Hide & Seek
History is a love story, a story of unrequited love. It’s a story of sabotage, theft and rebellion. It’s all of these, but it’s also a story of hide and seek.
The story begins with God creating the world and everything in it, and humans are the creatures that God has fellowship with, an interactive personal relationship. When that relationship is sabotaged, God comes looking for Adam, and Adam is hiding from God.
Adam has rebelled against God, he knows it, and he hides from God. The hide and seek has begun.
“God called to the man and said to him, ‘Where are you?’ ” That’s the first time we read about God calling people, and all the way through history God has been calling people. But all the way through history, most people have kept hiding from God and from truth itself, “suppressing the truth in unrighteousness”.
But some seek him. It’s like they hear God’s patient and persistent call to come to him, and they come out of hiding to find the one whose voice they hear.
Hundreds of years before Christ, God said through his prophet Isaiah,
"Seek the Lord while he may be found;
call upon him while he is near;
the wicked should abandon his way,
and the unrighteous man his thoughts;
let him return to the Lord,
that he may have compassion on him,
and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.”
It’s pretty hard to look for someone you can’t see. God is spirit, but he still calls us to seek him, and he promises to reward those who earnestly seek him.
To make it so much easier to find him, God did something which astonished everyone: he showed up in person, in human form. He came seeking us personally. Jesus Christ said he came to seek and to save the lost, and he called people to himself, like a shepherd calling his stray sheep. He made it clear that God wants us to seek him, he wants to be found, and he wants to abundantly reward those who come looking for him.
“I have come so that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” “If anyone thirsts, let him come to me and drink,” he said. “Come to me, all you who labour and are burdened, and I will give you rest”. The good news that Jesus announced and sent out with his apostles is that God is calling an estranged humanity to stop hiding and come and find him. And Jesus showed us how good it is to find God through him.
One of God's ambassadors said that God made humans “so that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us”.
Yes, we have sinned. We’ve rebelled against God, but God has made a way to be reconciled. “Draw near to God and he will draw near to you.”
Enough of the hiding.
Seek and you shall find.
Scriptures quoted:
Genesis 3:9; Romans 1:18; Isaiah 55:6-7;
Hebrews 11:6; Luke 19:10; John 10:10; 7:37;
Matthew 11:28; Acts 17:27; James 4:8
