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Christian Network

The Christian life cannot be successful apart from human relationships. For some this might seem an obvious truth, but there seem to always be those voices, inside or outside of the church, which tell us that all we need is Jesus. On the surface such a statement sounds very pious and it is certainly true that our direct relationship with God must have first place in our lives. However the fact remains that, apart from someone lost on a deserted island somewhere, every child of God is called to make "horizontal" as well as "vertical" relationships a priority. The myth of the Lone-Ranger Christian is just that, a myth.

The radically theocentric believer forgets that in the prelapsarian Garden of Eden Adam had access to an intimacy with God that no human being, save Christ, has known since. Yet Adam was without a human counterpart and God Himself declared that it was not good for Adam to be alone. The deep sleep and rib-removal ensued and the rest is history. Apparently the divine-human relationship, by design, is not meant to be all there is for us. We needed each other then and we continue to need each other now. How, then, does an obvious biblical truth somehow get ignored by the "Jesus only" promoters?

The answer might lie in the personal history of the person who fiercely clings to the vertical while keeping a distance from the horizontal. Many of these individuals have had bad experiences in human relationships. Human betrayal and rejection is unfortunately a fact of life in a fallen world. Whether it came from a parent, a peer, a spouse or a child Christians who downplay our human need for each other have most likely been deeply hurt by someone near and dear to them in their past. If they have never resolved that loss and healed from it they may develop an unconscious determination to never allow any person to hurt them that way again. This can be consciously manifested by a theological position about the Christian walk that radically disdains any relationship but the one they have with God. Since they know God is perfect and will never betray or reject them it seems completely logical to concentrate all their relational energies on Him.

The problem is that while we are called on to love the Lord our God with all of our heart, soul, mind and strength we are also commanded to love our neighbor as ourselves. We cannot truly love our neighbors without letting them into our lives through relationships. Such relationships are messy, but God ordains them. When He, Himself, came to live on Earth He did not spend all His time alone in prayer. Jesus was deeply and intimately involved in the lives of others throughout His earthly ministry. He even depended on them sometimes for comfort (see the Garden of Gethsemane) though they often proved unable or unwilling to be there for Him when the chips were down. But if Jesus Christ cultivated these intimate relationships with human beings when he lived on Earth who are we to write such bonds off as unnecessary to the Christian life?

It is a much better enterprise to seek to forgive those who have hurt us and come back into fellowship with our spiritual family than to try to fill up the space God reserved for human connection with the one we have with Him.

Someone once pointed out that the cross itself consisted of both a vertical and a horizontal beam and likened this to the requirement that our temporal pilgrimage through this world consist of the same as far as valuing both the divine and human connection. Truly you cannot have one without the other, both literally and figuratively. As we behold the cross may we behold not only the one who died for us on it but also those who His Father calls us to walk hand and hand with, no matter how imperfectly, through this life.