Written by Reuben M. Bredenhof |
Saturday, June 18, 2022
Through his Spirit, our Saviour is always near: to bless, to guide, to comfort, restore and forgive. For He has united himself to us, like a rabbi and his students, like a head and its body, like a shepherd and his sheep. It means Christ doesn’t forget us when we’re grappling with uncertainty nor overlook us when we’re grieving. He’s not out of earshot when we cry in a prayer of pain.

Israel had a rich tradition of rabbis and their students. A wise teacher would attract a band of followers and carefully instruct them in all the things that he wanted them to know. Over years of lessons and interaction, there would grow a close connection between the teacher and his pupils.
And so when a rabbi died, his bereaved disciples were often described as “orphans.” They were like parentless children, like youths without a legal guardian. Now there was no longer someone to lead them—they were on their own.
In the tradition of the Jewish rabbis, Jesus led and taught his disciples for years. And He knew they feared the day of being alone. So on the eve of his death, Jesus speaks comfort and hope. His words in John 14 have a Trinitarian theme. He tells them about the Father’s heavenly house, about the Son’s mission to do the Father’s will, and about the promised Counselor, the Holy Spirit.
Jesus is leaving, but this good rabbi won’t abandon his students as orphans. He says that He is going to come to them yet. He would be gone, but not absent! Ten short days after ascending, He would send them the Spirit.
Even as the disciples are despatched into all the world to testify about the Christ, and even as they face opposition and encounter a lot of unbelief, Jesus says in John 14:18,
I will not leave you orphans; I will come to you.
After He ascends, the good Teacher will send the Spirit. And not just any Spirit, He will send his Spirit. He is a Spirit so connected to Christ, a Spirit so full of Christ, that it would be like Christ himself was still among them! “I will come to you.” This is how Jesus can say to his disciples just before He departs for heaven, “I am with you always, to the very end of the age” (Matt 28:20).
This beautiful truth lives on today in this place. He has ascended, but Christ is with us. As God’s children, whoever we are, wherever we are, whatever we are doing, Jesus comes to us, He draws near to us, and He stays among us.
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During a special session in 2019, the UMC adopted a disaffiliation agreement allowing churches to leave the denomination through the end of 2023 “for reasons of conscience regarding a change in the requirements and provisions of the Book of Discipline related to the practice of homosexuality or the ordination or marriage of self-avowed practicing homosexuals as resolved and adopted by the 2019 General Conference, or the actions or inactions of its annual conference related to these issues which follow.”

Seventy churches in Georgia split from the United Methodist Church (UMC) last week largely over LGBTQ issues, marking the latest in a growing divide within the third-largest Protestant denomination in the United States.
The North Georgia Conference voted last Thursday to allow the churches, most of which were in rural areas, to disaffiliate from the UMC. The process for disaffiliation was laid out by the 2019 General Conference of The United Methodist Church through 2023, according to the North Georgia United Methodist Church Conference website.
In 2021, the Board of Trustees adopted a process and, along with District Superintendents, walked alongside the churches that requested to disaffiliate. The conference established ratification by the Annual Conference as the final step in that process.
During a special session in 2019, the UMC adopted a disaffiliation agreement allowing churches to leave the denomination through the end of 2023 “for reasons of conscience regarding a change in the requirements and provisions of the Book of Discipline related to the practice of homosexuality or the ordination or marriage of self-avowed practicing homosexuals as resolved and adopted by the 2019 General Conference, or the actions or inactions of its annual conference related to these issues which follow.”
The 70 churches that chose to disaffiliate represent 9% of the congregations in the Conference and 3% of the membership, according to the denomination. The date of disaffiliation will be effective June 30, 2022.
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As Jesus claims repeatedly to be the way to salvation in John’s Gospel, he will also back up his right to make that claim, especially when the religious leaders question his authority, by appealing to his eternal origin from the Father. It is only because he is begotten by the Father from all eternity that he can then claim to be sent by the Father to become incarnate in history. His eternal relation to the Father constitutes his redemptive mission to the world, but not vice versa.

I must admit, we evangelicals have developed an allergy to things eternal, especially when it comes to our doctrine of the Trinity. To be brutally honest, we are prone to conflation. We approach the Bible assuming history is its only focus. Ironically, this approach is a failure to be biblical enough. Yes, Scripture’s storyline does take a narrative form, focused as it is on salvation history. But the biblical authors never stop there, nor is narrative an end in and of itself. Never do they shove the infinite, incomprehensible Trinity into our tiny box of history, limiting who God is to what God does, prioritizing function over being. Either in their presuppositions (consider the Psalms) or in their theological conclusions (purview Paul’s letters), they intend the reader to read theologically. More to the point, the biblical authors are not so focused on the historical facts of the life of Christ that they are unconcerned with his eternal, trinitarian origin prior to the incarnation. They are not so earthly minded that they are of no heavenly good.
We should not be either.
Consider the opening of John’s Gospel, for example. As I share in Simply Trinity: The Unmanipulated Father, Son, and Spirit (Baker, 2021), I often hear pastors advising churchgoers to give the Gospel of John to someone they are trying to evangelize. That’s for good reason, too: John’s Gospel lays out the gospel with lucid conviction, bringing the unbeliever face-to-face with the crucified and risen Christ and the many gifts he gives to all recipients of his grace. That’s why we love texts like John 3:16; we desire to tell the world about God’s Son so that they might receive eternal life.
But in our rush to talk about eternal life, we sometimes skip to the second half of John 3:16 and forget to talk about the eternal Son. As the first half of John 3:16 says, God “gave his only begotten Son” (KJV). Let those words marinate: God . . . gave . . . his . . . only begotten . . . Son. When we rush to the benefits the Son brings and skip over the identity the Son has in eternity, we neglect not only the first half of John 3:16 but the first two chapters of John’s Gospel—chapters, need I remind you, that precede John 3.
God in Himself
Did you know, for instance, that John begins his Gospel not with the eternal life we receive but with the life the triune God enjoyed in eternity? Go back to the opening of John 1 and what do you read? “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God” (1:1–2). Before we get to the good news about Jesus and the eternal life he brings, let’s take a step back and consider, as John does, where this Jesus originates from in the first place. This will be hard, but let’s put off what God has done in creation and focus first on who God is apart from creation. Why would we do that? Here’s why: unless you understand who God is apart from you, you will never understand the importance of what God has done for you, at least not in full. I realize how counterintuitive that sounds, holding off on the history of redemption—your history—to talk about things eternal. Abstract and esoteric perhaps. But John is convinced that in doing so you will have a better grasp of who this Word is and why he became flesh and dwelt among us. Furthermore, a long line of church fathers also believe that John’s approach avoids a dirty swamp of heresies, many of which threaten to conflate who God is in and of himself (ad intra) with how God’s acts externally (ad extra) toward his creation.
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