Well, I said yesterday that I would meditate on relationship today, relationship between God and man. So I guess I will start at the beginning and work my way through.
In the beginning there was God. And God, for some reason, decided to create this world. He made a man. And he decided that the man couldn't be alone. Now this is my first point where I stop. Adam wasn't alone, he was with God. Adam got to walk and talk with God. And I just thought if you had that kind of unity and relationship with God, why would you need someone else? Did God make the woman, because Adam really needed her? Or was that just the plan to populate the entire earth? Maybe, man was always destined to sin, so whether Eve was there or not there would be the fall of man. If this is the case, then Adam did need the woman, because he would not always get to walk and talk with God. So perhaps Adam needed Eve, but not yet at that time. And God says things like that, because he does not have the restrictions of time and he is in all time at all times.
And now we have both Adam and Eve, they both get to dwell in the garden with God, but there is an evil force. Because in every good story we have an evil force. I often question how a perfect God somehow created imperfection... but that is not a discussion for this morning, sometime I will get to it. So the evil comes to the woman, the weaker of the two, and offers her a chance to be like God (he was lying). She knows how awesome God is so she goes for it, then she offers it to Adam, and how could Adam resist such a beauty like hers, so he goes for it as well. At this point they are ashamed of their nakedness and they are ashamed of their sin. So when God comes to the garden looking for them, they hide. Now, God is probably the best hide and seeker ever... so there is no way that they can hide from him. But he plays along, like a dad playing with his small child that he sees moving in the curtains, but pretends that he can't find. He calls out to them asking where they are and why they are hiding. They answer back that they are ashamed of their nakedness and they go on to explain what they had done.
I feel like God was very sad at this point. His creation with whom he loved to spend time with, turned from him. And this was the beginning of a long and hard battle to get them back. God had to send them out of the garden and into the harsh world. Now the human race had fallen. They were no longer worthy to be with God. But God never stopped loving them. He just had to pursue them now and fight for them.
So we go through the Old testament, and the people multiply and with their numbers, they get more and more sinful. Then God comes to Noah, he see's nobody else in the world that is seeking after him, so he starts over again with Noah's family. This doesn't stop sin, but God starts with a relationship again. He has shown Noah how faithful he is and he gave him a promise that he will never flood the entire earth again. Now Noah will teach his children about the faithfulness of God. That is something that I don't know if Adam and Eve taught. They knew what a horrible thing they had done, and they saw the perfection they had lost, but did they know where they were at with God? Did they know he still wanted them? And that he was never going to give up on mankind? It is all just speculation, but I tend to wonder these things.
Now the story begins to unfold even more. God develops relationships with some key men, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. These men follow God and even though they screw up from time to time, God makes a covenant with them. They are to develop into a great nation. And this nation becomes God's chosen people. I feel pretty bad for the people who were not his chosen people, because they were screwed. But I dare not question God's perfect plan. The nation of Israel strategically get put into Egypt with the whole story of Joseph, which I am not going to go into at this time. But after awhile of them living there peacefully, they get too big and freak out the Egyptians so they get put into slavery. So it's a pretty big bummer for them, but God has a plan. He brings along Moses, a man who sucks at public speaking, to talk to Pharaoh and free the people. God wants to show the people of Israel his awesome power. This is his time to capture their hearts and trust. So he continues to harden Pharaoh's heart to show his incredible power. He wants his people to trust him as he takes them through the wilderness and gives them instructions. This is the time when he teaches them about rules and how to use sacrifices to atone for their sins, yes, it is something that was done in the past. But he gives them exact and specific instructions on how they are to do things.
I am going to kinda skip past the rest of the old testament. It continues with the Israelites turning from God, and God getting them back. It is a back and fourth struggle. Also the rules of God had been expanded on and they had forgotten the powerful God behind those rules, and it became all about the rules. So then came the time to change things. It was time for the big battle to be fought. God sent his only son to be the sacrifice to save our sinful world. When Jesus came into the world he created quite the uproar. God saw that it was time for relationship to be restored with the human race. Yes, there always was some form of relationship, but he wanted to to be personal and passionate, as he had intended it.
Jesus came and gave people an inside look at God's heart and how he wanted each of them to belong to him. God no longer had a chosen people, he wanted everybody! Thank God for that, if not, I wouldn't be included. And it would really suck not to be included in God's family.
When Jesus died on the cross as a sacrifice, he covered us all for all time. Now when God sees a person who has accepted the grace that we have been offered, he sees not our sin, but the purity of the one who saved us. And God no longer had to be an outside force trying to get people to follow him. The Holy Spirit was put inside of us, so we could all be spoken to and we can all hear God and see him. We get to talk back and fourth with God and live to glorify him in our every day lives.
Again, this is just mw thinking out loud. They are not perfectly thought out or anything. I am just so glad that God has allowed me to know him. I want to celebrate that by meditating on his past, present and future. I could write for another few hours about relationship with God, because it is not something that I can cover in 2 hours, but I have to meet a friend in about an hour so I will leave this for now. And I just want to quickly thank God for the overwhelmingly incredible incredible gift he has offered through sending his son to die for our salvation. I love you Jesus.
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