Delusion or Delight in a Relational God?
There’s an abundance of examples displayed through others who seem to experience God relationally. But in practice, His relationability can often feel like a mystery.
What does having a relationship with Him really look like? How is it supposed to change our day-to-day life? It seems as many who claim a relationship with Him, not all reflect a life any different than anyone else.
So, why should we even care? When we think about a relationship with God, it starts with what we get out of the deal. We all have an innate desire to be loved and to love, we want to know and be known. Finding these desires fulfilled in a God who claims to answer all our needs and fulfill our longings is attractive to us.
God’s holiness and goodness existed before He created us. He didn’t need us to be those things. He doesn’t get holier because we worship Him. Or become more pure, good or loving because of the attention we give Him. God receives nothing from us but enjoyment of our enjoyment of Him.
He is endlessly explorable. Since we are the only one receiving anything, His goodness is endlessly available to us.
Things in this world bring us joy, but only shadow the primary source of it. The world can’t give more than the One who created it. While lesser joys of the world bring us additional joy, only He will give us what we need.
Because God didn’t create us for anything other than enjoyment of Him, it only makes sense that we would be innately needy of Him. We were created to need God.
We don’t usually enjoy the word “needy.” It reveals our own weakness. Our continual search for meaning and purpose in our lives can only be found in Him. It’s on one hand relieving to hear there’s a reason why we were created but on the other hand frustratingly too simplistic. And it doesn’t seem to align with our day-to-day experience with God and in this world.
Sin disrupted how God intended us to fully experience Him, we live in a cruel and unfair world. Our daily lives are filled with betrayal, corruption and hurt. A relationship with God feels conceptual rather than tangible.
What if we’ve been searching for a relationship with Him, but our experience of Him is very different from the glamorized spiritual picture which is thrown in our faces? Where is this God who supposedly wants a relationship with us? We’re calling, but He’s not answering. Is He even there?
How can He be good if He created us to be needy only to leave us waiting endlessly for His reply? How can He be good if He’s silent when we need Him the most?
There’s many more “how can God be good if..” statements. But what if our comprehension of His goodness isn’t the evidence of it? What if His goodness stands outside of our existence?
And yet, our experience of Him remains the same. We’re still left wondering why He seems to be offering the world but isn’t there when we search for Him. It seems as if He’s dangling a treat in front of our faces while maliciously moving it further back as we grasp for it.
This feels malicious because if He’s the Creator of this universe, shouldn’t He be responsible with how He created us? It’s as if He created the problem and not the solution. If He created us so needy in a world so cruel and unfair, isn’t this unquestionably unjust?
I’ve agonized over these same seemingly incongruous ideologies about God.
In a very dark time in my life, I was desperate for God. Having spent the majority of my life in faithful service to Him, I’d slowly slipped away from my once close-knit relationship with Him. Alone, afraid and hopeless, I turned to Him in what felt like my darkest hour and was met with a deafening silence.
I wrote Him off that night. Not His existence, or even surprisingly His goodness. Instead, I deeply questioned and distrusted His goodness and love towards me specifically. He was fully God and fully good, but only certain people seemed to experience Him in this way. It felt like God was playing favorites and I couldn’t understand how to be one of them.
The next few years I spent in search of filling the void from my felt abandonment of God. Seeking life apart from Him, I found what Hell feels like. When I’d exhausted my own resources, I took my chance on Him again. Truthfully, God was my final resort.
My return came out of a need I hoped He’d fill, not out of a love for Him.
Instead of expectations for what I thought I was owed, I brought my hurt, sin and shame. I had nothing to offer. Slowly, I grew the desire to know Him, and not what He could do for me. A genuine desire to lean in and discover Him. The deeper I leaned in, the more I grew to actually enjoy Him.
Maybe some of us have been following God for many years, but have been struggling with what “delighting in Him” really looks like. We feel stuck in a habitual relationship with Him, wondering how we got here in the first place. After years of faithfulness, tensions are high as we begin questioning what God has been giving us in return.
Or perhaps, some of us are doubting God’s character. We’ve been searching for Him and are done waiting in the still silence. Who is He really? And why did He bother making us? We’ll have to make sense of the world without Him, we conclude. If we choose God, we may miss out on the freedom and joys of this world.
Either way, God feels like a gatekeeper to true fulfillment or a bystander to our pain. We all search for this belonging and purpose, but what if we’re spinning our wheels in the mud to find freedom, but when we’re only digging ourselves into what will hold us back from it?
More thoughts to follow.
