A Crazy Thought

Recently I had a crazy thought. I was reading about the relationship between the Father and the Son in the Trinity. And I thought: “Why can’t I be like that?” I mean, God seems to have made me a kind of eternal second-class citizen.

Now ordinarily, as a good Christian, I would squash this thought like a bug within about 7 microseconds after having it. And it wasn’t really even so much as a thought as a feeling: how could I be contented knowing that there’s this relationship between the Father and the Son that I would somehow be forever excluded from?

I asked God about this, and stopped thinking about it for a while. But suddenly I thought about a verse in 1 Corinthians 15:

When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will also be subjected to him who put all things in subjection under him, that God may be all in all.
(1 Corinthians 15:28)

Previously when I read this passage I tended to think of it in exclusive terms: God being all in all means I am in some sense marginalized. It’s all about God and so it’s not at all about me. And that is the way most people think about the whole God thing. There’s even a CCM song about it called “Not To Us,” where one line goes “It’s not for me, it’s all for you.”

Leaving aside the song and how powerfully it reveals that CCM songwriters really need to be mentored theologically, I found myself moving past this idea that when God becomes all in all we’ll be marginalized. In fact, there’s another amazing passage that says the following:

And he put all things under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.
(Ephesians 1:22-23)

Focusing on the point at hand we see that His Body — the Church — is “the fullness of him who fills all in all.” That is, WE, the Church, are the way that God fills all in all.

Suddenly things start to take on a different perspective. One problem we have in our fallen state is that we tend to see everything as a zero-sum game. If I win, you lose and vice versa. But there is actually a different way to look at things: that God has arranged things so that everyone wins. The fact that God is all in all means that Christ is all in all which means that His Body is all in all which means that I am all in all with all the rest of us.

Still crazy (after all these years)? Well, one thing leads to another. My question about how Christ will forever be somehow above and different from me finds a response because the Bible also tells us that

For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified.
(Romans 8:29-30)

This points us toward a destiny of being like Jesus, and being one of the many brothers [i.e. brethren, men and women] of which he is the prototype. John also speaks along these lines:

Beloved, we are God’s children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared but we know that when he appears we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is.
(1 John 3:2)

Paul tells us:

But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory. None of the rulers of this age understood this, for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.

But, as it is written,

“What no eye has seen,
nor ear heard,
nor the heart of man imagined,
what God has prepared for those who love him”—

these things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God.
(1 Corinthians 2:7-10)

I always like to say that John 17 is “the deep end of the swimming pool” for Christians, and I think it sheds light on the nature of our relationship with God in eternity. Far from being a kind of exclusivist hierarchy, where the relationship between the Son and the Father is fundamentally different from any relationship we can ever have with God, this passage seems to talk about a union that bridges the gap between us and God in an amazing way:

I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me.

The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me.
(John 17:20-23)

The vision here of unity and love and glory takes me far beyond any kind of discontent I could have with God. He is going to embrace us with the very love with which the Father has loved the Son, with the same oneness and glory. How could anyone ask, or even in one’s wildest dreams hope, for more?