Intimacy with God #3 – More details

This is a 3 part series

1. Intimacy with God
2. Intimacy with God #2 – You have to want it
3. Intimacy with God #3 – More details

I’ll try and structure that first post a bit more and fill in the blanks.

Here is the declining intimacy and experience of God that I see in the bible:

• Adam and Eve had great openness and intimacy with their creator – God. They talked freely and saw His full form. They fell and the separation begun.
• Initially He literally walked amongst us, then just a chapter later it says “He smelled the good fragrance and came down to us”. The separation was growing, now He was “coming down” to us.
• Enoch, Abraham and Moses walked with Him on occassion and Moses saw Him once as Moses was in a cleft of the rock, as God passed by.
• Then He was in the ark and we carried Him on our shoulders.
• Then He was in David’s tabernacle (tent). He was still amongst us, but no longer on our shoulders – no longer very very close. In many ways the tent was better and He expressed His preference for it.
• Then He was in a cedar building (up a hill away from us) and later in the bible He says He preferred David’s tabernacle (the tent) to the building up away from us.
• Then was up a mountain in the Sinai and it doesn’t say we had to stay away… but the people did stay away because it was frigtening.
• Then later He decreed that only some people could touch the mountain without being killed. The separation was growing.
• Then He was no longer on the mountain.
• Then His glory cloud (Shekinah) was over the temple (there were several of them).
• Eventually His glory cloud (Shekinah) left the temple and moved up onto the Mount of Olives.
• There is no further mention of where the Shekinah goes… but it’s no longer (visibly) on the Mt of Olives (well… I didn’t see it).

During all of this time God kept sending prophets to say to the people “come back to Me” and the prophets were scorned and rejected, over and over.

In that list of points I think I can see a clear declining intimacy between humanity and God. If it was a graph it would trend down and have a few spikes upward in it (like David’s tabernacle).

But there is hope

It is into this separation between us and God that Jesus came, to restore us to God. Let me add that as a bullet point so it looks like the ones above:

• God came in human form, grew like we do, learned like we do and had pain and suffering like we do… and we killed Him anyway

It’s interesting that in many steps of the change the people had said they didn’t want to be with Him. Check it for yourself. God was on the mountain in Sinai and the people said they didn’t want to come near to Him because they were scared… and then God says that we can’t come near the mountain. I’m not able to say if God moved away only because of sin, or if we pushed Him away – perhaps both.

Whatever the reason, we have constantly been losing intimacy with God, slowly but surely, over thousands of years.

Jesus came to make the way clear

Yes He says He did… and He did. But as the saying goes, you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. Jesus has cleared the way for us to re-approach our God, but we have to want to do it and we have to try and do it. Let me encourage you again… Jesus made a way to go back into the Holy of Holies. He made a way for us to go boldly before our Father.

How?

That’s the big question. How. He said the way is… through Him. We have to be reborn. Paul says the same thing and Paul obviously did it, he has great evidence and stories in his life.

Almost everyone who reads that we can go before our Father in heaven through the body of Jesus will probably have no idea HOW to do it and I don’t think many of us have done it.

These words are exciting and give us hope… but they are also confusing. I hope the desire to have intimacy with God causes you to begin praying that God will reveal HOW to go before Him. It’s not immediately apparent. Please consider reading these two posts: Want and ask and ASK for revelation to find out more about how to find the revelation about returning into intimacy with Him.