What If God Was One Of Us?
Ezekiel 20:42-44 (New Living Translation)
42 Then when I have brought you home to the land I promised with a solemn oath to give to your ancestors, you will know that I am the Lord. 43 You will look back on all the ways you defiled yourselves and will hate yourselves because of the evil you have done. 44 You will know that I am the Lord, O people of Israel, when I have honored my name by treating you mercifully in spite of your wickedness. I, the Sovereign Lord, have spoken!”
My mother teaches second grade. One day her class was being rude and was talking without raising their hands, speaking over her and disrespecting one another during a lesson. They were trying to tell her (the teacher) what to do, so she decided to take a seat and allow one of the offenders to take the spotlight as the teacher. My mother and another teacher sat in the seats behind a desk as students, and they began to exhibit the same behavior that was being exhibited during the time when she was teaching the lesson. One of the children turned to her in frustration and asked, “Why are you‘ll acting like that?” My mother and the other teacher said “we are only acting the way you all were acting just minutes before.” What a moment of reflection that became.
As she relayed this story to me, I thought wow, what if God turned and acted towards us as we act and treat one another, or even if he treated us the way we treat Him, what is it that we would be receiving back from Him? OMG, probably nothing we would want…Most of us would be in a world of hurt, some of us would be getting the cold shoulder when we didn’t offer Him enough praise and worship, or some of us would be getting cut off, because we forgot to pray or didn’t pray enough to His liking. Some of us would have everything taken because we didn’t pay our tithes, which belongs to Him anyway. Others still would be cussed and fussed out because that was what He heard us do to someone in the same situation. And the list goes on and on. For many of us life would not be as palatable if God began to treat us like we treat Him and others that we encounter or that we have been blessed to have in our lives.
I am so grateful that God is an “in spite of God.” He is a God that in spite of how we treat him still loves us and cares for us. He is a God that even when we turn our back on Him He promises to never leave us. He is a God that even when we don’t give Him all of what He desire from us, will bless us. He is a God that when we make a choice not to speak to Him, He will speak to us anyway and even hears us when we call. He is a God that in spite of our sin sent His son Jesus to give us back our right to eternal life. I am so glad that God is not one of us, and that He is an “in spite of God,” aren’t you?
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