And I will give them one heart, and a new spirit I will put within them. I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh, that they may walk in my statutes and keep my rules and obey them. And they shall be my people, and I will be their God. 

Ezekiel 11:19-20

God’s Promise of Relationship

Throughout Scripture, God makes amazing promises as a deeply personal way of revealing Himself to us.  We know and trust that God the Father, Christ Jesus and the Holy Spirit is the holy Creator of everything.  He spoke the universe and everything in it into existence.  He speaks and chaos transforms to order.  He is unbound by space and time, existing outside of creation, and He knows everything.  He is all-powerful and infinite.  He is also holy, pure, divine, and as our vision is clouded by the world around us, we cannot fathom what those words mean.  He is set apart in ways we cannot begin to understand, but He is also intimate.  He knows everything about each of us.  He knows our needs, our desires, our deepest fears, and He hears our prayers, and He responds.  Underscoring His unimaginable power, authority and intimacy, Scripture says He knows and does things no human will ever know or do.  For instance, to Him, the hairs on our heads are numbered, indicating He knows the microscopic details of our existence.  Jesus says,

“I tell you, my friends, do not fear those who kill the body, and after that have nothing more that they can do. But I will warn you whom to fear: fear him who, after he has killed, has authority to cast into hell. Yes, I tell you, fear him! Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? And not one of them is forgotten before God. Why, even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Fear not; you are of more value than many sparrows.  Luke 12:4-7

During His earthly ministry, Jesus spent time getting to know ordinary people around Him.  He ate meals with, preached to, taught, and healed people who were deemed to be outcasts and sinners by the religious leaders of His day.  He was friendly and accessible.  No one was too sinful to receive His holy healing touch (please note that He healed both physically and spiritually), yet He desired each person to leave the experience transformed through Him.  He seems to have consistently viewed life through the lens of eternity, focusing on spiritual transformation first and foremost, knowing that discipline, responsibility, struggle, and yes, even suffering, provide a foundation for faith superior to abundance and pleasure.  Through the accounts of Jesus interacting with people in the gospels we see people on the fringe of society (beggars, tax collectors, prostitutes, disabled, demon-possessed, etc.) as far more likely to respond to His unveiling of God’s holy mercy and grace than those who believed themselves to be righteous, and in their self-imposed righteousness, superior to the sinners around them.

While Jesus revealed the kingdom of God through His mercy and grace, and He desired friendship, He never deviated from the truth.  He never altered God’s holy word in any way to help Him win friends or followers, making it clear that while His mercy and grace are freely bestowed, we must fully surrender ourselves to Him to enjoy His life abundant, His eternal life, His holy indwelling, the kingdom of God.  And if allowing folks to suffer is the catalyst for them to finally see Him and surrender to Him, with His focus on eternity, the tradeoff is worth it. 

Friendship comes with a cost, and friendship with God the Father, Christ Jesus and the Holy Spirit costs our lives.  In return, we gain His fullness, His satisfaction, His joy, His life.  This notion of friendship with God runs throughout Scripture, from Genesis to Revelation.  Time and time again, God promises to be God to His people.  Let’s consider some of God’s promises along these lines.

When Abraham was 99 years old, 24 years after he and Sarah left their home and started following God’s lead in the wilderness, they were still childless.  God had promised to make them a great nation, yet they still had no children.  God restated His promise to Abraham saying,

And I will establish my covenant between me and you and your offspring after you throughout their generations for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you.  Genesis 17:7

God promises to be Abraham’s God and to be God to Abraham’s descendants.  When God called Moses into service, God made a similar promise.  He instructed Moses to speak on God’s behalf to the Israelites in captivity saying,

I will take you to be my people, and I will be your God, and you shall know that I am the Lord your God, who has brought you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians.  Exodus 6:7

God promises to be their God and He promises to take them as His people.  Later, while His people camped at Mount Sinai, God repeats the promises and adds to them that He will dwell with them.  Through Moses, God says,

I will make my dwelling among you, and my soul shall not abhor you. And I will walk among you and will be your God, and you shall be my people.  Leviticus 26:11-12

And later, after 40 years wandering in the wilderness, God once again says,

For you are a people holy to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth. It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the Lord set his love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples, but it is because the Lord loves you and is keeping the oath that he swore to your fathers, that the Lord has brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt. Know therefore that the Lord your God is God, the faithful God who keeps covenant and steadfast love with those who love him and keep his commandments, to a thousand generations, and repays to their face those who hate him, by destroying them. He will not be slack with one who hates him. He will repay him to his face.  You shall therefore be careful to do the commandment and the statutes and the rules that I command you today.  Deuteronomy 7:6-11

Why did God choose Israel as His people?  They did nothing to merit His holy favor.  He chose them because He chose them.  He loves them because He loves them.  We can never earn God’s holy favor.  Each of us is a sinful human, unworthy of God, yet He loves us because He loves us.  Through Christ Jesus and His holy transformation, His holy indwelling Presence, His holy love abiding within us, we have hope of actually obeying His commands.

We know that almost as soon as God’s people took possession of the Promised Land and its material abundance, they started straying from Him.  They forgot Him.  They started worshiping other gods.  The prophet Jeremiah, known as the weeping prophet, served shortly before Babylon destroyed Jerusalem in 586 BC.  He repeatedly urged God’s people to return to Him, to listen to His voice, to follow His commands, reminding them that God is who He claims to be.  Through Jeremiah we read,

The word that came to Jeremiah from the Lord: “Hear the words of this covenant, and speak to the men of Judah and the inhabitants of Jerusalem. You shall say to them, Thus says the Lord, the God of Israel: Cursed be the man who does not hear the words of this covenant that I commanded your fathers when I brought them out of the land of Egypt, from the iron furnace, saying, Listen to my voice, and do all that I command you. So shall you be my people, and I will be your God,  that I may confirm the oath that I swore to your fathers, to give them a land flowing with milk and honey, as at this day.” Then I answered, “So be it, Lord.”  Jeremiah 11:1-5

God repeats His promise – He will be our God if we act like His people.  Later, God says through Jeremiah, 

And you shall be my people, and I will be your God.”  Jeremiah 30:22

Once again, through Jeremiah God says,

For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the Lord: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the Lord,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the Lord. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.”  Jeremiah 31:33-34

God promises relationship, forgiveness and heart-filling knowledge of God’s holy will.  And again, God says,

And they shall be my people, and I will be their God. I will give them one heart and one way, that they may fear me forever, for their own good and the good of their children after them.  Jeremiah 32:38-39 

Ezekiel served as prophet while exiled in Babylon.  He preached a message of hope, reassuring His people that God was with them.  Here are two passages from Ezekiel:

And I will give them one heart, and a new spirit I will put within them. I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh, that they may walk in my statutes and keep my rules and obey them. And they shall be my people, and I will be their God.  Ezekiel 11:19-20

My dwelling place shall be with them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people. Then the nations will know that I am the Lord who sanctifies Israel, when my sanctuary is in their midst forevermore.”  Ezekiel 37:27-28

God promises to transform our hearts enabling us to be His people, and He promises to dwell with us.  Quoting Leviticus 26:12, Jeremiah 31:33 and Ezekiel 11:20, Paul describes followers of Christ as “temple of the living God” writing,

What agreement has the temple of God with idols? For we are the temple of the living God; as God said, “I will make my dwelling among them and walk among them, and I will be their God, and they shall be my people.”  2 Corinthians 6:16

In the next to last chapter in the Bible, John sees a vision of the new heaven and new earth, where we see God dwelling with humans.  This is the return to the Garden of Eden where God communed with Adam and Eve (see Genesis 2).  John writes,

And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”  Revelation 21:3-4

Throughout Scripture we see God, the holy Creator of everything with power beyond our ability to imagine, desiring relationship with humans.  And He promises over and over His desire for us to be His people and His desire to be our God.  He desires to dwell with us and in us.  He desires relationship with us.  We must merely surrender fully to Christ Jesus and allow His holy transformation of our hearts to occur.  He wants to be our God.  He wants to be your God.  He wants each of us to be His.  I pray we each have eyes to see and ears to hear His holy message to His people.  Amen.