You Are Not Your Own: Belonging to God in an Inhuman World

by Alan Noble

True supplication is not passivity or resignation. It is an act of dependence upon God, which always involves obedience to His will. When we reach out in supplication before God, we don’t get to ignore injustice or the dehumanizing structures of society. But it does mean that our actions are done in reliance upon God.

Our egotistical temptation is to think that what matters in life is what is big and visible and political. So we make grand plans and join national movements in hopes that we can make a “real” difference. And no doubt, some political movements can make a real difference. But for the most part the answer to the city is found in millions of tiny decisions to live faithfully even while living in the city.

There are no action items for us to complete, no strategies or methods or best practices for converting an entire city, let along an entire society. It is an act that can only be accomplished by God’s intervention.

you may worry that putting our hope in Christ to redeem the world will become an excuse for us to stop seeking justice. Why bother to pursue justice if only Christ can bring true justice? Again, I would refer us back to Ellul’s admonition: “Our task is not to spend time pondering this success, but to obey our orders.”

If abortions increase and racial justice remains elusive and wars develop in new and even more dehumanizing forms, we don’t get to stop doing good. We have received orders from God to “do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God” (Micah 6:8).

But desiring the good of your neighbor requires us to go beyond efficiency as the highest value.

A benefit of putting hope for redemption in Christ rather than a political movement is that you are less tempted to compromise with evil for short-term political gains. When you believe that you can save your country, it’s not difficult to justify lying or the use of propaganda or corruption for the greater good. You may tell yourself, “Technically this isn’t true, but the spirit of it is true and we have to save our nation!”

Most Americans have adopted the belief that human flourishing (which is one of the chief ends of the common good) can only be defined individually.32 But if we belong to Christ, then the common good exists and we have an obligation to advocate for it. Part of belonging to Christ is living according to His norms, the rightly designed limits He has placed on us as individuals and as communities.

Autonomy sounds comforting and freedom is valorized by society as one of the highest goods, but in practice freedom without limits is a kind of hell, as John Milton knew. It’s a hell that we carry within us.

What brings us comfort in life and death is our belonging to a loving, personal God, one who dwells with us, one with whom we have union, one who is able to desire and bring about our good without neglecting His own will.

Only in Christ can we find a belonging without violence or abuse, a belonging that grounds and fulfills our personhood rather than effacing it. Through belonging to Christ, we can belong to others in a subsidiary and conditional way. Those conditions, however, are not personal whims, but divine norms. I belong to Christ, who I can trust to desire and bring about my good, and He defines how I belong to my wife, my family, my church, and my neighbor. We find comfort in belonging to Christ because Christ is the only one we can belong to without harm or loss of our humanity.

There is no contradiction between the comfort of belonging to God and our obligation to deny ourselves and obey Him because it is Christ who works in us, and that work is always for our good, even when it doesn’t feel like it.

The great comfort found in belonging to Christ is that we are accepted and loved without reservation. It is the comfort of living before God. That love is not the ignorant love of a human who can never really know us. That acceptance is not the cheap acceptance of modern social psychology, which is only really concerned with producing productive and well-adjusted consumers. Christ truly knows us and His acceptance unites us to Him, sanctifying us by teaching us moment by moment to love what is true and good and beautiful—to love His will.2

Christ’s resurrection was as bodily and visceral as the bread and the wine, and yours will be too. And mine. That is all the hope we can ever have.

There is comfort in death through belonging to Christ, but it is a hard comfort. Because it asks us to stand before God every moment, never denouncing or rejecting the gift of life, but taking each opportunity to delight in God, enjoy His creation, and extend His grace to others so long as we physically can.