If God had a Facebook page, His Relationship Status with humanity would be: It’s Complicated. That’s because, it’s complicated.
If you think about your walk with God, your relationship with God, you might agree. There are ups. There are downs. There are times when you’ve wondered, should I stay or should I go.
I want us to spend some time today thinking about the love of God. It’s not uncommon that we talk about this a church, whether here on Sundays or at The Feast on Tuesdays.
The love of God is really the dominant or biggest theme that we look at, because it is so important for us to grasp. More than that, God’s Word says that Gove is love.
But there’s a problem. We can talk about the love of God so much that we stop really paying attention. We can talk about the love of God in general terms so much that we can lose the power of the Biblical concept of the love of God.
The love of God can become something that we almost take for granted. It can also be something that is misunderstood. When it’s misunderstood it’s cheapened and distorted: “God loves me so much, He’s ok with my sin”, we can come to think.
In fact, that idea is pretty big in our society, and I hear it expressed in the church. But actually, it demonstrates that if I really think that, I don’t understand the love of God.
So, in order to better understand the love of God, we need to dig deeper into the Word of God. In order to do that, we need to spend some time looking at three things: The Problem, the Promise, and the Fulfillment.
The Problem
We’re going to look at the book of Isaiah, chapter 1, in order to understand the problem.
Isaiah 1:1 The vision concerning Judah and Jerusalem that Isaiah son of Amoz saw during the reigns of Uzziah, Jotham, Ahaz and Hezekiah, kings of Judah. 2 Hear me, you heavens! Listen, earth! For the LORD has spoken: “I reared children and brought them up, but they have rebelled against me. 3 The ox knows its master, the donkey its owner’s manger, but Israel does not know, my people do not understand.” 4 Woe to the sinful nation, a people whose guilt is great, a brood of evildoers, children given to corruption! They have forsaken the LORD; they have spurned the Holy One of Israel and turned their backs on him. 5 Why should you be beaten anymore? Why do you persist in rebellion? Your whole head is injured, your whole heart afflicted. 6 From the sole of your foot to the top of your head there is no soundness—only wounds and welts and open sores, not cleansed or bandaged or soothed with olive oil. 7 Your country is desolate, your cities burned with fire; your fields are being stripped by foreigners right before you, laid waste as when overthrown by strangers. 8 Daughter Zion is left like a shelter in a vineyard, like a hut in a cucumber field, like a city under siege.
What we call the Old Testament, the first 2/3 of the Holy Bible, also known as the Hebrew Bible, is really all about the history of God's relationship with this planet.
Understanding history is a little like getting into a time machine and putting ourselves back their so we can better understand what was going on.
It starts with God creating Man and Woman in the garden of Eden. At first God dwelled with them in perfect harmony. It seems that went on for some time. But then after a while, spurred on by Satan, they chose to disobey God.
It wasn’t just a little disobedience. It was really about them trying to become independent of God, trying to be like God, which, if we have any understanding of who God is, is, of course, completely impossible.
But, believing a lie, they broke faith with God. God had given them extraordinary free reign over the garden, and that shows us that God wished to share its beauty with them in a liberal and generous way. God also gave them a limitation - because He is God and can give limitations.
Limitations keep us safe, keep us under authority, keep us humble. So to make a longer story short, communion between God and humanity was broken when Adam and Eve challenged God being God.
They preferred a lie - they could call the shots and be their own boss, over the truth, that God is God and we are not.
Jump forward a whole lot of time, and God has chosen to reveal Himself again to humanity through people he chose as those who would be His people.
Starting with Abraham, God created a people for himself who would know the truth about the living God, and through them God would reveal his will.
They would understand that God is God and they are not. They would love God, love each other, live fairly and justly among each other, and they would be blessed as a result.
They would be given an incredibly beautiful and fruitful land to dwell in, which was for them the greatest sign of blessing.
Was there anything in particular that was special about Abraham that caused God to choose Abraham? Probably not, except perhaps for one thing.
It ends up being a big thing. Abraham had the capacity to believe God, that was perhaps his greatest quality.
He could trust what his eyes couldn’t see. He could put together all the various evidence that God was real, and figure out that God is real. And because he had faith, he could listen when God spoke.
To make a very long, sad, ugly story short, the people who came from Abraham did not love God.
With a few notable exceptions, such as King David and a relatively tiny number of others, God’s people did not walk in His ways, they did not follow his prescription for how to live, known as the Law.
Central to the Law was the sacrificial system outlined in the Torah, in the book of Leviticus – in which animals of various sorts would be ritually sacrificed to make atonement for the sins of the people.
God knew that even if the people by and large were to seek Him, they would mess up sometimes. They would willfully do things that would offend God, or sometimes even just in error bad things would happen.
The slaughter of sacrificial animals was a way to do a few things. It demonstrated how very serious sin is, how big a threat it is to rupturing our relationship with God. It was also the way God ordained to take away sin, to forgive.
God, always gracious, always wants to forgive, always wants to restore us after we sin. Sin is a very serious thing, because it keeps us from God. God is completed holy, and sin cannot stand in His presence.
In the garden of Eden, there was no Law. Only a beautiful relationship with God. That didn’t work. The Law gave a framework for God’s people to live. If they followed it, all would be well.
But they rejected God’s rules, which was just like rejecting God. Again they broke the relationship between God and people.
Not only that, but they began to worship foreign Gods.
And so the prophet Isaiah summed it all up by saying: 2 Hear me, you heavens! Listen, earth! For the LORD has spoken: “I reared children and brought them up, but they have rebelled against me. 3 The ox knows its master, the donkey its owner’s manger, but Israel does not know, my people do not understand.” 4 Woe to the sinful nation, a people whose guilt is great, a brood of evildoers, children given to corruption! They have forsaken the LORD; they have spurned the Holy One of Israel and turned their backs on him.
So...that’s the problem. It’s a biggy. God wanted to be in a beautiful relationship with humanity, with us. Humanity rejected God. But even here, as the prophet Isaiah so clearly identifies the problem, there is an olive branch from God, just a few verses later in chapter 1.
16 Wash and make yourselves clean. Take your evil deeds out of my sight; stop doing wrong. 17 Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow. 18 ‘Come now, let us settle the matter,’ says the LORD. ‘Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool.
Humanity rejected God’s offer of relationship, but God did not reject us. Here God offers to clean the slate, but in doing so God is taking a through a necessary process where we come to realize our need for His intervention. If we can clean ourselves up, if we stop doing evil things.
If instead we do right, then there can be a change in our relationship status with God.
How do you think humanity generally responds to such a challenge? To make things right ourselves? We try. Some do better than others, perhaps, before they, like all of us, fail to make ourselves good enough to be in a relationship with God.
There are a lot of ‘if’s’, a lot of conditions in that passage that we can’t meet, if we’re honest.
Despite that, there’s this promise - ‘Though your sins are like scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they are red as crimson, they shall be like wool.
Something is coming. Some solution is coming. And we’ve learned, if we’ve been paying attention, that the solution ain’t us.
The Promise
One of the consequences of God’s people breaking faith with Him, is that they ended up in exile, far away from the land of promise. They ended up in places that they did not want to be.
It was partly a natural outcome of following after idols and forsaking the one true God - they were told not to blend with other nations because it meant that they would follow the false Gods of those nations. They ignored that command and ended up being assimilated into other countries.
It was partly that natural outcome, but it was also that God drove them into exile. They had chosen to break faith with God, to ignore Him, and they chose false gods, idols. They were determined to live a lie, so God sent them out into the nations through captivity.
Entire generations of God’s people over about 200 years spent their lives in exile. But that was not God’s permanent plan. He always intended to bring them home.
The prophet Ezekiel spoke after a few hundred years of exile:
Ezekiel 36:24-29
24 ‘“For I will take you out of the nations; I will gather you from all the countries and bring you back into your own land.25 I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols. 26 I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.
God says through Ezekiel that the peoples’ exile will come to an end. He will restore them To their original promised land. It should be stated that the idea of "promised land", was always first and foremost a poetic description of all the kind of relationship that God wanted to have with his people.
Was there a physical "promised land"? Yes, there was. But we really miss what's important if we think of that only very literally. First and foremost, God wants relationship with his people.
Then God says something very interesting. He says "I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols.
So we go from Isaiah, where God says "clean yourselves", all the way to the exile, where the people realize they can do absolutely nothing to "clean themselves.
Now, having realize that, God offers to be the one who cleanses. The one who cleans us up from all of our exposure to false idols.
And then God says something amazing. The problem in our relationship with God has never been God.
He's always been the strength of that relationship. He's always been faithful. Always gracious, always taking the initiative.
The problem has been the human heart, and the human tendency to put itself first, to live selfishly, to not live generously toward God or toward other people.
So here God promises to give us a new heart. He promises to put a new kind of spirit in us. He promises to take away our cold heart, our heart of stone. He plans to replace it with a heart of flesh. A responsive heart, a compassionate heart, a heart that cares about the things of God.
Ezekiel continues:
27 And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws.28 Then you will live in the land I gave your ancestors; you will be my people, and I will be your God. 29 I will save you from all your uncleanness.
Here is the best thing about the promise. God says that He will give us His Spirit. His Holy Spirit will dwell in us. And because the Spirit of God is in us, God will move in us to follow his will - His decrees and His law,
His prescription for living life well and receiving the blessing of God. So it will be Him that does it. Not we ourselves. He will transform our hearts from the broken things that they are, to being healed and transformed and made alive.God Himself will save us from all of our uncleanness - everything that spoils life and that compromises our relationship status with God.
Ezekiel 37:21-28
21 and say to them, “This is what the Sovereign LORD says: I will take the Israelites out of the nations where they have gone. I will gather them from all around and bring them back into their own land. 22 I will make them one nation in the land, on the mountains of Israel. There will be one king over all of them and they will never again be two nations or be divided into two kingdoms. 23 They will no longer defile themselves with their idols and vile images or with any of their offences, for I will save them from all their sinful backsliding, and I will cleanse them. They will be my people, and I will be their God.
God will return the exiles. He will make them one people. They will have one King. They will no longer follow false idols, they will no longer self-destruct because God will resuce them from their backsliding. God will cleanse them. God will call them His very own.
Ezekiel 37:24-28
24 ‘“My servant David will be king over them, and they will all have one shepherd. They will follow my laws and be careful to keep my decrees. 25 They will live in the land I gave to my servant Jacob, the land where your ancestors lived. They and their children and their children’s children will live there for ever, and David my servant will be their prince for ever. 26 I will make a covenant of peace with them; it will be an everlasting covenant. I will establish them and increase their numbers, and I will put my sanctuary among them for ever. 27 My dwelling-place will be with them; I will be their God, and they will be my people.
There will be one King, from the line of David, one shepherd for all. One Prince, a covenant of peace that will last forever.
God’s holiness will dwell with His people, God Himself will dwell with them and will be their God, and they shall be His people.
Are you beginning to see to picture that the Scripture is painting? There is a very real problem in our relationship with God. The problem is not with God, the problem is with us.
The Fulfillment
God so wants to restore us, to fix His relationship status with us, that he has a solution. In order for the solution to work, it seems that humans have to exhaust any notion that we are good enough in and of ourselves to be with God, and any notion that to live the best we can live - we can do it without God.
We need to come to a place of realizing this before we value the gift that God offers us in Jesus, who is the one from the line of David, who God wants to be our shepherd, and who is the one to give us the gift of God’s Holy Spirit, the comforter, as He promised.
There is a necessary process of ‘coming to an end of ourselves’ before our eyes can see the incredible gift that God is offering to us.
So...that’s a bit of a journey through the Old Testament. And this takes us to the New Testament, where the Apostle Paul brings it home to us. Here He explains the problem and now the solution to God’s relationship status with us and ours with Him:
Colossians 1:21 Once you were alienated from God and were enemies in your minds because of your evil behavior. 22 But now he has reconciled you by Christ’s physical body through death to present you holy in his sight, without blemish and free from accusation— 23 if you continue in your faith, established and firm, and do not move from the hope held out in the gospel.
The basic problem that we have as individuals is the exact same problem that God’s chosen people, the people of Israel, had.
Because of our actions, because of our rebellion against God, because of our offenses against God, we are alienated from God. Separated from Him.
Cut off, as if were, from the blessings of a relationship with Him, not able to experience His love.
And not just separate and alienated. That’s a passive description. We were also enemies in our minds. That means we opposed God in our minds.
I was raised to oppose God in my mind, to reject the very idea of God, and to think poorly of anyone who believed in God.
Whether we do not believe in Him, denying the reality of His existence, or whether we believe in Him and actively rebel against Him, as humanity has done for millennia as we’ve just seen with God’s chosen people, we’re in a bad way.
Our relationship status with God is kaput.
But, Paul continues, something has changed. God has taken the initiative. God has, as He promised, restored our relationship with Him through Jesus.
We are reconciled through the suffering and death and resurrection of Jesus.
Through Jesus, God now says we’re without blemish.
We are free from accusation of condemnation for our sin as we continue in our faith, as we continue to live under the New Covenant Jesus has made with us.
As we are planted and grow, established and firm in the hope of the gospel.
We’ve looked at how God dealt with what He called a stiff-necked people who rejected His love and rebelled against Him.
We’ve looked at how God has let people come to an end of themselves, an end of their illusions and lies, in order that they might turn to the living God.
The love of God. We’ve really been talking about the love of God. The extent that God has gone to in order to be in a relationship with us.
We’ve been looking at the longsuffering of God, how He waits, and waits, and waits for His people. He waited for me. He waited for you.
If you’re here today, perhaps hearing for the first time about the love of God, it may surprise you to know that he is waiting for you.
He is waiting for you to respond to His offer of abundant life through Jesus Christ. He wants to have a beautiful relationship with you.
He’s waiting for you to turn to Him in faith, to receive the best God has to offer, the gift of His only Son, the Messiah. His love was proved and poured out on the cruel cross.
Will you come to Jesus, just as you are? Will you renew your commitment to Him or perhaps, for the first time, receive Him into your life as your king, your Saviour, your God. He awaits your decision. Will you choose Him today?
