Covenant Renewal: God takes us back!

How committed to God do you want to be?  The answer to this question depends overwhelmingly on one’s view of God, who he is and what he did for me and you.

And nobody sees the glory of God directly, apart from how that glory is revealed in God the Son, Jesus our Saviour, by the work of the Holy Spirit.   Any other true view of God is simply impossible!

In Exodus 34 we find an encounter of Moses with God who had for some 40 days been in exceptional fellowship with this same living, holy God. Moses heard God saying wonderful things; he also heard God saying things that terrify.

We read in verses 5 – 7:  Then the LORD came down in the cloud and stood there with Moses and proclaimed his name, the LORD.  And he passed in front of Moses, proclaiming, “The LORD, the LORD, the compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger, abounding in love and faithfulness, maintaining love to thousands, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion and sin.  Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children and their children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.”

Yet in the end Moses learned first and foremost how small he was before God, how weak, how completely dependent on our almighty Creator – and Redeemer. And that he is not the God of our subjectivity, our feelings, our imagination and our worldly ideologies.

This God is in no one’s pocket and no human mind has ever come near to grasping his greatness, his majesty, and his glory.

Everything changes when we once again see the true greatness and glory of our God in his salvation plan through his only begotten Son, Jesus. When we allow the divine glory to drain our hearts of all its trivial, self centred preconceptions and preoccupations and excuses about God.  

The foundation of every Christian’s life is the discovery of the greatness of God and especially, the discovery of how immeasurably small our thoughts, our ideas, our wills, our plans and even our lives are in comparison to the reality of the greatness of the one and only living, loving, gracious, holy God.

We are in awe that this God deeply cares about us and our lives, our thoughts and our feelings. Although we too often break away, God continuously reconfirm this covenant of grace with us, when we affirm our response to his grace with repentance, faith, love, awe and renewed commitment.

And that our Lord “takes us back” always remains the most amazing of it all.