I think that most people at first have a hesitation to be honest about their struggles when speaking to someone they recently met, or that they don’t know well. It makes sense. We’re unsure of their reactions. We don’t know if they will be sympathetic or judgmental. We don’t know if they’ll understand.

Even more so, I think that most of us have that same hesitation with God, but for much deeper reasons. We know of God’s holiness, and even though we hear of and believe in Jesus’ sacrifice, there remains a disconnect. God his holy, we are not.

But just as it is with people, the more we get to know them, and the more they get to know us, the more aware we become of their struggles and imperfections. Most, in time, become sympathetic of our struggles and the judgment from people who we’ve become close to stops being a worry. We can look at them and know they’ll understand. We come to trust their sympathy.

John Piper makes, perhaps, the most intelligent argument for why we can have that same confidence before God, right out the gate.

“On the way to the cross for thirty years, Christ was tempted like every human is tempted. True, he never sinned. But wise people have pointed out that this means his temptations were stronger than ours, not weaker. If a person gives in to temptation, it never reaches its fullest and longest assault. We capitulate while the pressure is still building. But Jesus never did. So he endured the full pressure to the end and never caved. He knows what it is to be tempted with fullest force.”

Humans know the displeasure of failure, and that’s something. But no human understands the full force and weight of temptation to sin—except Jesus. When we sin, Jesus knows, and relates to every ounce of weight we experienced before meeting our failure.

As John Piper continues later, “Jesus feels with us, not against us.”

Before Jesus, in spite of God’s holiness, we are able to come with our struggles and failures. Not only before a gracious God with a legal obligation to pardon us, but with an emotional understanding of what led to our struggle and sin. He gets it. And not only in a cosmic, all-knowing sense, but in a real, “I’ve been there” sense. One that is much more potent than any brother or sister we might have confidence in.

Colossians 2:9-10

“For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily, and you have been filled in him, who is the head of all rule and authority.”

Isn’t this a stunning correlation? I absolutely love the ESV’s translation here, using the same idea of being ‘filled’ with something to describe Jesus’ oneness with God. His being of God. Then, our own fullness in Christ.

Christ was God in man form. All of God dwelled inside the man. Now, as followers and believers in Jesus, we now experience a filling of our own. We are filled by Christ in the Holy Spirit.

How could that not give you chills?

In John Piper’s Fifty Reasons Jesus Came to Die, he goes on something of a rant on all the ways we’re able to botch our reception of the Gospel. I found it more than interesting.

For example, salvation is not good news if it only saves from hell and not for God. Forgiveness is not good news if it only gives relief from guilt and doesn’t open the way to God. Justification is not good news if it only makes us legally acceptable to God but doesn’t bring fellowship with God. Redemption is not good news if it only liberates us from bondage but doesn’t bring us to God. Adoption is not good news if it only puts us in the Father’s family but not in his arms.

“You cannot love or hate something unless it is a reflection of something you love or hate about yourself.”

What do you think about that statement?

Is it possible that the qualities we fall in love with are in some way the qualities we hold dear about ourselves? What about the statement that opposites attract? Could it be that we are attracted to our own weaknesses? I have a friend who is excellent at mathematics, I find that a very appealing quality. Could it be because I am so shamefully bad at it?

Jealousy. We hate someone because of something they are capable of, simply because we are incapable of it. Or pride. We feel good about something special we are able to do because it is something other’s cannot do.

A stretch, perhaps.

But I have to wonder whether this principle, if in fact true, extends to God as well. As unbelievers, do we hate God because he is all the goodness we are not? Certainly. After all, as believers, we love God because God is a being dwelling inside us.

In Romans 8:32, we’re promised to be given “all things”. We know from elsewhere in scripture that this means “all good things”. I think what trips up a lot of Christians when pondering this verse is the difference between perceived good and actual good.

After all, Christians in lots of different places of the word go without bank accounts, cars, safety—even food. How could that be reconciled, except by differentiating between what we think we need and what we actually need.

John Piper comments like this:

What then does it mean that because of Christ’s death for us God will certainly with him graciously give us “all things”? It means that he will give us all things that are good for us. All things that we really need in order to be conformed to the image of his Son (Romans 8:29). All things we need in order to attain everlasting joy.

Sometimes what we would define as “good” for us or our spiritual walk is not so. Sometimes an even greater good is not having those things, in the interest of what we might learn, or how we might rely on God for what we do not have. Even safety and food. Some of the most basic needs.

Few truths about God’s behavior and feelings are as encouraging as the ones that reveal the unity of love for the believer by the Trinity. And it’s not so often that we’ll read it written in such a powerful way as in John Piper’s Fifty Reasons Why Jesus Came to Die:

Jesus did not wrestle his angry Father to the floor of heaven and take a whip out of his hand. He did not force him to be merciful to humanity. His death was not the begrudging consent of God to be lenient to sinners. No, what Jesus did when he suffered and died was the Father’s idea.

Thanks to Jesus, we are now at ease before every part of Trinity, and each independently—if that distinction is even reasonable. God the Father, Jesus the Son and the Holy Spirit all share the same affection for the believer.

When an infraction is committed, its severity is not always measured by the infraction itself, but often by the esteem or position of the one who suffered from it.

Imagine a homeless man has a shopping cart full of his possessions. Among them is something old and unassuming. Perhaps its a family heirloom. The object is very important to this man. It is also worth a great deal of money. One day, someone confronts the homeless man with force and steals this object. The thief, for this infraction, will probably never find himself in hand-cuffs

Now imagine the same story, but replace the homeless man with the CEO of a very prominent business in a very lucrative industry. Or the Don of a Mafia family. Or the president of the United States. All of a sudden, the seriousness of that thief’s infraction has gone soaring.

John Piper writes in his book Fifty Reasons Why Jesus Came to Die:

“Therefore sin is not small, because it is not against a small sovereign.”

It’s not uncommon to hear thoughts like, “why would God even concern himself with this or that… why would God care if I do such and such?” But that thought denies this fairly basic principle: Even small insults become huge ones when the offended party is of great authority or esteem.

God cares. God really cares. So much so that he himself came in Jesus Christ to absorb the wrath we would inevitably have suffered for those ‘little’ things.