GOD & MY PERCEPTIONS 2: GOD IS NEAR
Establishing first that God is grace and He operates within a grace paradigm helps us address our other perceptions of who He is. This is why in GOD & MY PERCEPTIONS 1 I started with the third misconception regarding performance based acceptance - it greatly informs how we move towards addressing the other two. I want to go back now and address the first of these three very common perceptions about God:
He is distant
He is unloving
He is a performance based acceptance God (PBA)
Understanding this grace paradigm becomes pretty important when we think about the first misconception on the list: God is distant.
When talking to people, it seems there are varying responses regarding God’s felt nearness. Some people talk about feeling close, other’s look lost and stumped when I ask “where is God in that?”. I often hear the response, “I don’t know”. I refer to what people share experientially, because it is experience that grants us these ideas about God - perceptions. Our perceptions truly play a huge role in our experience and vice versa. But are perceptions what give us Truth?
On our hunt for Truth, let’s probe our experience a little deeper first. Looking at my own and other’s experience there seems to be some common themes regarding why we feel God is distant:
I have messed up or disobeyed and He has turned away
I cannot see Him intervening in circumstances
He is not answering my prayers
I am still hurting and He hasn't fixed it
Perhaps you could add something to this list. But did you notice a common thread here? This list describes conditional nearness. God’s closeness being measured by some conditional reality. “Am I doing what I need to for Him to be near? If this circumstance changes THEN I will know He is near. If my feelings change that will show me”
Does this sound familiar at all? I don’t know about you, but it sounds a lot like PBA in a different form: “God is near based on how I am living or what I am seeing happen.”
When we looked at PBA, we addressed the fact that rather than God accepting us based on how we perform, He actually provides what we need to “measure up”. He grants us the very righteousness of Christ. Romans 5:21 tells us that this righteousness is a gift. Therefore it is something that is meant to be RECEIVED.
What if His grace is also the answer to feeling His distance? Let’s start with this little verse in Hebrews: “(for the law made nothing perfect); but on the other hand, a better hope is introduced, through which we draw near to God” (7:19). This better hope is talking about what Jesus did for us.
The Hebrew writer talks for several chapters about the incredible reality of what Jesus accomplished - He did what the law could not do. Remember Hebrews 10:14? Through His sacrifice He made us perfect for all time, He met all the conditions which the law could not do for us. He tells us here in 7:19 that the gift of being made perfect in Christ is our pathway to drawing near to God.
If we have received the gift of righteousness (being made perfect in Christ) we can move towards God with confidence - shame free, guilt free, and fearless. Whoa. This is truly incredible. I could say this a million times, but if our hearts can actually receive the magnitude of what this means - it changes everything. Because what Jesus did for us was ENOUGH, we can be bold and confident: He is near (Hebrews 4:16).
When we face up to our perceptions and consider how we may feel, we can always go back to how He has revealed Himself in Christ - Immanuel, God WITH us. The person of Jesus, Immanuel, answers all these dilemmas. God came TO us. He made the way FOR us. His acceptance, and His nearness are based on who HE is & what HE has done.
Jesus gave His disciples a hint in John 14:20 - a glimpse of the new reality that would be true after He had completed His work on the cross and would send His Spirit to live in His children: “in that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.” Jesus said this! The condition of God being near is not circumstantial nor based on what you do - it is about receiving and embracing who He is and what He has done.
Immanuel came to be God WITH us and then He sent His Spirit to be God IN us: “But he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him” 1 Corinthians 6:17. So once again, the answer is simple: Take Jesus. God’s nearness is based on us receiving this gift. The gift is a permanent bond with God through Jesus, you can’t get any closer than that!
