The Living Faith

I am reminded of a saying posted in one of the church’s signboard that read: “Our family tree traces back to the Cross of Christ.” Very true, but we should also add to this beautiful statement by enlarging it through the Scriptural Prism of the Cross: “Our family tree trails very back to the Triune Family of God.”

Jesus revealed and instructed us that the origin and source of all humans born in this world is none other than his Father God. And therefore those who move around his Cross invoke God “Abba Father.” According to God’s eternal plan, his humans must worship only him and him alone. Before Israelites were chosen as his exclusive children, humans were ignorant and indifferent to the Divine Desire. However, in the light of Christ, we are convinced that every human born in this or any planet, has the right to be called God’s children. This is what Paul claimed when he preached at Athens. Pointing out to an altar, dedicated ‘to an unknown God’, among the shrines constructed for Greek gods and goddesses, the Apostle attested that the God unknown to the gentiles was the One he preached. He too said, “He is the God who made the world and everything in it. He himself gives life and breath to everything, and he satisfies every need. His purpose was for the nations (humans) to seek after God and perhaps feel their way toward him and find him—though he is not far from any one of us. Paul too reminded the hearers of one amazing saying by one of their poets: We are his offspring.” (Acts 17: 22-30)

When this God the Father made certain humans in the form of team or community to be his representatives, he proposed how his offspring in this globe, should behave and reciprocate to his Fatherly love. Being by nature a jealous Person, he too repeatedly detailed it of how his humans should love him: “Hear, O Israel! The LORD is our God, the LORD alone! Therefore, you shall love the LORD, your God, with your whole heart, and with your whole being, and with your whole strength.” (Deut. 6: 4-5) Remembering His parental, undivided love, He wanted them to love him in return with filial devotion. Regrettably, either his leaders or his chosen children, as most of the gentiles, didn’t behave as the Father proposed; instead they were arrogant, self-centered and very stubborn in fulfilling his love-will. The eternal Family Tree was seemingly being annihilated and uprooted.

But God the Father, the Source of Life, never lost his heart. Scriptures declare that we got the very Good News of God sending to the human children his beloved Son, who was from the beginning part and parcel of the Godly Family Tree, from where the entire creation comes to exist. Through the Cross of obedience, self-immolation and love-fulfillment, not only Jesus saved every human during his Palestinian life, but also he, through his resurrection, became an Energy, a Movement, and a loving Resource whom he told us to call as the Holy Spirit.

Christian life starts, proceeds and ends in the name of the Triune God-Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Before Jesus ascended to heaven, he commanded his disciples to baptize us in that mysterious Name. (Matt. 28: 16-20) 'Baptizing' and 'becoming Christians' means 'sinking' deeply into a marvelous religious faith in the Triune God. We honor a God who lives in the community of a covenant relationship with us; that means, a God who makes us like his blood relatives, a God as close to us as a marriage partner, a God who preferred us to his own Son as he let Jesus give his life for us, a God who keeps stirring us through the Spirit with the inspirations of love and tenderness, of compassion and courage.

As a marvelous result of being baptized in the faith of the Trinity, we are privileged not only to be inducted as a member into the community of God, the Church, but also to be inserted once again in a more renewed way into the Family Tree of Father, Son and the Spirit. Triune God, in himself is a unified Family of Three Persons. What makes our Christian community so exceptional and unique is, the belief that we, though divided in various ways, are unified as one family, which founded on the love of our TriuneGod which “has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit which has been given to us” (Rom. 5: 5).