God’s Friend

The Old Testament accords that honor to only two humans.

Abraham serves the three angels, painting by Rembrandt, 17th century.

I was reading in Isaiah 41 this morning when I stumbled upon this sentence fragment:

But you, Israel, my servant,

                        Jacob, whom I have chosen,

                        the offspring of Abraham, my friend…(Isaiah 41:8)

 It is part of a passage where God is addressing Israel about its divine calling–the calling to be God’s servant. But what immediately arrested my attention is that fact that God also calls Abraham his friend. I had never noticed that before.

Now this is to accord to Abraham an enormous honor, at least in the values of the ancient world. For much of the ancient world, friendship was regarded as the highest and most intimate of human relationships. It was a far higher form of human relationship than was marriage. I discussed in my previous blog posting Jesus’ Privileged Friends why that was.

Here in this passage of Isaiah God calls Abraham his friend. I wondered if Abraham stood unique in the Old Testament in bearing that honor. So I checked my Bible concordance to explore if anyone else had been called that.

I found that Abraham was not alone in this honor. One other Old Testament figure has been accorded that same honor: Moses. In Exodus 33:11, we read: Thus the LORD used to speak to Moses face to face, as a man speaks to his friend. Apart from these two giants of the faith, no one else is raised to that honor.

Compassionate Friends

In the case of Moses, friendship with God is described as a relationship in which God speaks to Moses face to face. In some mysterious way Moses has access to God where Moses may speak his mind freely with God and engage in some persuasive debate. We see this in Exodus 32-33 where Moses tries to persuade God not to destroy Israel after the debacle of the golden calf. Moses becomes the compassionate defender of sinful Israel.

Likewise we see Abraham play this same role in Genesis 18 as God reveals to Abraham his intention to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah. This revelation evokes from Abraham an effort to speak up compassionately for the righteous people in these two cities who will be lost in the destruction. Abraham dares to call into question God’s compassion just as in a sense Moses does as well.

This is one of the extraordinary privileges that is accorded to Abraham and Moses as God’s friends. One gets the sense that God would not tolerate such presumption from anyone else, but because of the high regard he has for both men he pauses to listen to them and in the case of Moses to even change his mind.

It is truly an extraordinary motif in these two Old Testament passages. But the most extraordinary twist upon this motif comes in the New Testament in John 15:14-15. There Jesus at the Last Supper calls his own disciples his friends:

You are my friends if you do what I command you. No longer do I call you servants, for the servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father I have made known to you.

What is extraordinary about this passage is that the disciples are far from being giants of faith when Jesus accords them this honor. They will soon show themselves highly fallible as Peter denies Jesus that very evening and the other disciples desert Jesus in his time of greatest need.

Yet what Jesus does in this passage is point to that intimate relationship with him that he extends to all his disciples, including us today. For the end goal of spiritual formation–for most of us an arduous, life-long journey–is this privilege of becoming what Jesus says we are: God’s friends.

 

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