ONE MID-DECEMBER DAY, Mike and I packed his Saab station wagon and set out for the shores of the Gulf of Mexico for the annual Christmas gathering of my extended family. The trip cost us a chunk of change in gas, tolls, and hotels, plus some wear and tear on the nervous system due to, shall we say, interpersonal challenges within the extended family. But we gladly sacrificed because belonging comes at a price.
The need to belong tugs at every heart. God designed us to function based on intimate relationships, to love and be loved. He derived this design from Himself, for from eternity, the original family of Father, Son, and Spirit lived in intimate closeness. “God is love,” not just in the sense of love extending from God, but love within God, between the Father, Son, and Spirit. The very nature of God is love, with or without His creation.
But then God did create, and He created us like Him.
Because of our God-likeness, we possess not just a capacity for love but a demand for it. When our need is met, we thrive; when it remains unmet, we fail to thrive. Neuroscience screams this out to us in various studies, from those that show how children raised in a nurturing environment have higher IQs to those that correlate loneliness with heart disease and cancer. Belonging entwines itself in the spiralladders of our DNA, reaching out in tendrils of longing from our cores.
We want to belong. We need to belong. So how to belong becomes the question. Clearly, humanity fails at it. Strife lashes out everywhere, from the interpersonal to the global scale. We find ourselves “hateful and hating one another,” one description attests (Titus 3:3, KJV); another describes human beings as “alienated and enemies in your mind” (Colossians 1:21, KJV). A quick perusal of the daily news validates these assertions.
THE UNDOING OF ALIENTATION
So here we sit, alienated from one another and from God, opposed to the very need engraved on our DNA. We can’t extricate ourselves without a Savior. But qualifying Himself to save us cost Jesus something. The human race, under Adam, orphaned itself through sin, and only through a new Representative, a second or “last Adam” (1 Corinthians 15:45), could we gain entrance into the heavenly courts. Jesus qualified Himself to become he last Adam by first joining the sinful race and then atoning for its sins on the Cross. This was the cost of our belonging.
Have you ever noticed the plurality of God throughout Bible? “Then God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, . . .’” —Genesis 1:26
“Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?’ . . .” —Isaiah 6:8
“. . . ‘You are my son; today I have become your father.’” —Psalm 2:6–7
“Yet they rebelled and grieved his Holy Spirit. . . .” —Isaiah 63:10
“May the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all.” —2 Corinthians 13:14
“To God’s elect, . . . who have been chosen according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through the sanctifying work of the Spirit, to be obedient to Jesus Christ and sprinkled with his blood; . . . —1 Peter 1:1–2
While each member of the Godhead is mentioned in the Old Testament, the New Testament mentions the specific persons of Father, Son, and Spirit as a collective.
Yet the cry that ascends from the Cross, reveals the alienated condition that Jesus willingly took upon Himself. He cries, “… My God, my God, why have You forsaken me?” (Mark 15:34). Weighed down with our sin, He finds Himself outside the circle, outside His eternal home, outside of belonging.
The Inseparable Trio of love is fractured: Father looking down in woe, present but not perceived, Spirit moaning with cries too deep to be uttered; Jesus orphaned and outcast.
The cost was commensurate with that which He bought. He bought belonging for us. He paid with His own belonging. In Christ, we belong to the most elite family in the universe, soon to ascend with Him when He comes again.
Time to pack for the journey.
