God’s BHAG and a Bigger and Better Gospel: Trinity and Incarnation

Jesus, God in human flesh, is the ultimate expression of God’s BHAG – his Big Hairy Audacious Goal. Such a goal is “clear and compelling and serves as a unifying focal point of effort” that engages people in their “innards” and is “tangible, energizing, highly focused.  People ‘get it’ right away; it takes little or no explanation” (Collins, https://www.jimcollins.com/article_topics/articles/BHAG.html). The thing God wanted from forever, the divine BHAG, is for God and humanity to live together in friendship and love on this world he created for it. God desired this so much, to be so close to us, as close as he could possibly be, in fact, that he decided to become one of us!  His coming as one of us was always God’s plan. That was enormously complicated after humanity sinned and rejected friendship with him, to be sure. It now included the necessity to deal with sin and its effects in order to reclaim and restore humanity and creation to God’s intention for them.

Do you realize what this means? If Jesus was to become human anyway to fulfill God’s BHAG, then his reason for coming was not our sin or even to forgive our sin. Despite what many of us in the West have been taught it was not human sin that required Jesus to come die and be raised from the dead for us! He incorporated that into his coming as a necessary prelude to doing what he originally intended to do. But what he came to do is far bigger and better than that (as wonderful and necessary as forgiveness is).