You Rejected God. He Did Not Reject You.
*THE GOD THEY REJECTED ISN'T REAL* series 20-75
Three Asymmetries That Change Everything
It is a particular kind of exhaustion that settles into a person who has been away from God for a long time.
Not the dramatic exhaustion of active rebellion. Not the hot anger of someone who left the faith in a burst of intellectual crisis or moral outrage. The quieter kind. The exhaustion of someone who drifted, gradually, incrementally, until the distance became normal and the normal became permanent and somewhere along the way the question of God stopped feeling urgent and started feeling like something that belonged to a different version of themselves. A younger version. A more hopeful one.
These people are not usually angry at God. Anger requires engagement. They are simply gone. Living their lives at a functional distance from the question, not hostile, not seeking, not particularly troubled by the arrangement. The faith of their childhood or their earlier years sits somewhere in the background like a piece of furniture they stopped noticing, present but not load-bearing, there but not doing anything.
This post is for them. And its central claim is going to sound, on first reading, too simple to be serious.
You are closer to God than you think. Not because you have traveled so far back. Because He never moved.
The book this series is drawn from ends with what it calls its core discovery. It is structured as three asymmetries, and the structure is deliberate. An asymmetry is not a contradiction. It is a relationship between two things that are moving in different directions at different speeds toward different destinations. And the three asymmetries at the heart of the Christian account of God and humanity are the most consequential facts in the universe if they are true, and the most extravagant fiction if they are not.
Here they are, stated plainly.
You may have rejected God. He has not rejected you.
You may have walked away. He has followed.
You may have misunderstood Him. He has understood you.
Read those three sentences slowly and notice what they are doing. In every case the human movement is toward distance. Rejection. Walking away. Misunderstanding. The human being in these sentences is moving in one direction and that direction is away. Away from God, away from the relationship, away from the question. Every movement is centrifugal, outward, toward the far country.
And in every case the divine response is toward nearness. Non-rejection. Following. Understanding. Every divine movement is centripetal, inward, toward the person who is moving away.
This is not a sentimental claim about God being nice. It is a specific theological claim about the structure of a relationship that does not operate by the rules human relationships operate by. In human relationships, sustained rejection produces corresponding rejection. Walking away produces being walked away from. Misunderstanding that goes on long enough produces the giving up of the attempt to understand. Human love, even at its most devoted, has a limit somewhere. It has to. It is finite.
The asymmetry the Christian Gospel claims is that the love of God in Christ does not have that limit. Not as a nice thought. As a documented fact grounded in two of the most theologically dense passages in the Bible, passages written eight centuries apart by people who had no contact with each other and who arrived at the same place from completely different directions.
That convergence is worth paying attention to.
