God with you

Just for kicks sometime, read through the New Testament and every time Jesus says “I am” read “God.”

After all, that is God’s name, YHWH, I am who I am, I am (Exodus 3:14).

God the bread of life; God the light of the world; God the alpha and the omega; before Abraham, God.

And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age. Matthew 28:20

We are not alone. We never have been. Not as a people, not as a race, not as a generation, not as an individual. Recognize it or not, admit it or not, God is.

I have been physically alone more these past three years than I have ever been. A little quiet alone time was always something I treasured when people crowded my life. But after Nick’s death, and with Covid, that quiet aloneness was sometimes overwhelming. But I was never really alone. God was with me. God is with me.

It seems a little haughty somehow to claim that God is with me, but that is exactly what He promised; not just that He is with me, but that He is with us. Not because we are worthy of His presence, but because He desires to be with us.

Sometimes, when I am frustrated that people can choose not to believe in God, I wish He would do some mighty act that would prove His existence. But He has. He had done many mighty acts, and people still deny Him. We may wonder how the crowd from Exodus could deny God while still receiving manna, but are we much better? Did raising Lazarus from the dead bring religious leaders to their senses? Did Jesus’ resurrection? Perhaps it is not the mighty acts that prove God’s existence, but the smallest incidents of individuals feeling His presence.

The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed that someone took and sowed in a field. It is the smallest of all the seeds, but when it has grown, it is the greatest of shrubs and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and make nests in its branches, Matthew 13:31-32

So that smallest of things, you and me knowing that He is, could be just the thing that brings in His kingdom. Yahweh. Just saying it aloud causes us to breathe in and out, causes us to breathe, which gives us life. It seems a little thing, but it is not. Because He is with us. And His presence in a place makes that place a temple. Like Marine One, which is not a specific helicopter, but whatever helicopter the president is on, so the temple is not a specific place, but the place where God is. And if God is with us, then we are His temple.

Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you? If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy that person. For God’s temple is holy, and you are that temple. I Corinthians 3:16-17

I feel woefully inadequate to the task, the littlest of seeds. But of course, it is not the beauty of the building that makes a place a temple; it is God. So my “job,” if you will, is to acknowledge God’s presence. God is, and God is with us, YHWH, Emmanuel.

The glory that you have given me, I have given them, so that they may be one as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may become completely one, so that the world may know that you have sent me and have loved them even as you have loved me. John 17:22-23

I am, with you. God is, with us.

Betsy