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CHAPTER 1

The Importance of Relationships

Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up! Again, if two lie together, they keep warm, but how can one keep warm alone? And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him — a threefold cord is not quickly broken.

— Ecclesiastes 4:9–12

Personal relationships have a central role in human living. We spend a lot of our time interacting with other people — talking, listening, helping, cooperating in work and in leisure. When relationships degenerate, we may feel the effects keenly: we may hate others; we may quarrel, fight, backstab, envy, covet, lie, slander, steal, and murder. We may suffer when other people hurt us. Relationships can clearly be for both good and ill. Not only in the family but in almost every other sphere of life we experience human relationships. Education depends on relations between teacher and student and between fellow students. Businesses depend on relations of employer and employee, supervisor and subordinate, and teams of workers in cooperative effort. Communication, news, and entertainment, whether by television, radio, newspapers, or the Internet, involve relationships between communicators, news reporters, entertainers, and recipients. We can enter into relationships in friendships, social organizations, businesses, churches, charities, political parties, governmental organizations, military organizations, and sports.

Large organizations like national governments, big-business corporations, universities, and mass media organizations demonstrate the importance of relationships in another way. Their very existence is closely tied to relationships. They continue to exist because they are maintained through a vast number of internal relationships among those who work in them. And their influence on others relies heavily on what other people know and think about them. A business, for example, depends on people's trust in its reputation and their knowledge of the products that it offers for sale. A national government functions most effectively when the people freely recognize its authority, rather than regarding it as an unwelcome oppressor.

Some activities, such as gardening, do not demand the immediate presence of another human being. But even they gain significance from a larger context of human life in which relationships have an indispensable role. We practice gardening using advice and examples from other people. We may have obtained the seeds or seedlings from a nursery or gardening shop. We may work our garden with benefits in mind that extend to other people. And gardening can be more pleasant if we are talking with a friend while doing it. We could go on. Many of the most significant and precious moments in life gain significance through relationships. So examining our relationships could contribute significantly to reorienting our lives. That is why we are going to take a long look at relationships and their meaning.

The Importance of Relationships in the Bible

The Bible confirms the importance of relationships. It says that in the beginning God created human beings in his image: "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness" (Gen. 1:26). Human beings are created like God, and the likeness includes his personal character. Human beings thus have capability for personal relationships, involving knowing, loving, and communicating with others.

The first recorded interaction between God and man shows a personal relationship. God spoke to human beings concerning their task: "And God blessed them. And God said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth'" (Gen. 1:28). This speech showed a relationship of communication and personal responsibility between God and human beings. The personal responsibility came into focus more pointedly when God introduced a special prohibition: "And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, 'You may surely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall surely die'" (Gen. 2:16–17). Adam and Eve, the first human beings, violated their relationship with God when they disobeyed and fell into sin. But that was not the end of their relationship with God. God gave hope to Adam and Eve through a promise of redemption, which demonstrated a continuing possibility of positive fellowship with God (Gen. 3:15).

Among human beings, family relationships play an important role. God established the relationship of marriage even before the beginning of human rebellion (Gen. 2:18–25). The human race grows through families who bear children and raise them (Gen. 4:1–5:32). Parents have a responsibility to train their children (Deut. 6:6–7; Eph. 6:4). Children must maintain a relationship of respect toward their parents (Ex. 20:12; Eph. 6:1–3).

God also established the beginning of civil government when he gave instructions on how to deal with cases of murder (Gen. 9:5–6). We can see more complex governmental organization in Egypt (e.g., Gen. 41:37–57), in the kings of Israel (1 Chronicles 22–29), and in Babylon (Daniel 1–6). God established these governments and accomplished his will through them, even though they did not always act justly (Gen. 45:5; 50:20; Dan. 2:36–45; 4:34–35; 7:17–27; Rom. 13:1–3).

In the Old Testament God's relations to human beings come to particular expression in covenants. We will look at covenants more closely at a later point. Roughly speaking, a covenant is a kind of pact, an agreement that establishes a relationship between two parties. God made a covenant with Abraham and his descendants (Genesis 17), and later with the nation of Israel through Moses (Exodus 24). Jesus inaugurated a covenant at the Last Supper (Matt. 26:28). God's covenants with human beings express a commitment on God's part to a special people, and they look forward to a time when God will accomplish final and definitive redemption. Redemption includes the healing of the relation between God and mankind that was broken by human rebellion.

The healing of the relationship was accomplished when Jesus Christ came into the world and carried out his work. Jesus acted to restore a proper relationship of love between God and human beings, and a relation of love among human beings. His teachings have much to say about human relationships in their many dimensions. But his actions, especially his death and his resurrection from the dead, took place in order to effect reconciliation in the relation between God and man, and then, as a further result, reconciliation in human relationships with one another: "A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another" (John 13:34).

The "gospel" or good news that the Bible proclaims tells how Jesus's work restored relationships, and what we are to do in responding to God and what he accomplished. The Bible's message addresses relationships in all their dimensions.

Our response to the message in the Bible includes a response in changing our relationships. First of all, we need to be reconciled to God, against whom we have rebelled. In other words, our relationship with God needs to be restored. In addition, reconciliation with God has implications for our future relationship to God and to others. Jesus summarizes our obligations to God in two central commandments, both of which involve relationships:

"Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?" And he [ Jesus] said to him, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets." (Matt. 22:36–40)

Living your life as God designed you to live it means living fruitfully in relationships. If you are genuinely carrying out God's two commands — for relationship with God and relationship with other people — you are pleasing God and fulfilling the true goal of your existence. So relationships are vital in your life.

Relationships and the Trinity

The Father loves the Son and has given all things into his hand.

— John 3:35

How do we go about understanding human relationships? Human relationships have a close relation to the Trinitarian character of God. In fact, the Trinitarian character of God is the deepest starting point for understanding personal relationships. So we need to look at what the Bible teaches about God in his Trinitarian character.

The Trinity

The Bible teaches that God is one God, and that he exists in three persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. I will not undertake to defend orthodox Trinitarian doctrine in detail, because this has already been done many times. Let me mention briefly only a small number of evidences. In addressing the polytheism of surrounding nations, the Old Testament makes it clear that there is only one true God, the God of Israel, who is the only Creator (Genesis 1; see Deut. 6:4; 32:39; Isa. 40:18–28). The New Testament introduces further revelation about the distinction of persons in God, but it everywhere presupposes the unity of one God as revealed in the Old Testament. The New Testament does not repudiate but reinforces the Old Testament: "Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God, the Lord is one" (Mark 12:29). "You believe that God is one; you do well" (James 2:19).

Second, the New Testament dramatically affirms the deity of Christ the Son of God by applying to him Old Testament verses that use the tetragrammaton, the sacred name of God: "Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved" (Rom. 10:13; from Joel 2:32, which has the tetragrammaton). We also find explicit affirmations that Jesus is God in John 1:1 ("... and the Word was God") and John 20:28. The Holy Spirit is God, according to Acts 5:3–4.3 The distinction between the persons is regularly evident in John, when John expresses the relation of two persons as that of Father and Son, and when the Spirit is described as "another Helper," indicating that he is distinct from the Son (John 14:16).

God Has Personal Relations within Himself

The New Testament indicates that the persons of the Trinity speak to one another and enjoy profound personal relations with one another. These relationships within God show us the ultimate foundation for thinking about human personal relationships. God establishes a personal relationship with us, but, in addition, the persons of the Trinity have personal relations to one another. Personal relationships exist not solely among human beings, but also in divine-human relationships, and even in divine-divine relationships. Approaches that conceive of personal and social relationships only with reference to human beings are accordingly one-sided, reductionistic.

What evidence does the Bible give for divine-divine personal relationship? Divine relationships crop up again and again in the Gospel of John where Jesus talks about his relation as Son to the Father. For example, "The Father loves the Son and shows him all that he himself is doing" (John 5:20). "And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Helper [the Spirit]" (John 14:16). The relationship between the Father and the Son includes asking, commanding, loving, and each "glorifying" the other (John 13:31–32; 17:4–5).

The statements recorded in the Gospel of John mostly focus on Jesus's relation to the Father during his time on earth. But they reflect eternal truths. The Son, the second person of the Trinity, always existed, according to John 1:1. He became a human being at a specific point in time, which was the beginning of Jesus's life on earth: "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father" (John 1:14). This becoming human is called the incarnation.

What Jesus said and did on earth, he said and did as both God and man. So his work on earth was in harmony with his eternal relation to the Father. The statement "the Father loves the Son" (John 5:20 and 3:35) applies to Jesus's earthly life; but it also applies eternally. The Father has always loved the Son, even before his incarnation. The language about the Father "sending" the Son implies that the Father was Father and the Son was Son even before he was "sent" to earth in the incarnation (see John 5:23, 37; 10:36; Gal. 4:4; and elsewhere). And it implies that the Father and the Son already had together a plan for sending the Son before the moment when the sending took place in his incarnation.

So far we have considered two persons of the Trinity, the Father and the Son. There is also a third, the Holy Spirit. The designation of the Holy Spirit as "another Helper" (John 14:16) indicates that the Holy Spirit is a person distinct from the Son and from the Father. The fact that the Holy Spirit "proceeds from the Father" and that the Son "sends" him from the Father indicates that the Spirit enjoys personal relations with both the Father and the Son (see John 15:26). The three persons agree in their purposes, and one carries out the intentions of another.

The Spirit's relation to the Father and the Son also comes to light in the communication and sharing of knowledge among them:

When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth, for he will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me [ Jesus], for he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you. (John 16:13–15)

Distinct Roles of the Persons of the Trinity in Personal Relations

Since the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are three distinct persons, we may expect rich, many-dimensional personal relations among them. They know one another; they love one another; they are in harmony in their purposes; as divine persons, they share in the divine characteristics, such as omnipresence, omniscience, omnipotence, immutability, righteousness, holiness, truth, and eternality. They dwell in one another ("coinherence").

But we can also see distinctions among the persons in the relations that they have with one another. As we observed, the Father is Father and the Son is Son. The Father has a fatherly relation to the Son, and the Son has a filial relation to the Father. These are distinct personal relations.

The Father and the Son enjoy their Father-Son relation from all eternity. But it is also expressed or made manifest in time when the Son becomes incarnate. The angel who announces the virgin birth of Christ to Mary says, "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High [God] will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy — the Son of God" (Luke 1:35). Note the word therefore. The child will be called "the Son of God" because God himself — God the Father — will "overshadow you," and the child will be conceived by the special exercise of God's power, without a human father. God himself is the child's father, and so the child is definitely "the Son of God."

We have already affirmed that the Son of God was always Son of God in relation to the Father who was always the Father. The virgin birth of Christ is not in tension with this eternal reality. Rather, the virgin birth is an appropriate manifestation in its particular time and place of what was always the case in God, but it becomes newly manifest to humanity because the Son has now become "flesh," a human being.

In addition the third person of the Trinity, the Holy Spirit, has a distinctive role in the virgin birth. "The Holy Spirit will come upon you," says the angel, in an expression parallel to "the power of the Most High will overshadow you." The power of the Most High, the power of God the Father, operates through the coming and presence of the Holy Spirit. God the Father is the divine Father who fathers the Son in the virgin birth. And the Holy Spirit is present as the power of God who empowers the conception of the Son. Both Father and Spirit are present, but in distinctive ways.

Since the virgin birth and conception are in harmony with who God always is, we may infer that the Father fathers the Son eternally and that in this act of fathering the Holy Spirit is the empowerer. The old-fashioned word for fathering is begetting, and accordingly the Nicene-Constantinopolitan Creed uses the term to express the relations of the persons of the Godhead: "I believe ... in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only-begotten Son of God, begotten of the Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, very God of very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father; by whom all things were made...."

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Excerpted from "Redeeming Sociology"
by .
Copyright © 2011 Vern Sheridan Poythress.
Excerpted by permission of Good News Publishers.
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