Every time I see something right in another man, it tends to minimize me, and it makes it easier for me to have a proper creature-creature relationship. But each time I see something wrong in others, it is dangerous, for it can exalt self, and when this happens, my open fellowship with God falls to the ground. So when I am right, I can be wrong. In the midst of being right, if self is exalted, my fellowship with God can be destroyed. It is not wrong to be right, but it is wrong to have the wrong attitude in being right, and to forget that my relationship with my fellowmen must always be personal. If I really love a man as I love myself, I will long to see him be what he could be on the basis of Christ's work, for that is what I want or what I should want for myself on the basis of Christ's work. And if it is otherwise, not only is my communication with the man broken, but my communication with God as well. For this is sin, breaking the second commandment to love my neighbor as myself.
This remains true even if the man is desperately wrong and I am right. When 1 Corinthians 13 says, "Love rejoices not in iniquity," it means exactly what it says. When we find another man to be wrong, we are not to rejoice in his iniquity. And how careful I must be, every time I see a situation where I am right and another man is wrong, not to use it as an excuse to scramble into a superior position over that man, rather than remembering the proper relationship of fellow creatures before God.
The next practical question must be, if I am to see myself as an equal to all other men, and I live in a fallen world in which there has to be order imposed, where is this order to come from? Men have wrestled with this through the centuries. But I would suggest that from a scriptural viewpoint this is not really a difficult question, though it is a most practical one. The Bible makes a distinction between man as a creature and the relationship God has set up as offices among men. The central thing is the command in the Ten Commandments, "Honor thy father and thy mother." This is the core of the whole matter. There is a proper legal relationship between the parent and the child. But that does not mean that when the proper legal relationship is in order, everything is perfect. Far from it. Although my child is honoring me, the parent-child relationship may not have come to full fruition. The children are to love the parents, and the parents are to love the children on a personal level, within the legal framework, and once we see this, we under-stand all that follows. This is a relationship of office, but between fellow human beings. If we could learn this, we would stop seeing the tragedy of poor parent-child relationships. My child, while he is still a minor, is my fellow creature created on my own level; I am not intrinsically higher than he is. For a certain number of years there is to be this other relationship of office, but I am never to forget, as I look at my child, even when I hold that child in my own arms, that that child is a creature, created on my own level. And more than this, if he becomes a Christian while he is my minor child, I must not forget that then he is not only my fellow creature, but he is also my brother or my sister in Christ.
And the child is not just to have the proper legal attitude toward the parents; he is to work for a personal relationship to them, in love. Anything less than the personal relationship between the parent and child is not only wrong; it is full of sorrow.
Here is the New Testament teaching on human relationships: "And be not drunk with wine, wherein is excess; but be filled with the Spirit; speaking among yourselves in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody in your heart to the Lord; giving thanks always for all things unto God and the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ; submitting yourselves one to another in the fear of God. Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. . . . Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it. . . . So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself. For no man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as the Lord the church. . . . For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh. . . . Let every one of you in particular so love his wife even as himself; and the wife see that she reverence her husband. Children, obey your parents in the Lord: for this is right. Honor thy father and mother; which is the first commandment with promise; that it may be well with thee, and thou mayest live long on the earth. And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord. Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ; not with eyeservice, as menpleasers; but as the servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart; with good will doing service, as to the Lord, and not to men: knowing that whatsoever good thing any man doeth, the same shall he receive of the Lord, whether he be bond or free. And, ye masters, do the same things unto them, forbearing threatening: knowing that your Master also is in heaven; neither is there respect of persons with him" (Ephesians 5:18-22, 25, 28, 29, 31, 33; 6:1-9).
In each case mentioned here there are two parts: the legal framework, and a strong personal relationship within that legal framework. This is true of the marriage relationship, of parent and child, and of employee and employer. It is interesting to notice that the Bible also gives us a legal relationship in regard to those who govern us in the State. But even in this there is a personal relationship involved in our praying for these people.
The church is not to be a place of chaos, it is to be a place of order. We read in 1 Peter 5:1-3: "The elders which are among you I exhort, who am also an elder, and a witness of the sufferings of Christ, and also a partaker of the glory that shall be revealed: feed the flock of God, which is among you, taking the oversight thereof not by constraint, but willingly, not for filthy lucre, but of a ready mind; neither as lording it over God's heritage, but being examples to the flock." Here we see in the relationships of the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ that there is relationship of office, but in the midst of this Peter pleads with the elders to keep the personal relationship alive and real. Thus there is to be an order in the Church, just as there is to be an order in the family and an order in the State. There needs to be an order of office, but in every single office that is presented in the Scriptures there is the personal emphasis within that legal concept. In the Church the elder is an office-bearer. But both the preaching elders and the ruling elders are "ministers," and the word "minister" is a personal relationship, it does not speak of dominance. There is to be order in the Church, but the preaching elder or the ruling elder is to be a minister, with a loving personal relationship with those who are before him, even when they are wrong and need admonition.
In the area of office, whether it is in the Church, in the home, or in the State, the relationship indeed must be personal. Man is a rebel and there needs to be order in this poor world, but when I use whatever office God gives me, whether it is in the State, the Church, or the home, or as an employer, it is to be for God's glory and for the other person's good. If I must make legal judgments in my position as having an "office" in one of the relationships of life, I must consciously show that all I can do is let the Bible speak. I have no intrinsic authority in myself; I am an equal creature with the other person, and I too am a sinner. And every time I come into a place of eminence of office, I am to do it with trembling, because I must understand from the Word of God that eventually I will give account of my stewardship, not only in regard to my proper legal relationships but on the basis of my personal relationships.
One of the problems with humanists is that they tend to "love" humanity as a whole—Man with a capital M, Man as an idea—but forget about man as an individual, as a person. Christianity is to be exactly the opposite. Christianity is not to love in abstraction, but to love the individual who stands before me in a person-to-person relationship. He must never be face-less to me or I am denying everything I say I believe. This concept will always involve some cost: it is not a cheap thing, be-caus
e we live in a fallen world, and we ourselves are fallen.
Now we must ask, what happens when someone has been hurt by my sin? The Bible teaches that the moment we have confessed this sin to God, the shed blood of the Lord Jesus Christ is enough to cleanse the moral guilt. As Christians we insist that all sin is ultimately against God. When I hurt the man, I sin against God. But let us never forget that this does not change the fact that because man has been made in the image of God, the man I have hurt has real value. And this must be important to me, not only as a concept but in my practice and demonstration. My fellowman is not unimportant: he is God's image-bearer. That is true of the non-Christian man as well as of the Christian. He is lost, but he is still a man. Thus when God says, "My child, this sin is different; in this sin you have hurt another person," I respond, "What shall I do, Lord?" And the answer is clear from the Word of God: "Make it right with the man you have hurt. The man you have hurt is not a zero."
But what is the usual reaction when God says to me, "Go and make it right"? It is to answer, "But that would be humiliating." Yet surely, if I have been willing to tell God I am sorry when I have sinned, I must be willing to tell this to the man I have hurt. How can I say, "I am sorry" to God, if I am not willing to say, "I am sorry" to the man I have hurt, when he is my equal, my fellow creature, my kind? Such a repentance is meaningless hypocrisy. This is why so many of us have deadness in our lives. We cannot just trample human relationships and expect our relationship to God to be lovely, beautiful, and open. This is not only a matter of what is legally right, but of a true relationship of person to person on the basis of who I am and who the man is.
In James 5:16 we are told, "Confess your faults one to another." We are not told to confess our faults to a priest, nor to the group, unless the group has been harmed, but to the person we have harmed. This is a very simple admonition, but in our present imperfect state, very difficult to obey. To go and say, "I am sorry" is to enter by the low door: first in confessing to God, and then to the individual harmed. Let me emphasize, this is a person before me, a human being, made in God's image. So it is not such a low door after all, because all it involves is being willing to admit our equality with the one we have hurt. Being his equal it is perfectly right that I should want to say, "I am sorry." Only a desire to be superior makes me afraid to confess and apologize.
If I am living in a real relationship with the Trinity, my human relationships become more important in one way, be-cause I see the real value of man, but less important in another way because I do not need to be God in these relationships any longer. So now I can go up to a man and say, "I am sorry for such and such specific harm I have done you," without smashing the integration point of my universe, because it is no longer myself, but God. And we do not need to wait for the big explosions, especially among brothers and sisters in Christ.
We do not need to wait for someone else to begin. This is being what we should be, and it should be moment by moment.
This is communication. The men of the modern world are asking whether personality is real, whether communication is real, whether it has meaning. We Christians can talk till we are blue in the face, but it will all be meaningless unless we exhibit communication. When as a Christian I stand before a man and say, "I am sorry," this is not only legally right and pleasing to God, but it is true communication on a highly personal level. In this setting, the human race is human.
Of course, confession to God must always come first. It is confession to God and bringing sin under the shed blood of Christ that cleanses us—not confession to man. We must always stress that, over and over again, because men get con-fused. But this does not change the fact that after there has been confession to God, then there must be real communication in a man-to-man, personal relationship with the person I have hurt.
We must be careful of three things in this connection. First, we must be careful not to do it merely to be seen of men or the Church, because then the whole thing becomes worse than it was in the first place; it is a mere show.
Second, we must see that sometimes this will mean going back for years. If we have lost the human relationship, in the Church, the family, or in general, almost always it means that years ago we have got off the track in some personal relationship. In talking about the freedom of our conscience in reference to sin before God, we said that we have to go back to where we sinned, to where we got off the track, even if it was twenty years ago. The same thing is true in human relationships. If I know that somewhere back in my life I have dealt with some Christian, or some non-Christian, on less than a really human basis, I must go back if possible, pick up the pieces, and say, "I am sorry." Many can vouch for the fact that there have been springs of living water and dews of refreshment when they have gone back, knocked on somebody's door, and apologized—even after many years.
I do not think there are many people with any sensitivity who cannot remember some doors that need knocking on, and some apologies that need to be made.
Third, we must remember that Christ's crucifixion was real and in the external world. In Philippians we are told: "Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus" (2:5). Christ's crucifixion was on a hill, by a road, where everybody who passed by could not only see his pain, but also his shame. It was not done in a shadow, hidden away somewhere. And when you and I have some concept of really living under the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ, our confession to God and to man must be as open as Christ's crucifixion was open on that hill, before the eyes of man. We have to be willing for the shame, as well as the pain, in an open place. It is not enough merely to agree with the principle as we deal with these personal relationships; we must put it into practice. Only in this way can we give a demonstration to a watching world, in a way that they can understand, that we live in a personal universe, and that personal relationships are valid and important. Only thus can we show that we are bought by the Lord Jesus Christ not just in theory, but in practice, and that there can be substantial healing of the separation between men in the present life, and not just when we get on the other side of death. And if the other man is not a Christian that makes no difference. The demonstration and the reality is to be on our part, not his.
In two areas above all others the Christian demonstration of love and communication stands clear: in the area of the Christian couple and their children; and in the personal relationships of Christians in the church. If there is no demonstration in these two places, on the personal level, the world can conclude that orthodox Christian doctrine is nothing but dead, cold words. In a psychologically oriented age people may try to explain away individual results in a Christian life, but love and communication between Christians add a human dimension which, especially in a day like ours, is not easily explained away.
When man sinned, certain legal strictures were placed by God upon man and woman in marriage. In order to give a framework for order in the midst of a fallen world, the woman and man stand face to face with each other as creatures, yet the man has an office in the home. But the man-woman relationship must not only be stated in the negative—either in regard to wrong order in the home or concerning committing adultery, as important as these negatives indeed are—but it must also contain the command and the reason to love. Marriage is a picture of Christ and his Church (Ephesians 5:23). How poor is our concept of the work of Christ if we make it only a legal thing. How poor not to understand that we are to have communion with Christ and that there is to be a mutual love between him, the bridegroom, and ourselves, the bride. If human marriage is meant to be a picture of that tremendous union of Christ and his Church and of the present relationship of Christ as bridegroom to the Church as bride, surely then there should be a showing forth of joy and a song in communication and love between man and woman.
We are finite, and therefore do not expect to find final sufficiency in any human relationship, including marriage. The final sufficiency is to be found only in a relationship to God. But on th
e basis of the finished work of Christ, through the agency of the Holy Spirit and the instrument of faith, there can be a real and substantial healing of relationships, and thus true joy.
As Christians we understand something more. Not only are we finite, as we were created, but since the fall we are all sinners; therefore we know that relationships will not be perfect. But on the basis of the finished work of Christ, human relationships can be substantially healed, and can be joyous. Christianity is the only answer to the problem of man. Modern multiple divorce is rooted in the fact that many are seeking in human relationships what human relationships can never give. Why do they have multiple divorce, instead of merely promiscuous affairs? Because they are seeking more than merely the sexual relationship. But they can never find it, because what they are seeking does not exist in a purely finite relationship. It is like trying to quench thirst by swallowing sand.
If man tries to find everything in a man-woman or a friend-to-friend relationship, he destroys the very thing he wants and destroys the ones he loves. He sucks them dry, he eats them up, and they as well as the relationship are destroyed. But as Christians we do not have to do that. Our sufficiency of relationship is in that which God made it to be, in the infinite-personal God, on the basis of the work of Christ in communication and love.
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