Christians talk a lot about our “relationship with God”, but in my experience the concept tends to be pretty nebulous. Sometimes it seems to mean how consistent we are in reading the Bible and serving at church, or more generally, our level of Christian maturity as seen within a specific church framework. Other times it means how “in love” we are with God. However, the Bible portrays all its characters as relating to God in way, and for those that choose to worship and serve him, it describes three, increasingly intimate, qualities of relationship.

The initial quality of relationship is a master/servant relationship, or alternately, a parent/child relationship. In this relationship, the master or parent has a set of rules, and the servant or child is responsible for following them, usually with punishments/consequences for disobedience, and rewards for obedience. Israel’s covenant with God is the most notable example of this. There are a set of rules, and at the end of Deuteronomy Moses pronounces blessings on Israel for keeping the covenant, and curses for breaking it. Most of the rest of the Old Testament is the record of God trying to avoid implementing the punishments, as the prophets call the people back to obedience. In the end, the people refuse and God keeps his promise and kicks them out of the land.

A master/servant or parent/child relationship is certainly not bad. Paul says that the Law is good. In Dominion, historian Tom Holland notes that a covenant with the divine was unheard of in the ancient world. The pagan gods acted from “power politics”: they were powerful and they did what they wanted. The Illiad shows the gods acting to help their favorites, but opposing those who angered them in some way. In the Odyssey, Odysseus blinded a child of Poseidon, the one-eyed giant Cyclops who was trying to eat him and his men. Self-defense was no excuse, and Poseidon prevented him from arriving home for years. The problem is, the gods do not tell you they were angry at you, and Odysseus only finds out years later. In fact, he only makes it back home by traveling with people who are under Poseidon’s protection. Pagan societies had a set of rites and sacrifices that, because of their success in the past, they knew kept them in the gods’ favor (which was one of the reasons why Christians not sacrificing was problematic: their refusal risked society being punished by the gods). So in the context of the ancient world, Israel’s covenant with God was highly unusual. Gods do not bind themselves with covenants, but Israel’s God had. Furthermore, the covenant was clear on what was required. So by the time of Augustus, the Mediterranean world was somewhat envious of the Jew’s covenant, but the onerous rules limited converts.

In the context of a parent/child relationship, the rules are (hopefully) to train the child the behavior that leads to flourishing relationships in society (e.g. “share with others”). Some of the rules protect other members of the family (“don’t hit your baby sister”) or teach respect for others (“don’t talk back to your parents”, “listen when other people are talking”). Still others are for the child’s own safety (“look both ways and hold mommy or daddy’s hand when crossing the street”). These rules enable a child to flourish within the family community. Habitually breaking a healthy set of rules makes it very difficult to live with the child—it is hard to have a healthy family community if a child is always antagonizing their siblings, or insulting their parents, or constantly recklessly endangering their lives.

Israel’s covenant also has elements of the parent/child relationship. One Jewish writer summarizes the Law as the guidelines under which people can safely live and serve in the house/family of the Lord, again, a situation that would be unthinkable in the ancient world. In a number of places the Old Testament calls God a father to Israel: Deut 32:6, Prov 3:12, Isaiah 63:16, 64:8, Jer 3:19, 31:9, Malachi 1:6, 2:10, and others. So there are hints that the covenant is about building something more like a family than a business relationship with a nation.

A deeper quality of relationship is the friend/friend relationship. In John 15:15, Jesus says that he no longer calls the disciples “servants”, but “friends” because they know the values and goals of Jesus (which are what God revealed to him, which he taught the disciples). Despite the disciples constant misunderstandings, apparently Jesus had successfully taught them his values and goals, because after Pentecost they start acting like him.

Abraham is likewise called a “friend of God” (James 2:23). It is less clear how Abraham acted with God’s values and goals, given that he sacrificed his wife’s safety for his own on two occasions, and ended up trying to have the promised son on his own with Hagar. But when he tries to save Sodom to protect his nephew, he argues based on God’s own character of not killing the righteous for the sins of the unrighteous. Abraham must have had interactions with God outside the few interactions recorded for us, and had understood this aspect of God’s character. Likewise when God asked him to sacrifice Isaac, which if Isaac died would prevent God from keeping his promise about Abraham being a blessing to all nations through his descendants. Abraham seems to have the confidence that God would somehow keep his covenant, either by resurrecting Isaac as the author of Hebrews suggests, or by God doing something else.

David displayed similar characteristics of knowing God’s values. He refused to kill Saul, who was trying to kill him, simply because God had anointed him, and despite the fact that God had rejected Saul. Again, when Absolom rebelled, he accepts it as God’s punishment, and sends the Ark back to Jerusalem in hopes that God would bring him back to where God lived. Most telling is his insight that God desires a contrite heart rather than sacrifices. The Mosaic Law does not seem to suggest otherwise, but perhaps he learned the lesson from Saul’s inappropriate sacrifice, which presumably had become common knowledge (the book of Samuel not having been written yet). Or perhaps his time in the desert, which judging from his psalms developed an intimacy with God, taught it to him.

The friend relationship requires having first internalized the lessons of the servant/child relationship. Friendship is difficult if we refuse to share with other people, or hit them. Donald Trump is an example of failure to do this: he has a transactional relationship with people, and has no problem “hitting” people (metaphorically) if they cross him. He does not seem to have friends, just servants. So if we want to be a friend of God, we are certainly going to need to treat God’s kids well (which means everyone). Saul failed at the master/servant level, but when David also failed at that level (adultery and then murdering to cover it up) he came clean and repented—which for an authoritarian-style ruler is highly unusual.

The deepest quality of relationship is the marriage relationship, that is to say, two becoming one through the mutual-giving bond of love. There are hints of this in the Old Testament, too, with the Prophets using the metaphor of Israel as God’s wife, and comparing idolatry to adultery. Paul expands on this Old Testament metaphor, with the Church as the bride of Christ. Jesus also asks God for believers and God to be one “as you and I are one” as well as for that same unity among believers (John 17:21). He also uses a metaphor of being the vine and use being branches, again suggesting a oneness-unity.

It is harder to find examples of people with this quality of relationship with God, since, just like in marriage, the intimate parts are so personal that they are private and rarely shared. I believe that in this stage, worship becomes lovingly expressing that aspects of God and what he has done that we love. (Compare this to the master/servant stage, where worship can feel like a discipline of telling God how good he is, as if he has some sort of a need to hear us acknowledge it. God has no narcissistic need to “receive all the glory”, rather he is training us in habits that could be an exchange of love and lead to an intimate relationship with him.) I once experience a well-known Charismatic leader known for his teaching and wisdom lead worship for one song. It was just him and a keyboard, but it was crystal clear that he was in love with God and that this was a love song he was sing to God. I have never seen that intimacy in worship ever before, although Jeremy Riddle comes a distant second. (Riddle is also 30 years younger; that sort of intimacy does not happen quickly.) People like Kathryn Kulman and Heidi Baker also impress me as living in this stage.

The Apostle Paul says many things that suggest that he living in this quality of relationship with God. There is explicit marriage metaphor of the Church being the bride of Christ, of course, but that (in theory) could have been an extrapolation of the metaphor already used by the Old Testament prophets. He also says that we are God’s temple, which could simply be “God lives in us”. But this also is suggestive of John 1:14, where Jesus “took on flesh”, or “put on flesh like a garment”, and in that context, we as God’s temple could also be seen as God clothing himself with us, which would be quite intimate. Paul says in another place the we, in Christ, are new creations, which suggests the same idea. When a man and woman marry, over time they become something new, sort of like two atoms that join together to make a molecule create something new, something composite. It seems that God “enfleshes” himself in each of us—we are, after all Christ’s brothers and sisters, as implied by Rom 8:16-17, and Christ was God “enfleshed” (which is what “incarnation” means”), so God is just continuing to do what he started with Christ. The Church Fathers take a similar view, with Maximus the Confessor arguing that when Christ united the divine with the human, he united the logos (the design-plan, the purpose) of humanity with the divine. Or, from a different perspective, that was God’s plan in the first place—the Creation account describes God making a temple of the earth, and instead of a statue in the “image” of the god like pagan temples, we are the image in God’s temple. Since both a temple and a mountain (which is where the Garden of Eden was) were seen as a place where heaven and earth intersect, even from the beginning the intention was for heaven and earth to intersect in humanity.

Of course, to consistently live in the marriage / new creation relationship it is necessary to have absorbed the disciplines of the parent/child stage, and to have cultivated the shared values of the friend stage. How can you have a partnership as non-friends with conflicting core values, let alone a long-term, intimate, shared existence? And if you have not even developed the discipline of doing what pleases the other even if you do not like it at the time, how is this going to be a thriving shared existence? This stage is a constant giving to the other, which requires the previous stages to be successful long-term. I think this is why the “new Christian high” fades, because we stop giving ourselves completely to God, because we do not have the internal character to actually do that.

John Cassian in Conferences quotes an older (Egyptian) Desert Father as saying there are three difference kinds of obedience: obedience out of fear, obedience out of hope of reward, obedience because you love virtue, itself, for what it is. The last stage is not really obedience, it is embodying virtue and “obedience” is simply the result. Moreover, disobedience is not really a problem at this point, because you love virtue. Disobedience would be merely failing to live your desired values: failure rather than rebellion. I doubt that any of us perfectly get here, but allowing for that, this is consonant with the marriage / new creation relationship, since you are one with God in desire (in theory) even if fail to live it out. Of course, the failure to live it out is evidence of lack of oneness in fashion, so presumably this is only perfectly expressed in the next life when we are freed from sin.

So if we consider our “relationship with God”, we see three broad categories of relationship. There is obedience to an externally imposed rules like a child/parent or master/servant. There is adoption of God’s values, leading to a friendship. And there is the marriage / new creation two-becoming-one.