People of God

We think by being people of God that everything will be easy. But what we find is that we are on an intentional training in what it means to be the people of God.

I was reading the Old Testament and came across Deuteronomy 5:20: Remember that you were once slaves in Egypt, but the Lord your God brought you out with his strong hand and powerful arm. That is why the Lord your God has commanded you to rest on the Sabbath day.

It is common to have issues with the laws of the Old Testament and the feeling like it is a presentation of a different God than in the New Testament. But we must realize that a habituated people to slavery just don’t stop being slaves. The discipline and structure God gives His own people through Moses wasn’t intended to be a regulation to live by. It was intended to be a training for a people to learn what it means to live as people of God instead of slaves.

Because of this training, we can feel like God isn’t being God for us. I have been reading through my old journals and I came across something I wrote years ago:

“In Leviticus, God not only sets up the standard for integrity and holiness in the lives of people, but by seeing such boundaries and expectations that are based on the promise of being holy as the Lord is holy, then it appears to be a presentation of sorts of the God of their forefathers to the people in holiness and character that supersedes all that is characteristically portrayed of gods of the culture. As God reveals himself to Moses in all His glory, proclaiming His grace and lovingkindness to all generations, Moses then is able to share the intimacy of his knowledge of God with others through the law that reflects and expresses the very grandeur that was shown to him. The law begins a real and true interaction of the people of God with God that allows them to respond to now who they truly are and who God truly is.

This relationship is established when it is received by the people in a covenant relationship with the living God. Their life actions are then reflections of the presentation of God to them. It is when they actively reject or turn away from this in favor of the way of the world that this relationship with the living God is so easily forgotten or rejected. The way of the world does not point to the living God but actually points to actions that reject the truth of the living God. The result is discipline from God, not as condemnation but as a correction back to the truth so that God may be the only God among them.

This active rejection of God through their actions could not fully be understood to the depths for which it is an active denial of God because their interaction with Him was limited to getting to know who He truly was through the law. It is only in the Holy of Holies that God’s glory, still in part, could be seen and experienced by His people. The weight of such active denial of God by their actions would ultimately amount to death.

But as expressed throughout the prophets, God was not content with this partial relationship. His promise was and continued to be that He would make the people His children and Him their God. His goal was not to let His children stay at such a limited knowledge and relationship with God, but rather for a deep intimacy in which He would bring His children into His glory. The goal is to experience the living God by which the law (that which reflects the character of God through active participation in our lives) would be permanently written on their hearts.

Thus, God desired renewal of the entire person (the heart being the center of action, emotion, through, and character) into His own communal relationship with Himself in which His love abounds for His children. Their hearts were then to become the center of this intimate communal interaction with the living God (i.e. the Holy of Holies).

Therefore, being the children of God, the righteousness of God is bestowed upon us, we are brought into His truth, and our interaction with God is not based on not what we can do through limited knowledge but rather what God can do.

This knowledge of God is so foreign to us that we on our own could never enter into this without the very nature of God being a gift to us. But just a even a priest needed a sacrifice in order to enter the Holy of Holies, we too need to be purified and brought into this relationship. If we do not have a part in God, then when His glory comes, we will find no part in it and will be consumed. However, if we have allowed God to write His law on our hearts, through His own doing (the sacrifice of His own Son, a sacrifice of Himself), this allows us to enter and participate as children of God.

Once we are brought in, then we are called His own, His holiness is bestowed to us, and we can know the living God that has been hidden to us for generations. We get to meet the God of our forefathers, we get to meet the God who formed us, the God who longed to reveal His glory, we get to see our Father. We get to participate in what generations before us have eagerly awaited. We have the opportunity to be called God’s own people.”

God’s intentional training in our lives is to be brought into the fullness of our purposed identity as His own people. Our experience is not always one of being trained in a new identity or being brought into a loving relationship with the living God. We often still live and perceive our lives as beggars and slaves. But what took God thousands of years to establish, God is still at work in declaring to the world that we are His. He hasn’t stopped His plan.

Our training is to remember that we once were slaves (no longer true of us) but now we are His. We are not slaves with a new name but rather children called to reflect God’s very glory in the world. Our purpose is to step out a see that we are His.