Home with God

This article is excerpted from Home with God: Our Union with Christ.

Home with God

It’s easy to forget the original audience of Genesis 1–2 is a homeless people. Having been rescued by God from hundreds of years under the tyranny of Pharaoh, Israel is gathered around Mount Sinai. Tents and plunder from the Egyptians were better than making bricks for Pharoah’s buildings, but I don’t think any of them would have turned to their neighbor and said “home is where the heart is.” They longed for a home they had forgotten.

In Genesis 1–2, God reminds His newly rescued people: you were created to live in My presence. Deep within all image-bearers of God is a faint remembrance: We once walked with God in Eden’s abundance. Lurking beneath all desires and duties, beneath all stories, beneath all songs, every hand held, every kiss given, every satisfying sip, beautiful bite, and beauty beheld there is a whisper of a desire for a home for which we have always longed. If you scratch beneath the surface of any longing, you will find a deep desire to be at home with God. As the writer of Ecclesiastes says, God “has put eternity into man’s heart” (3:11).

We were created for home with God, not because God was lonely or bored, but because of the delighting love of God. And this is important to remember about creation: God didn’t create out of mercy, God didn’t create out of pity, God didn’t create out of forgiveness. God created the world out of delighting love.

When we consider the love of God, we often think of it primarily in terms of forgiving love. Grace is often considered to be less than what it is. Don’t get me wrong, God’s forgiveness is rooted in God’s love. Forgiveness is a gracious gift from God. I don’t want you to minimize His gracious forgiving love, for we are sinners in need of forgiveness. But this wasn’t where we started. We are not creatures made of forgiving love; we are creatures made by delighting love who are in need of forgiving love that we may once again enjoy the delight of fellowship with God.

The garden home was not supposed to come to an end. Eden, as a temple home with God in delighting love, was meant to be stretched over the whole world. Adam and Eve were called to multiply, cultivate, and subdue in the presence of God. The last day of creation was to be an unending Sabbath, an unending seventh day marked by God’s people living their whole lives in His presence to reflect His purposes in His place.

But by the time the words of Genesis are heard by an audience, something has gone terribly wrong. The garden home has been lost. How did we get here? And how do we get back home with God?

Beloved Before the Beginning

Before we were created, we were chosen. We were beloved before the beginning. How do we know this and why does it matter? In Romans 8:29–30 we hear,

This echoes in Ephesians 1 where we are told God “blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing . . . even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world” (vv. 3–4).

Before there was anything, before there was a garden home, before there was a world at all: God’s people were destined to live at home with God in Christ Jesus forever. Before our fellowship with God was ever experienced or disrupted, we were already chosen for union with Christ. We were beloved before the beginning.

The very same God who eternally enjoyed delighting love in Himself, who created all that is out of the overflow of this trinitarian delight, made a covenant for the salvation of His people. Theologians call this the pactum salutis. The fancy Latin phrase means “agreement of salvation.” We use it to describe God’s eternal plan to save His people. It is the first covenant, and it stands as the foundation for all the covenants we read in Scripture. This “agreement of salvation,” like all covenant promises, finds its perfect fulfillment in Christ Jesus. As the apostle Paul writes in 2 Corinthians 1:20: “All the promises of God find their Yes in him.”

I am an organized guy. When I travel, I have backup plan after backup plan. If I am hopping on a flight, I don’t only bring my driver’s license, I bring my passport. I make multiple dinner reservations for each night of a vacation, at different times, in case we miss the first one. But it is crucially important to understand this: living in covenant love with God was never a “backup plan.” Before there was a problem that needed fixing for humanity, there was a promise for the future of God’s people: we would dwell with God in Christ forever.