God is Holy and Merciful: Does God really dwell with us?

One of the central features of Biblical spirituality is that God would dare to dwell with us. If we don't have God-with-us, we don't have much of a faith story to tell. In fact, all we would have is a set of morals and virtues to compete with other sets of morals and virtues. But we have far more than a moral guideline for right living; we have the audacity to claim a God who is close.

The Bible begins with God walking with the people in the Garden of Eden. It transitions next into the people fleeing from the Garden and the dance begins. God draws near at different times. Enoch, a character in early Genesis, is said to have walked with God. Noah walked with God. But God does not seek to walk one-on-one with us, God seeks to walk with us in community.

And so Abraham is called and his family walks with God to the Promised Land. They get detoured, and time turns the family into a nation in bondage. God calls Israel out of Egypt to walk with a pillar of fire and a cloud of smoke to the Promised Land. During that forty-year walk, they build a tent for God as a resting place. When they cross into the Promised Land, they build a permanent building in the Temple. And when it was completed, the people of Israel couldn't imagine it getting any better than that. A Temple where the nearness of God could be experienced was quite amazing. How could you get better than that?

God was not finished, though. Soon, God would dwell not in a beyond-belief building, but in a manger. Advent is only a couple weeks away, the time where we celebrate that the God of the universe would be fully present in Jesus Christ. If Solomon found it hard to believe that God could be confined to a building, imagine how he would respond if he knew that God would walk around as a person!

But that's enough from me, how about you- what does it mean to you that God would dwell with us?