A God Who Means Always--May 4, 2021

A God Who Means Always--May 4, 2021

"Therefore, bothers and sisters, holy partners in a heavenly calling, consider that Jesus, the apostle and high priest of our confession, was faithful to the one who appointed him, just as Moses also 'was faithful in all God's house'." [Hebrews 3:1-2]

It's funny:  in the storytelling of our Greek forebears, Zeus was known for his powerful thunderbolt, and his son Hercules was known for his strength.  For the Norse peoples, Odin was wise and cunning, and his son Thor was mighty (especially with a hammer).  For the Egyptians, the sun god Ra was the king of the world, and the pharaohs of Egypt took the title "son of Ra" as a warrant for their claim to power.  

But Jesus?  Ah, the God we meet in Jesus, is known for being faithful.

That's really a curious distinction, if you think about it.  Before getting around to Jesus the "healer," the "wonder-worker," the one with authority over unclean spirits and the wind and waves, or even the one who has power to raise the dead, the writer of Hebrews points us in the direction of Jesus' faithfulness.  Jesus' fierce trustworthiness, not only to the God whose Son he is, but to the people he has claimed and redeemed, is what stands out.  Jesus is faithful, all the way to death.  He loves, as the Gospel-writers would put it, all the way to the end, even to laying his life down for his friends.  He did not bail out, flake out, or give out, even in the face of torture at the hands of the empire and death from an angry mob stirred up by the Respectable Religious Crowd.  Even when everyone else in his inner circle gave up on him, He refused to give up on them.  The word for that is faithfulness--and Jesus has it in spades.

And in a very important sense, that faithfulness is also what Jesus, the Son, reveals about the One whom he called "Abba" (Father).  You might just say that the defining character trait of the God we meet in the Scriptures is God's covenant-loyalty and unconditional love, which is to say, God's faithfulness.  As theologian Douglas John Hall once put it, "God, as God is depicted in the continuity of the Testaments, is never quite predictable—or rather, only this is predictable about God: that God will be faithful. God's faithfulness, however, is not to be equated with our idea of consistent behavior!"

All through this book so far, the writer of Hebrews has tried to get across to us that what we see in Jesus is what God wants to be known for.  Like a shadow or silhouette is the two-dimensional representation of a three-dimensional object or person, Jesus is what is looks like when God's very Being is projected onto a human life like a screen.  And so, in a very important sense, the faithfulness of Jesus is a direct reflection of the faithfulness of God's character.  

And again, the God we meet throughout the Scriptures is faithful to the end.  God keeps promises unilaterally, even when we've done nothing to deserve it.  God holds onto covenant relationships, even long after we've broken them and run off with some idol made of gold.  God keeps seeking us even when we've gotten ourselves lost or stuck in the trench like a sheep for the millionth time.  And God continues to be constant in character, rather than flighty or fickle.  God doesn't wake up in a good mood one day and then wake up cranky the next.  God doesn't move from dependable to unreliable and back again.  And in a world full of folks who let you down or disappoint or bail out on you when things get difficult, it can sound too good to be true to hear that God doesn't act that way, that God is really faithful all the way.

And when those questions come, when those doubts and worries arise, we turn to Jesus, who is the human face of God.  And as we see Jesus' own utter and complete faithfulness, we know this is what God is truly like.  The way Jesus loved all the way to death--that's God's kind of faithfulness.  The way Jesus gave his all, even when he was tired and weary--that's what God's kind of enduring devotion looks like.  The way Jesus never bailed out on his friends just because somebody new came along--that's the strength of God's love.  So when we worry whether the idea of a God who means "always" when he says "always" is just wishful thinking, we look to Jesus, and we know: God loves us always.  And always means always.

Know that today, and let it lift you where you need it.  We don't need to fuss so much with the images of power or brute strength or self-congratulating pomposity of the ancient gods, Caesars, and pharaohs or their imagined sons.  The faithfulness of Jesus is all we need.  Always.

Lord Jesus, let us rely on you and your faithfulness, and see in you the face of God's own enduring love.