. He can entice us to think that faith is simply our acknowledgement of a legal transaction outside of ourselves in which Jesus makes some helpful arrangements with the Father so that we can be forgiven, and no personal connection with God is necessary. This view sometimes sneaks around under the heading of "righteousness by faith," but it strips all the essential meaning of the word faith.
Jesus Himself, while a man on earth, lived only by depending upon His Father for life. This was His faith-connection. His saving relationship. And the remnant are described as having Jesus' kind of faith--that same vital relationship with God.
For as the Father has life-giving power in himself, so has the Son, by the Father's gift. John 5:26, N.E.B.
Can a light bulb give off light without having a relationship with the dynamo? Can a baby calf live without having a relationship with its mother? Can a plant grow without having a relationship with the soil? Can a God-created human live without being in relationship with Him who has life-giving power within Himself?
The answer to the first three questions above seems so very obvious to all thoughtful people. In each case, if the relationship is broken, the negative results very quickly become evident. But what complicated challenges God faces in trying to tell us that the pattern holds true for the fourth question as well! He did, after all, give us the power to choose to break that relationship. Yet if, when we break from Him, we were to experience the immediate consequences of the choice, we would be in no condition ever to change our minds. On the other hand, when God--in an act of mercy--holds off those consequences, we fall for Satan's deceptions and think that we really can live apart from God.
There is nothing that Satan will seek to do with greater diligence than to get us to ignore that life-giving relationship with God. He will try to distract us with the enticements of the senses or with our handmade endeavours to build our own wall of security against the trouble to come. Or he will coax us to believe that a heavy involvement with religious busy-ness is a good substitute for involvement with the person of God.
But here is a very subtle way that Satan can get us to neglect the vital relationship with God that we call faith. He can entice us to think that faith is simply our acknowledgement of a legal transaction outside of ourselves in which Jesus makes some helpful arrangements with the Father so that we can be forgiven, and no personal connection with God is necessary. This view sometimes sneaks around under the heading of "righteousness by faith," but it strips all the essential meaning of the word faith.
Jesus Himself, while a man on earth, lived only by depending upon His Father for life. This was His faith-connection. His saving relationship. And the remnant are described as having Jesus' kind of faith--that same vital relationship with God.
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