What It is All About

And he said, “My presence will go with you, and I will give you rest.”

And he said to him, “If your presence will not go with me, do not bring us up from here. For how shall it be known that I have found favor in your sight, I and your people? Is it not in your going with us, so that we are distinct, I and your people, from every other people on the face of the earth?” Exodus 33:14-16 ESV

What is salvation, biblically speaking?  What does it mean to be saved? Or lost?  The longer I study the Bible the more I am convinced that the Bible and the cross and salvation are all about the presence of God. To understand that we have to go back to the very beginning, to the garden of Eden. What made the experience of Adam and Eve in the garden an experience of bliss? It was the presence of God.  What was special about the “cool of the evening?” It was about their Father coming.  He had made them for fellowship with Him and He must have had tears running down His face as He watched them leave the Garden when sin entered their lives.

The rest of the entire Bible is about God beating Satan and coming home. That’s what it’s about—God wanting to share His presence with us.  God wasn’t content to just live with His people, He wanted to live in them. God’ people are His temple. From the beginning He has intended to return to that kind of fellowship which Adam and Eve knew in the garden.  That’s why Jesus came to die on the cross—so that He could live within us. He died to save us from our sins, but it doesn’t stop there, it begins there. He came in order that the presence of God might be real in your life and in mine. He came to share the glory of God.  “Christ in you, the hope of glory.”

If God is not present in your life and mine in a real sense, then we have missed what it’s all about. We have missed those centuries of patriarchs and prophets and apostles. We’ve missed it. What it was all about was that God could come home. Is He at home in your life? Or do you just know the doctrine and not the reality?  The greatest blessing of being a Christian is to be able to experience the presence of God in your life. Don’t miss it.