What is the Message of God to the People of the Digital Age?
The message is simple:
It’s okay. I love you. Go and show others that I love them too.
How do we discern the message of God to us in this time?
There are literally thousands of books on the subject. Diving deep into the troves of theology left to us by people before. Centuries of human words piled into scrolls, then paper, and now on web pages like this one, telling us all the things that God says. The things God wants. The way God wants us to be.
And of course the Bible. The book of historical wisdom, the origin story of the Christian faith that tells us how faith ancestors’ interpreted the message so long ago.
There are so many words out there about God’s message that it makes us think the message is complicated. That its one that takes reading all the books, or listening to multi-part sermons, or that it takes a life of church attendance to comprehend.
But that complexity is not the message. The complexity is in us, the message givers and the message receivers.
Like most things that we try to explain to each other, the message is complicated by the telling and the hearing. It’s complicated in the discerning and the trusting. It’s complicated in the disbelieving of its simplicity.
It’s okay. I love you. Go and show others that I love them too.
It can’t be just that right? That’s not enough! How can you say it’s okay when so much isn’t what I wanted it to be? How can it be okay when so much is wrong? How can you say you love me when there’s so much I don’t love about myself? How do I show others? Tell me what to! What do you mean!?
That’s the complexity of us. That’s the complexity of the messengers. That’s the struggle of human life responding. The message is simple but the nuance of life among others is not. The complexity of human society requires rules and steps, procedures and rituals, guides and levels…
To address this complexity, we wrote more words, created groups, started churches, spread whole religions. To address the complexity of life together, we argue over rules, doctrines, boundaries, guidelines. We the messengers responded to our own complexity. We filled in the hows — because we had to. Because human life is complicated.
But still all of that is not the message of God.
The message is simple:
It’s okay. I love you. Go and show others that I love them too.
Not convinced? Read the book of John. Yep the whole thing.