Copyright by Shea Oakley
All rights reserved
What is the most compelling attraction of Biblical Christianity? For me it is simply this: the thought of a God who so loves us that He is willing to become one of us. Such an unfathomably condescending God, for me, is the only one worth knowing and loving above anything else in my life.
Christians believe that Jesus is neither God alone, nor man alone but someone who is both fully God and fully Man. Nothing in the scriptural description of Christ takes away from either His divinity or His humanity. Jesus performed miracles only someone with ultimate power over nature, in short, God, could perform. This same Jesus also was born and grew, ate and drank, worked and loved, lost and suffered, and finally died as one of us. The only difference between His essential humanity and ours is that he never did anything wrong. In that singular fact, His innocence from evil, is perhaps the greatest evidence that He was, and is, also God but a God who willed to become like us in every other way.
I find such a God to be incredibly compelling. If He was willing to become like me then I can relate to Him as something other than what one theologian called the “totally other”, a being so distant from His creation as to be alien to it. Such a distant God is found in the other two monotheistic world religions, but not in Christianity. You may level any number of accusations against this faith, but calling its God remote and uninvolved with human beings is one that is ultimately untenable. It is untenable because Christians worship a God who became a human being, admittedly one unique in all the history of our race, but still a human being.
Think about such a God. Any being rating the Name is, by definition, infinite, eternal and all-powerful and yet this Divinity so wanted to be known by us that He reduced Himself to taking on our form and living among us. It is as if we so cared for the fellowship of ants that we somehow made ourselves an ant and joined the colony.
I don’t know about you but because of this willingness on His part to so identify with me as to become like me, this God is the only One who touches my deepest heart. The God of Jesus Christ, who also is Jesus Christ, is not someone I can ignore, nor do I want to because He was willing to draw close to me to enable me to desire to draw close to Him. This is one of the most profound reasons, though certainly not the only one, why I have come to believe that He loves me and why I love Him, however imperfectly, in return.