Evangelicals are forever talking about “having a relationship with Jesus.” They sing songs like “What a Friend we have in Jesus.” They sing about how “he (Jesus) walks with men and He talks with me and He tells me I am His own.”
And we concede that there is truth in the idea of having a “relationship with Jesus.”
However, the Cross was not primarily about making it so you could have a relationship with Jesus. Even the idea of having a relationship with Jesus is strained by the fact that if such a relationship exists it is a very different usage of the word “relationship” than we normatively use with that word. I mean, we don’t sit down to breakfast every morning with Jesus hearing Him ask us to “pass the juice please.” We don’t take Jesus to the beach with us so we can toss the frisbee with Him and go swimming in Lake Michigan. We don’t buy an extra ticket to the concert so Jesus and I can go to the concert together. These are the types of things that “having a relationship with someone” usually means. So, if we have a relationship with Jesus it is a very very different kind of relationship that we have with someone else.
So, Jesus doesn’t die for us in order to establish a relationship as the idea of relationship typically means in our effeminate culture. Jesus dies on the cross for us as our legal representative in order to bear the penalty of sin done against God and His Law-Order. Christianity is primarily a forensic/judicial faith and is only secondarily “personal.” Jesus is our Lawyer who successfully pleads our case before the bench. It is true that one can have a relationship with their Lawyer but what one is most concerned about in a Lawyer is that they can successfully defend them in court. Jesus, in His work on the Cross, where He takes our sins to Himself and bears the burden of the penalty our sins deserved is our chief Advocate.
I bring all this out in order to urge Evangelicals to move away from the “relationship” language which allows Evangelicals to reduce the Christian faith to “me and my pal Jesus,” in hopes that Evangelicals will start learning about their Advocate with the Father. Evangelicals who emphasize relationship tend to know nothing about the great juridical themes of the cross — propitiation, expiation, reconciliation, redemption, sacrifice, substitution, ransom, imputation, active and passive obedience, etc. The reason they don’t know much of this is that they are too busy being caught up in being in a “relationship with Jesus.”
Having said all that I do realize that speaking of having a “personal relationship with Jesus” can be drawn from Scripture. Abraham was known as “the friend of God.” Jesus said, “Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends,” and then turned around and died for his friends. So clearly we can speak of having a relationship with Jesus. My plea is that we take the time to scour Scripture to understand what the Scripture teaches regarding the person and work of Jesus Christ who we call our friend.
