Stooping Like God
The way we view God determines the way we treat people. My picture of a stooping God has significantly impacted the way I treat people. It is easy to see God stooping to bear the sin of His people in the life of Jesus. But for most it is a stretch to see the gentle and meek behavior of Jesus in the severe and arbitrary actions of the Old Testament God. Because He is God, most of us excuse as His prerogative the bloodthirsty ethnic cleansing, misogyny, homophobia, racism, infanticide, genocide, and megalomania. Can this Old Testament tyrant have anything to do with Jesus?
The Warrior God Is a Cruciform God
Yet, if John is correct in the first chapter of his gospel, then Jesus is the God of the Old Testament! Let that sink in. This means that if the cross is the supreme revelation of what God is truly like (Hebrew 1:1-3) and if God does not change (Micah 3:6), then it reveals what God has always been like throughout history. This means that God has always stooped as He did on Calvary to bear the sin of His people. Yes, that fearsome warrior God of the Old Testament paints a picture of a slain Lamb.
What I’m saying is that if we don’t understand God—especially the Old Testament God—as a stooping, cruciform god, then we can never comprehend how we should stoop to accommodate others, let alone do it.
“Because God sovereignly chose to create a world in which true freedom exists, he cannot override the personhood of people by controlling them. He must work with them, and through them, by means of a loving influence. This is what we should expect, given that we know that the kind of power God relies on is revealed on the cross (I Cor 1:18). Since God does not lobotomize people to get them where he wishes they were, he must be willing to humbly stoop to relate to them as they are. Which, in turn, means that God must patiently bear people’s sin as he continues to influence them in the direction he wants for them.
“This is why God has always been willing stoop to allow the sin of his people—including their sinful conceptions of him—to condition how he appears whenever he “breathes” revelations of himself.”
– Greg Boyd
Mirroring A Stooping, Cruciform God
The concept of a stooping God is foreign to us. We listen to others not to hear and understand, but only to inform a rebuttal to prove our point. Valuing a relationship over being right and humbly stooping to relate to people as they are baffles us. Yet God’s example from both the New Testament and the Old requires us to silence our strong opinions and beliefs in order to gently, tactfully, and respectfully accommodate even those with whom we sharply disagree, even those who it would be easy for us to consider as rivals, infidels, or heretics.
The Way of the Cross
So we must stoop to share love instead of dogma, to validate each other in tactful and gentle ways instead of embracing a spirit that “cries aloud and spares not.” Instead of being combative over differences, we seek common ground. This attitude is what irresistibly drew men and women to Jesus. With this approach we leave the Spirit open do His job instead of trying to do it for Him.
When we stoop like God we endear others with a gentle and kind spirit that seeks to understand instead of condemn. Behaving like this is only following the course God has always taken with men. Throughout history He has been willing for men and women to believe lies about Him, indeed, to let them believe that He is something He isn’t—even a violent warrior God—just so He can stay in relationship with them. We should be willing to do the same. In fact, Jesus commands us to do the same (John 15:10-12). Only when we have learned to do this have we truly come to a mature understanding of the character of God.
