Ownership is precious in God’s eyes
There is no ownership by consent in God’s plan because his ownership is all through assent to his intent. In his plan, ownership is by design. Other kinds of possession are misuses of his design. In his creation, and, as well, in his purchase of his people through the cross, he is always fulfilling a plan not to simply respond to their consent of his rule, but to complete the function of a design he intentionally created before time began. We are God’s temple, so he designed temples so that he could take possession of them. When this is done by his design, the outcomes are holy to him. When anyone tries to take possession only through consent (or without it), not through God’s design, it’s an abomination to him.
Ownership is very special to God’s heart. You can see this in his response to demon possession in that he never accepts it, even for the gravest of sinners, he will rescue them. (Matthew 8:28–34Mark 5:1–20) We are, in this sense, “his,” and taking possession of his creation against his design is always met with his wrath. This is why a simple definition of relationship through consent is not enough, because it puts both parties at risk of the wrath of God. Why is this so important to God? Because he is direly opposed to enslavement. All relationships that aren’t by his design are enslaving, not because he made them to be. They are enslaving because one of those involved loses, or gives away, their rights. His design is meant to prevent addiction to that which is not fulfilling, but enslaving. Once you take someone’s God given rights, and use them for your pleasure instead of God’s plan, you establish a false contract with them, enslaving them to your will instead of God’s will.
Relationship then becomes an obligation to the will of man rather than to God. There is no obligation that does not enslave besides one made to God because, by design, none of his obligations are addictive, but fulfilling. And, they’re fulfilling because they are not based on a theft, but rather on serving his purposes, his plan. This is why any type of transactional exchange of pleasure is totally enslaving, because it serves no purpose but pleasure. It does not serve God’s purpose. Once a man falls in love with something that’s not from God he then sells himself out for ways to serve the false god of pleasure, and not by choice, but by obligation. There is no fulfillment, so the obligation feels empty until the next time it’s served.
God is purpose. This is how one must live if they are not to live enslaved by their passions. It’s always been a curiosity to me why God gets so irritable when people ask him who he is or question his authority. His response is always “I am that I am.” Or in other words, “I am purpose, itself!” In other, other words, “Why would you ask a question like, ‘why do you have to be what you’re made to be?’ I AM THAT I AM.” (I’ve always thought of this as the one stupid question you really shouldn’t ask, so I don’t blame him for getting a little perturbed when he has to answer it.) Think of the most popular question today though, “Who am I?” Well, God told us a long time ago. We are his. We’re made to serve him. We’re made to serve purpose. We’re absolutely free to miss this point and try other things, but he designed us so these would not be fulfilling, but only lead us back to him, back to fulfillment. If you feel an obligation to anything that you can’t break, it’s not from God. His ‘obligations’ only come from logic, purpose, and love. Serving God’s purpose for you is fulfilling because he is purpose, and nothing else has any purpose at all. Serving God is making the choice between enslavement and fulfillment.
In this way his wrath is simply consequence. No purpose makes sense if it’s not personal. His personhood, though, seems to make us think he’s somehow vulnerable, like us, to mistakes and errors, when actually its because nothing of purpose can be impersonal. A god made of only physical laws and natural consequences would be exactly what a universe without God would already be, pointless. He made us “us” so we’d see that our purpose is serving others, and that that this is exactly what he does, too. So, trying to make anything impersonal that was meant to be a gift from God is of the highest possible offense. It’s precisely when we start thinking of anyone as less than a person that we break his design, and fall into enslavement of our own designs. No wonder Proverbs isn’t afraid to call us fools when we behave this way. It’s not just foolishness, it’s rebellion against logic, truth, and meaning itself.
Design is a road map to fulfillment. It may seem fun for a while to go of road in rebellion, but it only ends in purposeless, unfulfilling destruction. Isn’t this exactly what we see in our world today? All sorts of new paths, great advertisement for the pleasure of going your own way, and absolute chaos in it’s aftermath. God is not punishing us, we are doing that to ourselves. What is so painful to observe is how obvious the destruction is, while at the same time, where it is coming from is not so obvious. And, that’s due entirely to our own self-deception.
What a world we would have if we just let God finish what he started. Some pain might be inevitable, but not all of it. He is there to heal us when we have gone off into destruction. He has made his purpose our well-being. He has made his purpose to give us purpose. He has designed us so that our well-being is dependent on his version of love. There are many ways to corrupt love into things that serve our purposes and our pleasures. There is only one true love. God’s love moves us away from destruction to peace. We are all God’s gift to each other. If we can see ourselves fulfilling God’s promise by serving each other, not taking from each other, peace would be our purpose, not a fleeting fantasy.
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