Practical Christianity 3: God with us

When the Jews first met God, He was up there somewhere, hidden behind swirling mists in the summits of untouchable mounts. 

He was out of reach, remote, distant and fearsome. The earth trembled where He passed and no one could dare to even look.

I guess our fathers were somewhat similar when we were toddling into the brightness of life. 

He was way above us, a towering mystery and an immovable rock, whose deep voice demanded our attention and commanded our respect.

As our fathers became more accessible with time and we gained the height that narrowed the distance between the summit and our aspirant lives, so God closed the distance between us.

The big difference though was that most of the initiative was His. He had to come down to us as we neither had the means nor the will to go up.

He made a way

Those steps involved a severance from the past. It was brutal, absolute, uncompromising. It echoed adoption, in which a child is uprooted from its own miserable past and that past is then uncompromisingly cut off and extinguished.

He did not settle for a mere change of regime, which would have kept them in Egypt but under new management. He uprooted them completely and cut off their pursuers.

God is progressive in nature. He has no reverse gear. For better or worse, He can only advance. As such, He drew lines and shut doors at the Red Sea and again, some 40 years later, at the Jordan and the heap of ruins at Jericho that made that final.

Jacob modeled that with his heap of stones, where He swore never to return to what he left behind. It erased every trace of that ancient path just as the way back to Eden was never found again. The Jews used such cairns to mark points of no return. So does God.

Having brought them to His “skirts” as it were, He then engaged His children in very practical developmental activities. 

That provided formative pictures of the unseen God and His, as yet, mysterious ways.

As their learnings gained traction, came together and integrated into a solid, tangible structure with all its working parts, so their concept of God grew, from the naïve petulance of ignorant and wayward children, into grounded, principled sons.

That formative process slowly matured, not just by way of a tabernacle, but also through their setbacks and recoveries, lessons learnt, and respect gained. God then left His “out there” mystical isolation, to dwell among them and go with them on their continuing journeys.

Moses, undoubtedly the greatest statesman who ever lived, saluted the idea that God would go with them, as the greatest distinction of our emerging faith.

Not content to leave it there, the Great I am provided for them over the ensuing 40 years until He was satisfied that they had earned their wings. Their voice had deepened, their strength had risen and as they pushed against their restraints, the yoke broke and He let them go.

They advanced to maturity and a place of their own

It was always His intent to raise a people of autonomous stature, just as it is the yen of wise fathers to equip their children to rise up as mature, free standing adults capable of taking their place in the world. When the time was ripe, He brought them into their inheritance.

It’s a profound story. That atheists even dare to dismiss that as fairy tales is so reprehensible to me I could swear. If it is a fairy-tale, it is an ever-after one, for to this day that little slither of real estate holds its own as a beacon of light in a world of darkness.

Out of so many practical steps, came a tabernacle or temporary meeting place, a more permanent temple, which was only less temporary and a second temple that was more substantial and enduring yet also fell. Finally, a lasting, enduring structure emerged.

In the birth of the long-anticipated Redeemer, Jesus, our Emmanuel, God lay the foundations, the enduring, immovable bedrock that would forever seal the idea of "God with us". 

He then built us into its walls, its fabric, its substance. The church is the practical, tangible evidence of the unseen God, pitched in this world, but for God’s habitation. It as an organic, living form that will perfect our concept of the unseen God.

We will talk further …. 

(c) Peter Missing: bethelstone@gmail.com