This is a statement of my personal faith. I could easily have included the Apostle’s Creed and parts of other great online faith statements, but I wanted mine to be personal and read more like you are listening to me talk to my Heavenly Father.
I believe that you, Heavenly Father, Jesus Christ Son of God, and Holy Spirt are one God. In your name “I Am” I believe that you have always existed, will always exist, and are present everywhere.
Of all of your holy characteristics, you God are first, and foremost, love. Your love is manifested in the perichoretic1 relationship between your three persons, each of you giving and receiving love from the other two. Your character is clearly described in the following scripture.
1 Corinthians 13:1-13 (NIV)
1 If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not God, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal.
2 If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but have not God, I am nothing.
3 If I give all I possess to the poor and surrender my body to the flames, but have not God, I gain nothing.
4 God is patient, God is kind. God does not envy, God does not boast, God is not proud.
5 God is not rude, God is not self-seeking, God is not easily angered, God keeps no record of wrongs.
6 God does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.
7 God always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
8 God never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away.
9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part,
10 but when God {perfection} comes, the imperfect disappears.
11 When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me.
12 Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see [God] face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know [God] fully, even as I am fully known [by God].
13 And now these three remain: faith, hope and God. But the greatest of these is God.
Your purpose, God, in creating mankind is to lavish your love on men through fellowship. Because you loved us, you also would not force us to love you in return. You enjoin us to partake in the perichorectic love that the Father, Son, and Holy Spirt enjoy. I can choose not to love you in return, but that will not change your love for me. Beyond your mighty power, your love is therefore your license for my creation, exactly in the way that I chose to have my own children whom I could love.
Your desire for me is completely unselfish. You need me for nothing, and I need you for everything. You want to make me complete, and to restore me to a rightstanding, the same place where Adam and Eve were before they sinned against you, O Lord. I am, of myself, unable to make a way back to you, O God. Without your strong draw in my spirit, I would sense nothing, and die in separation from you.
When you created my first father, Adam, and my first mother, Eve, they were innocent of anything, because they did not understand good and evil, right and wrong. You told them not to partake of that understanding, yet they broke your commandment, and ate of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. This one specific act of disobedience also caused them to know the shame of, and instantly be responsible for, their disobedience. Because your word is true, they died to you that very instant, and their bodies began to die as well.
Because I came from Adam, my father, and Eve, my mother, I carry the curse of their disobedience, and the knowledge of good and evil, right and wrong. I am like them, and also break all your other commandments by the nature that was given to me through them. Like them, I feel shame and guilt, and my body also slowly dies from the moment I’m born. Separation from you, O God, is death, just as Adam and Eve were separated from you. All of mankind partakes of that separation as the punishment for that one sinful act. We all sin in all other ways, because of that sinful nature, that was derived from our father, Adam.
From before our beginning, however, your plan was set. You knew that mankind would fail, and that only your love could redeem us. You, O God, are both fully just and fully merciful. Your nature required separation as consequence for our disobedience. Your mercy and unque, holy nature requires that only you can satisfy that consequence for our sin, and still bring everything back aright.
In the person of Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God, you yourself came in our flesh to take this consequence of separation. In Jesus Christ, your mercy kisses your justice. Once and for all, I have a way back to you, O God, my creator, but only if I choose to accept it. Yes, Lord, I still have the right that your love gave me not to choose you and your mercy. But I have responded to your strong draw which caused me to seek you who seeks me first.
Jesus Christ, who was not a son of Adam, but the Son of God clothed in our flesh through Mary, died on the cross, was buried, and went to sheol, the place of the dead. There he confronted all the evil of mankind in the flesh of mankind as it states in the prophetic prayer in Jonah. There you told those in the bosom of Abraham, like Lazarus, that God’s promise to redeem them from the dead was ensured.
Jonah 2:1-9 (ESV)
1 Then Jonah prayed to the LORD his God from the belly of the fish,
2 saying, “I called out to the LORD, out of my distress, and he answered me; out of the belly of Sheol I cried, and you heard my voice.
3 For you cast me into the deep, into the heart of the seas, and the flood surrounded me; all your waves and your billows passed over me.
4 Then I said, ‘I am driven away from your sight; yet I shall again look upon your holy temple.’
5 The waters2 closed in over me to take my life; the deep surrounded me; weeds3 were wrapped about my head
6 at the roots of the mountains. I went down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever; yet you brought up my life from the pit, O LORD my God.
7 When my life was fainting away, I remembered the LORD, and my prayer came to you, into your holy temple.
8 Those who pay regard to vain idols forsake their hope of steadfast love.
9 But I with the voice of thanksgiving will sacrifice to you; what I have vowed I will pay. Salvation belongs to the LORD!”
When I die in you, O God, I am assured that death from separation is not my final end. As certainly as you raised your Son, Jesus Christ, from the grave, and restored his very flesh to that same state as Adam and Eve before they sinned, you will do so someday for me.
In the course of my life in this body, through the Holy Spirit, you will work in me to change my sin nature here on earth. I will do everything I can to follow you, and when I fail, you will call me back to you. Even though I have not yet been restored bodily, your promise to change me is as eternal as yourself. There is nothing stronger than the Word of God. You will do what you say.
In return, O God, I will give my heart to you. I will love you with all my being. I’m wounded when I disobey you, but you will not cast me out, because you are already the satisfaction for the justice that my disobedience requires. Because of this, I love you all the more. I want to be like you, and I want to be with you.
I know that others like me, who are trapped in this present corruption, need what you have given to me. I will set my face to share with them your love. I will tell them that you have made them a way back, and it is their’s for the asking.
I will teach my children, my grandchildren, and all my descendants, about you, O God. We were made to know your love, and to give love back to you. I am never consumed by you, but am become more fully myself. I thrive in you, O God.
Now the time is coming, and near to us, when you will retrieve and restore all who have chosen to accept Jesus Christ’s mercy. Those who will turn away from you are like prisoners holding the key to the jail cell in which they have locked themselves. Your love for them will allow them to reject you, O God, but in this you are blameless.
Fairest Savior, loving Father, and gentle Holy Spirt, I praise you.
1 Wikipedia: Perichoresis (from Greek: περιχώρησις perikhōrēsis, “rotation”) describes the relationship between each person of the triune God (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit). The word circumincession (later circuminsession) is also used to mean the same idea.↑
2 Strong’s Concordance. 4325. מַיִם mayim, mah´-yim; dual of a primitive noun (but used in a singular sense); water; figuratively, juice; by euphemism, urine, semen:—+ piss, wasting, water(-ing, (-course, -flood, -spring) ).
Note: Waters or seas refers to mankind. Here the meaning is quite graphic as men swim in the filth and sorrow of their sin which they chose over a loving relationship with God.↑
3 Strong’s Concordance. 5488. סוּף çuwph, soof; probably of Egyptian origin; a reed, especially the papyrus:—flag, Red (sea), weed.
Note: Think of Is. 42:3 which says “A bruised reed shall he not break, and the smoking flax shall he not quench: he shall bring forth judgment unto truth.” The sense of this is that these weeds are men.↑
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