Being One with God . . .
What's it mean to be one with God? Why does it matter?
It may not jump out to you right away, since oneness sounds abstract, but oneness with God is really all about love. Oneness is an expression of intimacy, a circle that encloses persons in deep relationship. This is what we want more than anything: to be fully known and loved for eternity.
Most people spend their entire lives searching for that in other people. They’re looking for the oneness of love, even though they wouldn’t call it that. But this oneness of love is high, so high that we can’t get to it all on our own. It’s the peak of Everest that we can’t ascend by ourselves. The fully satisfying oneness of love comes from above us, since God is the origin. God, after all, is love (1 John 4:8). God is perfect, intimate, personal relationship. Our longing for the oneness of love will never be satisfied apart from him.
The Romanian Orthodox theologian Dumitru Stӑnlioae once wrote,
God does not need our love in the same way that we need His. And this is a result of the limited nature of humans. This is why we are helped to grow in love’s infinity and in the joy that comes from loving our fellow men more and more, in the joy that comes from loving others more and more. Still, however many people we love, none of them can truly satisfy us, and none can assure us eternal beatitude, for they cannot open us up to an infinite love. Like us, they remain thirsty for a loving relationship with the Triune God.[1]
I love the wording “opens us up.” Sometimes human souls resemble clams more than their Creator. They’re shut tight, clamped and closed, not wanting the light. And only divine hands can pry them open to reveal what’s inside. And what’s inside is longing for what’s outside. The God without beginning or end is the God of love, and it’s him that we want most. He is the oneness of love that invites us into eternal relationship. And it starts now.
Oneness: Truth, Trust, and Speech
So, oneness is shorthand for love and relationship, for fellowship. And oneness requires truth, trust, and speech.
Let’s start with truth. You can’t be one with someone you don’t truly know. The truth—about who you are, what you’re like, what your passions are—has to be set on the table before the one you love. Everything is open. Everything is exposed. Truth is the door to oneness.
Trust comes once we reach out to open the door. Trust is laying our life down in the shadow of another. It’s saying, “I am willing to place my hopes, my welfare, and my identity in your hands. I may not be able to see everything, but I see you, and that’s enough.” Trust is the path of oneness.
Trust is laying our life down in the shadow of another.
Speech—what I call communion behavior—is what holds oneness together.[2] Oneness is a fellowship of persons, and fellowship is born in the country of communion—that place where sharing and expression are the air we breathe. Speech is the atmosphere of oneness.
We’ve all had trouble with truth, trust, and speech throughout our lives, haven’t we? And that means we’ve had trouble with oneness, with love and divine relationship. Something is broken. But what’s been broken has also been repaired by the God of oneness.
Start with truth again. In Eden, our ancestors rejected the truth about God—his goodness and prodigal heart. To remedy that, God would eventually send himself, as the truth (John 14:16), to earth’s doorstep. The truth of who God is—the person of truth—would set the door of oneness before us again. In Jesus Christ, we find the oneness of love. As Timothy Jennings wrote, “Life, health and happiness are only found where love flows free. And love only flows free where the truth about God is known!”[3] God didn’t just reveal the truth with pen and paper. He didn’t just send a message. The message was the messenger. The truth is a person. We enter oneness with God through him. It’s beautifully simple for Jesus to tell us he is “the door” (John 10:9). He’s the most wonderful door the world has ever seen.
Trust, which was broken by us, was also restored through Christ. All throughout John’s Gospel we’re called to trust that God sent his Son. And trust trickles down to us from a divine spring. The Sender (the Father) calls for our trust by bringing his Son (the Sent) to us in the white-doved, winged presence of the Holy Spirit (John 1:32). We trust the sender by trusting the one he sent in the power of his sending.
But this trust is a work of God for us, in us. He doesn’t leave us to ourselves. He meets us where we are and carries us where we need to go, all so that we might be with him where he is (John 14:3). Trust, like everything else, is a gift. Just as truth is. Just as the speech of God is. God is always giving.[4]
Along with truth and trust, the oneness of love is completed by speech. There can be no oneness without sharing, without expression. And God spoke (and speaks) creatively and redemptively.
We know God created all things through speech, but we overlook the redemption that follows Adam and Eve’s rebellion. It comes in a little question in Genesis: “Where are you?” (Gen. 3:9) Silence is judgment. Speech is grace. God could’ve stopped his lips and left us alone in the garden forever. But he didn’t. He spoke. That’s grace.
And stare more closely at this question in Genesis 3:9. God is all-knowing. He doesn’t need to ask where they are. So, why does he do it? He’s addressing the oneness broken by rebellion, by a lack of trust and a following of falsehood, a chasing after counterfeits. He’s starting the conversation again. He’s setting before them the door to oneness: the Word. Most theologians point out the first glimmer of the gospel in Genesis 3:15. But it comes before that. It comes in this little question: Where are you?
Again, given what we know about God, he couldn’t have been asking the question to obtain information. He wasn’t asking to learn; he was asking to love. He was inviting them back into oneness. Can you see it?
Pause here for a moment of application. In Christ, God asks this question of us continually, in the silent syllables of his Spirit. “Where are you?” Right now. Go on. Answer it. It’s not a trick. Where are you right now, spiritually? Where are you? God already knows. He’s just waiting for you to come out of your ridiculous hiding place and say, “I’m over here.” So often in our spiritual lives we act as if God doesn’t truly know where we are going or where we are. He already knows. He’s not looking for you because he’s never lost sight of you in the first place. Wherever you are right now, voice it to God. That’s the beginning of oneness.
Oneness is a relationship of love fostered through truth, trust, and speech. The question is, why does this oneness with God seem fleeting for us, and how we can receive divine help in restoring it and keeping it central in our daily lives? Those will be questions addressed by future letters.
[1] Dumitru Stӑniloae, The Holy Trinity: In the Beginning There Was Love, trans. Roland Clark (Bookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox, 2012), 16. Though I’m in a different theological tradition from him and disagree with elements of his doctrine of the Trinity (most notably the notions of monarchianism and the Eastern rejection of the biblical teaching that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son), I have found his writing on the love of God helpful.
[2] I get into this in The Speaking Trinity & His Worded World: Why Language Is at the Center of Everything (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2018).
[3] Timothy R. Jennings, The God-Shaped Brain: How Changing Your View of God Transforms Your Life, 2nd ed. (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2017), 47.
[4] On giving as a perspective on who God is, who we are, and what the world is like, see The Book of Giving: How the God Who Gives Can Make Us Givers (Independently published, 2021).