Part 1 of series: That I Will Be Their God and They Will Be My People

God gave us answers in His Scriptures to our questions, “Why did God make us?” and “Why did God save us?”  And from the beginning to the end of the Scriptures He tells us:

And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God.

Revelations 21:3

This is a deep and beautiful thing that is beyond our understanding but still God took thousands of years, hundreds of authors and dozens of word pictures to describe it to us and to show us the lengths He has gone to secure it. One of the many analogies we find in Scripture has to do with fruit.

Unfortunately for us, when we see these word pictures in Scripture, we filter them through an unbidden belief that God thinks about fruit the same way we do, we don’t look critically at the text, and we come to wrong conclusions. We incorrectly think that God made us so that we would be beautiful and perfect and produce lots of good fruit. We assume that when we sinned and began producing bad fruit, God saved us so that we could get back to producing good fruit. We filter everything God has said and done thru the lens that God thinks of and values fruit the same way that we think of and value fruit.

A farmer’s view of fruit

You would agree that usually, when we plant fruit trees, our goal is bountiful fruitful trees, our goal is the cider, the pies and crisps, the apple butter and applesauce, and a well stocked pantry. Having and obtaining the fruit itself is our goal. If we have a tree that produces bad fruit we seek to restore the health of the tree so that we can get the tree back to producing lots of good fruit. If by some magic, a sick and rotting tree still produced copious amounts of healthy fruit that was good for eating, we’d thank our lucky stars and not bother to restore health to the tree because it was already giving us plenty of what we wanted. Our goal was met in spite of the poor health of the tree. When your end goal is to have fruit, you will approach everything about the plant with that in mind, this goal shapes how you tend and nurture the tree. Since we approach fruit more from the perspective of a farmer, who’s end goal is a bountiful harvest, we see mention of fruit in God’s Word from that perspective.

And if we’re honest, we have to admit, that no matter what God says about it, we do just like fruit. We are all pretty obsessed with fruit. We like having fruit, we like people who have fruit. We like real fruit, we like fake fruit, we like anything that resembles fruit. We categorize fruit, we like to assign values to different kinds of fruit. We like to think we can evaluate the quantity and quality of everyone’s fruit and make declarations about their core. At the end of the day, an unbeliever with something that looks like fruit is more pleasant to us than a saint who doesn’t appear to be bearing fruit at all.

A gardener’s view of fruit

In our own obsession over fruit, we overlook the Scriptures and forget many things that we know to be true about God’s character and intentions.

While we’re busy counting, categorizing and weighing fruit, we seem to have forgotten that no where in Scriptures does God tell us that we have been given discernment about the fruit that He bears in His children. We forget the plain fact that, to us, an un-believer’s fruit can look more like what we think “real fruit” looks like, than the “real fruit” of a saint. We have not been given insight to make these distinctions.

And we totally fail to see that God has never been all about the fruit. We must remember that God looks at fruit from the perspective of a gardener. A gardener plants things for the sake of having a garden. A gardener delights in being surrounded by plants, in tending to plants, in nurturing daily their little lives. A gardener values the fruit more because it is an evidence of the overall health of the plant than for the value of having the fruit itself. A gardener sees bad fruit as one of a variety of signs that the plant itself is in poor shape and that the plant itself needs tending and healing. 

Where we may see something that looks an awful lot like beautiful healthy fruit, God can see and will judge the dead evil hearts of the unbelievers. And where we think we see withered vines and dried up grapes, God sees His precious and redeemed Beloved, complete and totally alive in Christ.

We see this clearly in Jesus’s teachings and in old testament descriptions of our dead hearts and our evil ways. He speaks that it’s not just in our actions – to murder a brother – that is the sin, but even having hate in one’s heart is a sin. If we think of a fruit tree, the rotted fruit is proof of decaying branch which is proof of a dead core. Murder is proof of hate which is evidence of the twisted evil and dead soul of the man who has not the right heart position up to his Creator as God. We, on the other hand, get caught up in the murder, we get caught up in the hate, and we forget about the position of our hearts up to the Creator as God. We celebrate when we restrain the murder, we suppose that we can reteach ourselves not to hate by somehow wielding the power of Christ living in us, but still we forget about the position of our hearts up to our Creator as God. 

In the same vein, to compound our error, our tendency to think of sins as a plural thing and when we do that we go all sorts of wrong by trying to weigh and count sins. We picture God counting up all the things we’ve ever done that were wrong. We weigh hate as a sin that is only so big, but hate plus murder is two sins and murder is bigger and weightier. We picture Christ hanging on the cross for each sin as though they were piled on Him in a heap. And we teach our children that sin is everything we “think, say and do that is wrong before God” as though we are neutral and our thoughts and actions are the problem tainting our insides over time and with exposure. But I can’t find that God says these things, rather He uses things we think, say, and do to reveal to us the fact that we ourselves are the problem because we ourselves are dead, rotten and decaying. It is the heart that is not positioned up to its Creator as God that is the problem. In our own flawed terms we could say that this incorrect heart positioning it is the One sin, the only sin, the biggest and most offensive sin. 

God wants us, not our fruit

God has created and sustains many trees that are dead and rotting trees that produce good fruit. They love and care for people with more selflessness than a thousand Christians. But still, in their core, they are dead and rotting and decaying. Their heart position is not up to their Creator as God. They are not His people, and He is not their God. In the day of judgement, God will look to their core and see that they are not alive in Christ and they will receive judgement.

So too, God has many trees to whom He’s given life through Jesus Christ, who don’t appear to have much fruit, but they are most precious to Him, bought with His own blood and they are His delight. He is their God and they are His precious people. In the day of judgement, God will look to their core and see that He has made them alive in Christ and they will receive blessing, reward, and inheritance.

We are His people, and He is our God

All of us who have been washed in the blood of Christ and clothed in His righteousness have had our dead stone hearts removed and given new hearts of flesh which are positioned up toward our Creator as God. We ARE God’s people, and He IS our God. And we who are redeemed are more than even Adam and Eve were in perfection in the Garden of Eden, for we have been adopted and are now God’s own beloved dear Children. Our purpose, the reason for which we were created, is now fulfilled in Christ. In every breath we take, we are IN CHRIST and fully completely pleasing to God, and when we die we will be raised with Christ and get to experience our purpose in fullness and perfection. 

These thoughts spark my imagination. In my mind I picture the Garden of Eden. They had someone who was in charge and responsible. They had everything they needed to live. They had jobs to keep them busy, pleasures to delight them, purpose and play in proper amounts. They didn’t have to decide and be the final authority. And their very Creator walked alongside them through life, engaging and participating with them, enjoying them. And they enjoyed Him.

He created then He redeemed, for His own enjoyment, a beautiful garden over which He is the kind gardener. Though we know this is true now, we only can see and enjoy a small token of its fullness but one day we will get to enjoy God as our God, with perfect heart positions that can love and adore and submit and obey and enjoy Him as our God and Father, in blessed peace and rest.

Rest today, for He IS your God and you ARE His beloved redeemed child. God’s purpose for your creation has been completed by Jesus Christ.

And God says that the best is still yet to come.