What Gets in the Way of Our Oneness with God?

There are 3 causes for us not being one with the triune God . . .

Being candid is always best, so I’ll start with this: I’m an expert . . . at the absence of oneness with God (John 17:11, 21). I have years of experience, years of grasping for it, years of it being on the horizon but not in my hands. Maybe you feel the same way.

There’s a long list of things that get in the way of our oneness with God. But here are three theological causes. I’ll get into the practical causes in the next article.

Theological Causes

Theologically speaking, oneness is only ever possible when the door of trust is kept open. You can’t be one with someone you don’t trust. And in the story of Scripture, distrust—the closing of the door between God and man—is what broke oneness in the first place.

Let’s go back to Genesis. At the dawn of time, we have a relationship. There is God the giver—Father, Son, and Spirit. And there is Adam and Eve, his reflectors. The setting is a garden, bursting with color and teeming with life.

Use your imagination. The air is heavy and sweet, filled with cedar wood and maple; the grass soft as silk; bird songs filling all the spaces among the canopies, like piano notes finding their homes amidst the silence. Pears, pomegranates, and figs so ripe and full that their branches hung low, offering the generosity of God in round, skinned packages of green and red. The rabbits and squirrels dancing through thickets, alert to the joy of abundance. And the sky—each day a song of light, running red to blue and then golden-orange, clouds sailing through like ships made by angel hands. This is the wild wonder of God’s good earth. And into this wonder God whispered his shepherding words. “Eat from every tree but one.” That’s a call to trust in the beautiful, bountiful, generous God of creation. Trust—that was in focus for the first relationship, and for every relationship since. Trust.

This is always what God’s words do. They set trust before us like a well-cushioned chair. “Sit,” he says. “Sit and stay awhile. I’ll take care of your needs. Just rest on the frame. Put all your weight in it. Nothing will whine or crack. You’ll be alright.”

We know that Adam and Eve wouldn’t sit in the chair with all their weight. They believed a lie about God instead. And the lie spread. It spread to their progeny—a blood borne disease. It spread to you. It spread to me—the disease of distrust.

Distrust is the first and deepest cause for the breaking of oneness. Look at what happened as a result. Before the fall, Adam and Eve used to walk with God on well trodden paths through the garden. But after their distrust led to disobedience, they fled. They hid themselves. Do you see the visual depiction of how oneness breaks? There is distance now. There is hiding. There is shame. There is fear. That’s what distrust does. Distrust takes the perfect circle of oneness and divides it, adding space between the persons.

Don’t you ever feel like that, like there’s this space between you and God? Rainer Maria Rilke had a few lines in one of his poems that always struck me.

In a sacred conversation with God, he writes,

As it happens, the wall between us

is very thin. Why couldn’t a cry

from one of us

break it down? It would crumble

easily,

it would barely make a sound.

Sometimes it feels like a thin wall stands between us and God. Other times it feels like the Atlantic runs between us, like we’re continents apart. It seems hard for us to even notice him.

Distrust is most often a quiet disease. It creeps through the caverns of our thought, whispering “no” where “yes” should be, pushing our heads down so that we can’t see God, chanting about how past failures must govern future freedom. And distrust is the devil’s favorite melody. He’s always humming it to us. And as long as we follow along with it, oneness with God is threatened.

We need trust to have loving, intimate fellowship with anyone. And with the invisible God who speaks, we need trust in his words. We need to sit in the worded frame he gives us in Scripture. Look at what Jesus says. “If anyone loves me, he will keep my words, and my Father will love him, and we will come to him and make our home with him” (John 14:23). Love is bound to keeping God’s words. Oneness is bound to keeping God’s words. Without fully trusting what God says—about who we are, about what we need, about how we approach suffering, about how we’re being daily shaped to his image, about what we hope for—we can’t be fully one with him.

Now, let me pause here to make a very important theological distinction. We’ll talk soon about union with Christ as the path to oneness, but there is a very real sense in which your oneness with God goes well beyond your feelings. If you believe in Christ and have received the Spirit, you are one with God. Nothing and no one can take that away—not even the devil himself. So, when I say that we “can’t be one with God” when distrust is present, I’m not talking about the deeper theological truth of our salvation. Our salvation is an objective fact, eternally set. Instead, I’m talking about our day to day experience with God. Even though we’re joined to the Father in Christ and by the Spirit, we also haven’t fully become who we will be (1 John 3:2). Or, perhaps better, we haven’t fully realized who we already are in Christ. Paul talks about knowing one day in full, as he is fully known (1 Cor. 13:12). He’s talking about the experience of oneness with God, not the objective truth of that oneness (salvation in Christ through faith).

The theological truth of our salvation and union with God is like a magnet for our souls. It’s pulling us forward to the end. Nothing can stop that force. At the same time, we’re not there yet. And you know that, don’t you? You can feel it. Your experience of oneness hasn’t caught up with the truth of your oneness. It’s an already-but-not-yet reality. This parallels what John Owen wrote about our communion with God being both complete and incomplete.

Keep this in mind throughout the book. We’re not working towards oneness as if we could earn it, as if we could somehow complete the unfinished jigsaw puzzle of our own salvation. But we are working out our salvation with fear and trembling (Phil. 2:12). We are striving in the Spirit to have the truth of our oneness match our daily experience. That’s what faith is about: aligning our lives with the truth of God, recognizing along the way that God is the one doing the aligning by his Spirit. And that is one of the many reasons why we worship him.

Okay, back to the theological causes for the absence of oneness. Distrust is really the parent of the other theological causes. Again, look at Adam and Eve. Distrust leads to three other causes: disobedience, fear, and shame.

Disobedience

We overlook disobedience perhaps because it seems more like an action than a cause. But it’s one of the most harmful causes of our brokenness. It was the repeated disobedience of the prodigal son that made him so distanced from his father (Luke 15:11–32). Distrust lays the tracks for the train of disobedience. When you don’t trust what God says—about himself, about you, about the world you live in—you’re in the perfect position to trust yourself or someone else. Trusting no one isn’t an option. It’s either God, self, or others. That’s it. Those who say they don’t trust anybody aren’t telling the whole truth. What they mean is that they only trust themselves. Other people walk through life chasing the popular idols of the world: power, fame, money, sex, euphoria. They trust others. They trust that what everyone else is hunting is what they should hunt. And the last group trusts God, and as a result starts to resemble him in beautiful ways. It all goes back to one of my favorite sentences from G. K. Beale: “What you revere you resemble, either for ruin or restoration.”

Disobedience takes us away from oneness with God and puts us in relationship with something that can’t satisfy us. Take alcoholism, for example. An alcoholic acts on the idea that the feeling of drunkenness is enough. It satisfies a longing for careless euphoria, even numbness, that tries to be a stand-in for oneness with God. But every hangover is a reminder of the lie. And yet when the reminder wears off, the lie looks ripe enough to eat again. The cycle continues. The distance widens. The disobedience has clicked down the tracks of distrust. The absence of oneness is a raw, open cut. Something on the inside screams for attention on the outside.

This is how disobedience works. Just as Adam and Eve fled from God (a futile thing, by the way) after their disobedience, so do we. We try to get as far from the idea of being in intimate relation with God as we can. Distrust lays the tracks. Disobedience takes us down them. And then comes fear and shame.

Fear

Now, there are two types of fear. There’s reverential fear. That’s a good kind of fear. It’s the kind that recognizes God’s greatness, power, and control. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Prov. 9:10). Adam and Eve would’ve had that before they fell. The God who gave their lungs breath and their world color was worthy of that kind of fear. The second type of fear is the one we usually think of. Let’s call it breaking fear, since it’s a type of fear that shatters us. When we’re scared or terrified, when we’re worried about consequences or punishment, that’s breaking fear. That’s the sort that John had in mind when he said, “There is no fear in love, for perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:18). When we’re one with God, there’s no fear of punishment or condemnation (Rom. 8:1). That’s because, as we’ll get to soon enough, when God looks at us, he sees the righteousness and beauty of Jesus. We’re one with Christ by the Spirit, and so what belongs to Christ—perfect righteousness and beauty—belongs to us. Our darker selves have burned away. We’re new creatures (2 Cor. 5:17) still growing into our heavenly clothes.

In light of that distinction, it’s clear that Adam and Eve would have had breaking fear after they sinned. They had fear of condemnation and punishment. And if those terms sound off-putting to you or outdated (and they do for many new Christians), think of it this way. Adam and Eve kicked over the protective fence of God’s words. They went where they shouldn’t have gone. They did what they knew they shouldn’t do. This is the prototypical example of children disobeying the good command not to put their fingers on a hot stove. In addition to the pain they felt in the action came a fear. “Oh no! I did it. And I can’t take it back!”

Condemnation is the knowledge that something has gone wrong, and you’re responsible. Punishment is the consequence. Adam and Eve knew they had a consequence. That’s why they hid. This knowledge of a consequence (condemnation and punishment) is what broke their oneness with God and drove them into hiding. It’s the same thing when a toddler breaks a flower vase. The light in his world goes dim for a moment. And that’s enough for him to jump behind the couch and close his eyes.

We can’t be one with God when breaking fear is present. And we all deal with this sometimes. It can show up as self-loathing, when we feel like a failure in the simplest ways. It can show up in disbelief, when we quietly confess that we couldn’t possibly be worth saving. It can show up in the terror of judgment, when we assume that bad things happening to us are a result of some pattern of sin. No matter how it manifests, breaking fear builds an invisible wall between us and God. Even if we’re sitting right next to him on the other side, there’s this thing that keeps us from feeling truly close to him. There’s a barrier. And sometimes it’s there so long we accept it as normal, passing it off as an aloofness that must be related to God’s greatness.

Let me tell you something: God’s greatness has never kept him from us. It’s never kept us from being his people. Even in the presence of sin—the very first sin—God comes close and speaks. In fact, oneness with God is always about him coming to us, not the other way around. We worship a prodigal God, a God who spends all his love on us, not when we’re worthy of it, but precisely when we’re unworthy of it (Rom. 5:8), when we’re raging against him, when we’re kicking his words in the dirt and spitting on his Son. He comes to us. In fact, as Dane Ortlund has shown, our very fallenness is what draws out God’s heart. “It is the very fallenness which he came to undo that is most irresistibly attractive to him. This is deeper than saying Jesus is loving or merciful or gracious. The cumulative testimony of the four Gospels is that when Jesus Christ sees the fallenness of the world all about him, his deepest impulse, his most natural instinct, is to move toward that sin and suffering, not away from it.”

Is that not wild? As the loving Father, as the sent Son, as the companioning Spirit, God is drawn to us, not just despite our sin but because of it. He sweeps our breaking fears aside as if they were bread crumbs on his ancient table, and he stares at us in love so strong that we’re reborn in him, new children, progeny of God-given faith.

Shame

Distrust, disobedience, fear, and then shame. Adam and Eve were embarrassed. But did you ever think about why? It says in Genesis, “I was afraid, because I was naked” (Gen. 3:10). But then God says, “Who told you that you were naked?” (Gen. 3:11). Adam and Eve were naked before they distrusted and disobeyed. And they were naked after that, too. The nakedness wasn’t the thing that changed. What changed? Their knowledge of it, their perception of it.

Think about this with me. When Adam and Eve “knew” about their nakedness, that doesn’t mean that they became naked in God’s presence; it means that they changed the way they saw themselves. Nakedness had never been an issue before. They were who they were before God without a thought. Nothing was between God and his people, not even clothing. There were no secrets, nothing “private” as opposed to “public.” All was public between them. There was pure, interpersonal sharing among them. Shame entered only when there became something to hide, something to be kept private, something to cover.

Shame says, “Don’t look. I don’t want you to see this.” It closes the door on oneness. It puts a covering over us. God sees right through it, of course. But that doesn’t keep us from trying to cover up. We just don’t want to be seen.

Some theologians talk about the first clothing of animal skins as a blessing (3:21). It wasn’t a blessing, really. It was an accommodation of their shame. The clothing was God’s way of saying, “Okay. You want to pretend that I don’t see you? You want to pretend that you can keep things private from me? Go ahead. Play your game. It will cost life to play it. But you’ll always be naked to me.”

Just think of the irony. Adam and Eve already had skin—beautiful, adequate, God-made skin. Clothing was just another skin, an attempt to conceal what God could see anyway. Adam and Eve—like you and me—were trying to remake themselves in their own image; they were trying to cover what they thought needed covering, not what God thought needed covering. Clothing was their attempt to live in a world where oneness with God was broken. It was ultimately futile, as all sin is. But they did it anyway. They were embarrassed by how God had made them—to be fully seen and fully known. They were convinced they could do better, that they had to do better. Oneness with God was now always going to have a barrier before it, represented by their clothing.

I’m not advocating for nudist colonies, by the way. I’m just pointing out the theological and spiritual origin for covering ourselves. Nakedness is only a problem when we believe two things: (1) that we have something that should be hidden and (2) that we think we can actually hide it. Both of those things happened once sin entered the picture. The tragedy of it all is that neither of those things has to be true.

There’s nothing we should hide from God, and we’re not able to hide anything anyway. That’s why shame must be overcome by oneness. That’s why Jesus took shame on his shoulders and crucified it with his naked body. Shame died with Jesus. And it didn’t rise again. Jesus wore garments after his resurrection for our sake, not his. He had nothing to hide. We still think that we have things to hide and that we can actually hide them. That’s shame.

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One with God launches June 20th! Can’t wait to share this with you in full!