Role Play

We return to the theme of role play.  It comes to us from the Trinity of God, and partly explains why God reveals himself as trinity.  Trinity is found in the family – father, mother, child (one family in three persons) and the oneness verified in the various ways available to us and for us in establishing the one and the many – especially illustrated in our DNA.  In the Trinity of God there is the Father taking on the role as Judge (in the assignment of evaluator); the Son taking on the role as Advocate (in the assignment of providing for rescue for defendants in the redemption context); and, Holy Spirit (providing constant nurture of the program of the redemption plan providing maturity growth).  In this pattern there is the operation of the family members in everyday life for leadership (authority), nurture (growth to maturity) and work (process for life sustenance and service).  In such sacred parables Christians learn how to live in nature. 

A major reason for defending the pattern of marriage/family is the role play of parables.  Parables are recognized in any language and culture.  They imply several constructive meanings such as probing the plan of God for modified lives of human beings.  The family needs specialties of generation, nurture, education, work, resolution and fulfillment.  Every person needs someone else, and that in some sort of ordered context.  The family is one and accomplishes what God in Trinity does in the spiritual context.  For the Christian, family is the great parable of natural/ordered life, and Scripture is written in that parable.  This is referred to, and developed in several ways in the volumes of these Pages.  There is more of the evidence of God in the individuals of the one unity, family, than in any other parable we can discover.  The requirements of family inform us, at the beginning, that we can’t make it to the goal of life to divine ecstasy without assistance from others – human and divine.  We are one in self (Adam) and in society (Eve).

A parent is an adult, perhaps taken with some of the most important assignments of life calling upon the most serious thought and conduct that we might imagine.  That parent, just after dinner, may retire to the parlor and play with his or her child.  There are smiles, giggles, baby-talk, the tossing of a ball, the push of a little fire engine, and the adult genius of the evening seems like a child with an undeveloped I. Q.  The parent doesn’t really care much about the ball or the fire engine.  The parent is taken up with the antics of the child, the beloved child.  The serious context of the parent now adapts to the innocence of the child, a different context and order.  God treats us like that.  We rightly fear God in his context.  We should not fear him alone in our context.  If we are effective parents we do in human life what he does in spiritual.  That role play (parable fulfilling), when done well in the context of the family teaches us something about God that we would not likely learn in any other way.  When the disciples requested Jesus to speak plainly – he was.  They would make it far more complicated than God would have it.  The plan, meaning, context of God are clear and straightforward in the parables of life – made possible for even intellectually limited persons.  When he was preparing the disciples to become Apostles he did make explanations that are beyond the competence of man to discover.  Nicodemus received a parable of birth in John, Chapter Three. 

The disciples were given a much larger context leading them to Apostleship when they were prepared to receive it, and were girded to accept the ordeals that would cost them their lives in the natural context.  Jesus then prayed for the disciples.  Remembering what he had told them and knowing that even with the clarification they wanted they would not be able on their own to carry through to the preferred conclusion.  He sealed the matter with prayer, beginning in John, Chapter 17.  Whatever we do we need the assistance of others for the important stuff.  Jesus noted that to the disciples, and assured them that in the forefront would be the Comforter (the Holy Spirit carrying through the parental care of God both in the human acts they performed and the inner fulfillment of love, protection, and resolution for immortality even through sorrow, pain and death).  These last factors would be treated by God in triumph.  Death is swallowed up in victory – 1 Corinthians 15:54.  To form a good family on earth is learned from forming the family of God.