It has always been a dream of mine to write and publish a book, and last week, I crossed the finish line of that idea; thank You, Jesus! I had been working off and on for four years to write a book about how adoptive families connect, based on our experience and what we learned – both before our adoptions, and during the “hot mess” years! Ultimately, we learned a lot that paralleled the love of Father God and His invitation into the Family!
Lately I have been reading Isaiah, Jeremiah, Lamentations, and Ezekiel. Ezekiel was a prophet, whom God called to do many crazy things to show the Israelites who He was and what He was after. When you read Ezekiel, you see that while God brings new and creative visual lessons to His people, the bottom line of all these lessons is the same. Yes, He was echoing through these books that the people were horrible, belligerent sinners. But why didn’t the sin of the Philistines or the Edomites cause Him the same grief? Because God’s priority was His family: “I want you to know that I am God, your God, and that you are a people, My people.” He was upset about their behavior, He called out certain actions – but He just kept saying in all of His decisions: “Then they will know I am God.” It reminds me of Ps. 46:10: “Be still and know that I am God…”
Again, and again, and again. In Isaiah, or Lamentations, or Exodus, or just about all the Samuels, Kings, and Chronicles, God is warning: I will punish you to bring you back to Me and teach you what you really need; I will make you see that I had a special position and place for you which was the best plan for you; I will make you sorry so that you will understand and never stray again! And eventually, He lets a great number of them die, be exiled, etc, never to return to their promised land because of their consistent choice to sin and not be His people. While He left a remnant, as He promised, His warnings did come to pass.
And in all this, the thing that keeps standing out to me is that, in my opinion and from what I can see across the Word, God’s greatest desire was simply: “a people”. A people that belonged to Him. A people that were proud to be His. A people that reflected His heart and His ways. A people who enjoyed knowing that He was God and happy they did not have to be. A people at peace, knowing that while they lived in a foreign dark world, they had a secret identity and connection to the King of a much better and more important Kingdom.
And yet that was the one thing they did not do, the one thing they refused to be. The Jews rejected this belonging.
In the New Testament, we see that Pharisees and Sadducees were finally some Jews that had their acts together. They weren’t going to hurt the reputation of their God! They weren’t going to get punishments like their ancestors had, no way! They finally had a grip on what God wanted out of them…or so they thought. Unfortunately, they had it backwards! It was a different version of the story, but still sin and still separation from God. They couldn’t care less if they belonged to God; they really just belonged to their law books, their religion, and their self-righteousness. They had their act, and I believe they believed it was enough, I really do. But they were missing the fact that God wanted their behavior to flow from their joy of belonging to Him – in humble awe calling Him their God, in humble awe praising Him for saving them because they couldn’t possibly be near Him without mercy, and in humble awe obeying Him through serving others. This is not what the leaders in Jesus’ time on earth lived like. That’s why He judged them more harshly than the drunks and the prostitutes.
The religious leaders rewrote the story of what God wanted from them…or at least they tried to.
We make things complicated sometimes.
The question to be asking is, truly, am I thinking and living and enjoying Him…like a child of God, beloved and secure?
Lord,
Help us recognize the value, the priceless value, of belonging to You, of being Yours! Lord, the gift and the beauty of this…Thank You.
amen.
