Sean Johnson - Intentionally - The Education of Sean Johnson

Let’s get one thing straight. God didn’t have to create us.

The Christian worldview of God, the God of the Trinity, already had everything. Within the dynamic of the Trinity existed the perfect love relationship. The Son constantly brought glory to the Father, the Father delighted in the Son. There was no need for humanity in the first place.

Still, God felt compelled for some reason to create other beings - first angels and then man. His creations were amazing - the power of the angels, the awesome beauty of the world, the potential for man. But the creations weren’t perfect. If they were, they would by definition be God themselves, and there is only one God.

So we fell. First Satan, and then us. When it happened, we weren’t living in enormous houses, working 60 hour weeks and filling our days up with soccer practices and community service organizations and bars and American Idol. God didn’t feel “distant” from Adam and Eve; he walked with them in the cool of the grass.

God loved us in creating us. He loved us in giving us a world full of beauty so breathtaking that we’d praise Him all the more.

And we rejected Him.

So he made a covenant with Abraham. Promised him many descendants and land and salvation. All Abraham’s people had to do was follow His Law and live holy lives.

And we rejected Him.

So he sent his Son, the second person of the Trinity, to take our place. Since none of us could live up to the Law, the Son took on the responsibility for all of us. He lived a perfect life, walked with us and showed us the very essence of who God is. He offered us a love relationship with a power and magnitude unlike anything we’d ever felt before.

And we rejected Him.

We beat him to a bloody pulp, ripped his flesh from his body and put him on a cross to die one of the most gruesome and painful deaths imaginable. He knew it would happen. And he choose to do it for us. In doing so, he offered himself as a sacrifice for everyone. No longer did we have to send in a high priest once a year to the inner sanctum of the sanctuary to offer a sacrifice for the people. Christ served as the ultimate high priest for all of us.

He gave us the opportunity for direct access to God through prayer. He offered us the Holy Spirit, allowing God to dwell in our hearts. He gave us the opportunity for joy in the midst of trial, peace in the face of persecution. And he promised us a future constantly in His presence. All we had to do was finally, finally accept Him as our Lord.

And we rejected Him.

We sit in our philosophy classes and discuss why He doesn’t exist. We read books about the “lost” writings of the church fathers, marvel at how conradictory they are with the Biblical canon, and conclude that it’s the Bible and its 25,000 plus source texts that are wrong. We decide that no one thought of Christ as God until Constantine forced it down the church’s throat in the fourth century, choosing to ignore the reams of early writers who explicitly called Christ God.

We ask, “If God is all loving, why would He send me to hell?” We convince ourselves that deep down we’re all good people, ignoring the horrible things we do to each other every single day. We face hardship and yell at God. We receive blessings and pat ourselves on the back. We refuse to pray except to ask for a new plasma screen TV or a promotion at work, and decide that God hates us when we don’t get our way.

We decide to “take the good things” from a bunch of ridiculously contradictory systems of belief. We tell everyone that we’re “spiritual but not religious,” thinking that allows us to believe in a higher power but not be accountable to anything. We say that “religion is different for each of us and all paths lead to God,” and base such an assertion on absolutely nothing but our own need to believe that in the end we all end up okay - the belief that in the end, no matter what we do and who we do it to, weend up okay.

God didn’t have to create us. He chose to create us, and to offer us the chance to spend life with him and experience a love so powerful it would make us fall down and cry. And he loved us so much he gave us a world full of beauty and adventure. He loved us so much he sent himself to die on our behalf.

He loved us so much he gave us the freedom to choose whether or not to love him back. He gave us the rules, and the everything we need to follow them. He gave us the ability to either spend life making much of ourselves or making much of Him. God doesn’t send us to hell - He allows us to go there if we choose to.