students of jesus

What is the distance between you and God? It’s not nearly as far as you might think. If you’ve been told, “a Holy God cannot look upon sin,” you’ve been misled. Consider just three tales from the beginning of time:

• After Adam and Eve choose to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil they discovered their nakedness and tried to hide from God. Far from rejecting them, God himself went searching for them. 
• When Cain was angry with his brother, it was Yahweh who tried to talk him down from the ledge. Even after Cain murdered Abel, Yahweh not only heard the voice of the victim, he protected the guilty from the revenge of others.
• When Jacob cheated his brother and lied to his father, God did not reject him—though it would have been understandable. Instead, God revealed Himself at Bethel and said, "I am with you and will watch over you wherever you go . . . I will not leave you until I have done what I have promised you.” (Genesis 28:15)

One way to grasp the grand story of the Bible is to cast the Creator in the role of seeker, and humanity in the role of the sought. King David, who abused the privilege and grace of God as much as any modern politician, discovered a faithfulness beyond human reasoning, a presence not far from any one of us: 

You have searched me, LORD, 

   and you know me. 

You know when I sit and when I rise; 

   you perceive my thoughts from afar.

David wondered out loud if there was any location safe from God’s intrusion. He played with the idea of setting up camp in Hell, but came to the conclusion:

If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me 

   and the light become night around me,” 

even the darkness will not be dark to you; 

   the night will shine like the day, 

   for darkness is as light to you. (Psalm 139)

If there was ever a candidate for separation from God, the Apostle Paul’s your man: a self-righteous religious cop bent on dragging heretics back to Jerusalem to face the orthodox music. Yet when Jesus confronted Paul on the road to Damascus it was a confrontation of grace, not judgment. The good shepherd left the ninety-nine and went after the one who wandered away. Years later, as Paul stood at the marketplace of ideas in Athens, he suggested that God is close at hand to each of us: the sensual, the cerebral, the religious, the skeptic, the clueless and the pagan. I suspect Paul could make such a statement because he had experienced the reality: Jesus tracked him down and cornered him with a blinding light.

By the time Paul had re-calibrated his understanding of God, he was able to celebrate God’s goodness and affections: “For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” (Romans 8: 38-39) Paul, the legalist, had become the Apostle of grace, and something more: he was the messenger of God’s goodness and presence.

Paul discovered that the Father has always wanted to be among us, and he will not allow anything to get in the way. If sin separated us from the Father, then the Father provided a remedy. It’s more than a legal transaction: the record shows that God will go to any length to be with us. If, as Isaiah says, “your iniquities have separated you from your God; your sins have hidden his face from you,” (Isaiah 59: 2) it is because we are the ones in hiding. He has not gone anywhere. He is still “not far from any one of us.” 

How many of us need time and space to re-calibrate our view of the Father? Which events in our personal history point to God’s desire to be with us, if only the scales would fall from our eyes? You won’t have to think this through alone. Ask him: he’s not far from you at this very moment.