Approaching Relationship Reverently

We probably all keep the content of what Jesus identified as the first and great commandment near the front of our minds: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Matt.22:37-39). Why is the second commandment like the first? Loving God will cause us to love all of those who bear His image (Gen.1:26). A neighbor is anyone who is near enough to observe. This is the foundation of how we are to treat one another.

Bearing the image of God is a fearful thing. I must keep in mind as I interact with my wife, my children, clients, strangers, friends, church attenders, that I am a representative of God to them. Do my words reflect the heart of God towards people? Do my attitudes accurately represent God’s disposition towards those I interact with? Am I slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love like He is? Do I have an earnest desire for reconciliation like He does? Do I treasure that which is eternal like He does?

There is a second lens through which to view this awesome truth that human beings are created in the image of God. As I interact with other people, it is incumbent upon me to remember that all of the other people with whom I speak and live are also image-bearers. Thus, how I treat them is an indication of how I regard God. Does He exist merely for my pleasure? Of course not! Would I be comfortable with snapping at the Almighty in a petty fit of anger? Not while I am in my right mind! Even while I am called to represent Him to my fellow human beings, I must do so with the knowledge that they also are in the process of imaging Him to me and that I must deal with them in an attitude of reverence for the One whom they represent.

I define reverence as acting as if God were literally present. When I was a child, I was taught that reverence meant being quiet and thinking about Jesus’s death on the cross in the minutes before the service started. Hebrews 5:7 has caused me to shift my view of reverence to the one I have written above. “In the days of his flesh, Jesus offered up prayers and supplications, with loud cries and tears, to him who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence.” For Jesus, reverence moved Him to loud cries and tears. When I use the word “reverence” in regard to our relationships with other human beings, I do not just mean one thing (e.g. thinking quietly about Jesus’s work on the cross). I mean acting in fear as a representative of who God is with respect for those who are likewise entrusted with the responsibility of imaging Him to the world.