The God Who Steps Into Your Story
Ben Blevins opened the fourth message in the Reasons for Hope series with an honest admission. He had one book, the whole story of God, and about twenty-five minutes to introduce it. Where do you even start?
He started with the gods people have always believed in. Ancient gods, modern gods, the quiet little gods we build in our own minds without noticing. Ben's summary of them was simple: they are basically us, but more. More powerful. More intelligent. And more cruel, more vindictive, quicker to strike out. In ancient Egypt, the gods lived in temples across the Nile, guarded and nearly impossible to reach. You brought a gift and hoped you did not somehow get in the way.
Then God brought His people out of slavery in Egypt and said something those other gods never said. I do not want to be a far-off God. I want to live in the middle of you.
That is the question worth sitting with this week. Not whether God exists, but who He actually is once you strip away everything borrowed from every other god we have ever imagined.
Not Us, But More
Ben told the story of his friend Rusty, who came to him early in their friendship with a real tension. Rusty saw an angry God in the Old Testament and could not square that with Jesus in the New. So Ben asked him a simple question: what do you know about God in the New Testament? Rusty answered easily. Compassionate. Gracious. Slow to anger. Abounding in love and faithfulness. Forgiving of rebellion, wickedness, and sin.
Ben told him to go back and read the Old Testament with that description in mind, because God's character does not change. A couple of weeks later, Rusty came back and said it felt like reading a whole other book.
That is what happens when we let the small-g gods, the "us but more" gods, quietly shape how we picture God. We assume He is the loudest, most powerful version of us, prone to the same anger and pettiness we are prone to, and we lose sight of who He has actually said He is.
Pictures, Not Definitions
Ben pointed out something about how the Bible talks compared to how most of us naturally think. As Westerners, we think in definitions. God is great. God is love. God is omnipotent. We think abstractly, and we build rules to protect what is best for each of us individually.
But the Bible is an Eastern book, and it thinks in pictures. Ben's illustration was almost embarrassingly personal: he loves the Buffalo Bills, and he loves his grandparents. Both real. Not remotely the same. If God offered him one more day with his grandparents instead of a lifetime of watching the Bills, he would take the day, every time. Definitions flatten that distinction. Pictures do not.
That is why Psalm 18 does not define God. It pictures Him. The Lord is my rock, my fortress, my deliverer, my shield, my stronghold. Ben brought up Masada, the fortress in Israel built high on a plateau with enough water and food stored to protect ten thousand people for years. When the psalm says God is my fortress, that is the picture, a place strong enough and stocked enough to actually hold you. The Bible gives rules, but the rules exist to protect a relationship, not to replace one. When the rule gets broken, the goal is still to find a way back into relationship, because relationship was always the point.
A God Who Makes Room for You
So who is God? Genesis starts simply. In the beginning, God created. And everything He created, He called good. When He found Adam alone, He said it was not good, and He made a way to fix it.
Before creation, Ben said, there was nothing except God Himself. For God to create anything else, He had to make space within Himself. He then made us in His image and told us to reflect Him to the world, including in how we bring life into being. God could have designed reproduction any number of ways. Instead, He built into us the same pattern He used Himself: making room within ourselves for new life.
He placed the first people in a garden with a tree of life at its center, the place where His presence was strongest, and He walked with them daily. He also placed a second tree there with one instruction: do not eat from it. The instruction was not there to withhold something good. It was there to protect the relationship, the same way your body can conduct a small amount of electricity safely but would be destroyed by a live wire meant to power an entire building. The boundary was for their good. They crossed it anyway, and access to the tree of life was lost.
The God Who Hears the Cry and Steps In
It does not take long in the story before God's people are enslaved in Egypt. They cry out, and He hears them, because He is still the God who walked with Adam and Eve and still wants to walk with His people. The plagues were not random displays of power. They were proof: I am the Creator God, and I hold authority over all of creation, including life and death.
When God gives the Ten Commandments at Sinai, the first line, in the order many Jewish readers use, is this: I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of slavery. God was telling His people He did not just want to be known as the One who made them. He wanted to be known as the One who steps into their most painful moments and walks them out.
Shortly after, in Exodus 34, God describes His own character: compassionate and gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love and truth. Ben pointed out that the Hebrew word often translated "faithfulness" more literally means truth, which can be uncomfortable, because it means God already knows the worst thing about you, the thing you are certain would make people walk away if they knew. And He still wants to step into it and walk you out.
Jesus, the New Exodus
That pattern reaches its clearest point at the Mount of Transfiguration. Jesus stands with Moses and Elijah while Peter, James, and John watch. Luke tells us what they were discussing: Jesus's coming exodus, the very word Luke uses, that He was about to accomplish in Jerusalem. As Moses led God's people out of slavery in Egypt, Jesus came to lead us out of slavery to sin. It is a new exodus.
Jesus told His disciples that unless a seed falls to the ground and dies, it remains only a seed. He was crucified on what Ben called a withered, dead tree, and the disciples scattered, certain it was over. But three days later, the tree of eternal life emerged from the ground where the seed had been planted. When the women find the empty tomb, they ask the man standing there if he is the gardener. He is. He planted the first garden, and He came back to bring His people into it again.
On the night He was betrayed, Jesus gathered His disciples and reminded them who He was: if you have seen me, you have seen the Father. He broke the bread and called it His body, given in love. He took the cup and called it His blood, poured out so that whoever drinks of the fruit of the tree of eternal life will have life. Do this, He said, and remember.
Taking It Into Tuesday
Ben closed with a caution worth carrying into this week. It is one thing to have a moment where you turn back to Jesus. It is another thing to actually live in relationship with Him. He compared it to trading in a car that will not start, smokes constantly, and dies in traffic, and then parking the new car in the garage while you keep driving the broken one out of habit. You cannot just ask Jesus to fix everything and keep living exactly as before. You have to actually step into the relationship you were created for.
Sit with these questions this week:
- Where have I pictured God as "me, but more," rather than as who He has actually revealed Himself to be?
- Is there a part of my story I assume God could not know and still want to walk with me through? What would it look like to believe He already knows and still stays?
- Where am I treating a moment of turning to Jesus as the finish line instead of the starting point of an actual relationship?
- What rule or boundary in my life have I been resenting instead of recognizing as protection for something I actually care about?
- What would it look like this week to let relationship, not rules, be the point?
Plan Your Visit
The story Ben told on Sunday ends at a table, with bread and a cup and the simple instruction to remember. Real Life on the Palouse practices communion together as a regular part of Sunday gatherings, a weekly chance to remember the same thing: God did not stay distant. He stepped into the world and pulled us out.
Join us this Sunday at 9:00 AM or 11:00 AM at the Eastside Marketplace in Moscow. Kids are cared for and taught at their own level through Lifer Kids, so the whole family can be part of the morning. Come as you are and see for yourself who this God really is.