I once heard a theologian say in a lecture that if you arrive in heaven one day and God is not there then you are in Hell. When we think of heaven, we often think of a type of paradise reward of perfect reality. When we experience wonderful and beautiful things, it is not uncommon for someone to say, “this is heaven.” There’s a song we often sing in our church that I hope might shape our attention for this next year. The lyric is repeated over and over throughout the song, “Your presence is heaven to me.”
What does God’s presence mean to you? Have you ever given it much thought? You wouldn’t be alone if the concept felt foreign to you. Much of the Christianity in our country’s history has been plagued by the teaching that God is up in his heaven, has set the creation into motion, and never interacts within his creation. This kind of teaching has led to all kinds of atrocities where we’ve convinced ourselves that we are made to be gods of our dominions here on earth. This is a deeper study for another time. The more pressing issue with this teaching is that God was made inaccessible, impersonal, and in need of appeasement.
In my time of studying the Bible, one of the greatest lessons I’ve learned is that it is essential to take off my metaphorical glasses and examine the lenses in which I look at scripture. The lenses we look through play a large part in how we interpret what we read. If we fail to never examine our lenses, we run the risk of fitting the Bible into our worldview rather than allowing the Bible to shape our worldview. Over the next two weeks, I want to hand you another set of lenses in which to read the Bible, and in turn shape how you view the world.
God’s desire from the beginning of creation, and the reason for the creation, is to be with us. He desires to make his presence known to us, in us, and with us. This is a lens in which we need to view scripture because it is one of the overarching themes of the Bible. The Bible is framed with the presence of God: being with Adam and Eve in the Garden (Gen 3:8), his presence coming in Jesus called Emmanuel (Mt 1:23), and finally his presence coming down to be with his creation in Revelation (21:3). There are many other places throughout the prophets, psalms, Gospels, and epistles that emphasize God’s presence with us. As we look forward to Advent, the season of expectation of God’s presence returning to his people, I want to look at the importance of God’s presence in the First Testament (this Sunday) and then look at the promise of God’s presence in the New Testament (Next Sunday).
The passage I want to focus on for this Sunday is Exodus 33. Pay attention to Moses’s attitude towards God’s presence. Jesus came to consecrate a new people to be his holy nation in this world. As I think about our calling to answer the call of Jesus to be salt and light to the nations, I want to urge us to take the attitude of Moses in Exodus 33 and embrace the promise of Jesus in John 14:15-17, that the Spirit will be with us always. When we develop the habits of slowing down to be present to God’s Presence within us, we will be transformed by his presence, and develop eyes to see where God’s Presence is at work in the world around us.