God With Us

When you step back and take the Bible as a whole, you see a theme throughout scripture: God wants to be with us. Together. Intimate. With nothing separating us. But God cannot join to himself that which is not like himself. He wants us to be like him so that we can be closer to him. God’s call to righteousness is actually a call to intimacy with Him.

His original plan was to be with us in the garden

• Genesis 1:27: So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
• Genesis 2:7: Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.
• Genesis 3:8: And they heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden.

The lie of the serpent was that God doesn’t want us to be like him

• Genesis 3:5: For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.
• Leviticus 19:2: Speak to the entire assembly of Israel and say to them: ‘Be holy because I, the Lord your God, am holy.‘
• Ephesians 4:22-24: You were taught, with regard to your former way of life, to put off your old self, which is being corrupted by its deceitful desires; to be made new in the attitude of your minds; and to put on the new self, created to be like God in true righteousness and holiness.
• 1 John 3:2: Dear friends, now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when Christ appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.

God chose the family of Abraham to be a people through whom the whole world would be reunited with him

• Exodus 25:8: Then have them make a sanctuary for me, and I will dwell among them.
• Exodus 29:45-46: Then I will dwell among the Israelites and be their God. They will know that I am the Lord their God, who brought them out of Egypt so that I might dwell among them. I am the Lord their God.
• Leviticus 26:11-12: I will put my dwelling place among you, and I will not abhor you. I will walk among you and be your God, and you will be my people.
• 1 Kings 6:13: And I will live among the Israelites and will not abandon my people Israel.
• Ezekiel 37:27: My dwelling place will be with them; I will be their God, and they will be my people.

When the law was given it was up to human strength to uphold the law. But we could not. So God came closer in the form of Jesus

• Isaiah 7:14: Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.
• John 1:14: The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

Jesus came to open the way back to the Father

• John 14:2-3: My Father’s house has many rooms; if that were not so, would I have told you that I am going there to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back and take you to be with me that you also may be where I am.
• John 17:21-23: that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me.

He sent the Holy Spirit

• John 14:16-17: And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another advocate to help you and be with you forever—the Spirit of truth. The world cannot accept him, because it neither sees him nor knows him. But you know him, for he lives with you and will be in you.
• Ephesians 2:22: And in him you too are being built together to become a dwelling in which God lives by his Spirit.

In the end, His will to be with us will be done

• Revelation 21:3: And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, ‘Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God.’