The People of God, Pt. 1

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Something happens the moment you put on a uniform or stand under a flag. You’re no longer just representing yourself. You are part of a people. That sense of belonging shapes how you think and how you act. Pastor Nick Gatzke traces the origins of a group who are identified as The People of God.

What makes the Olympics truly unique, what makes the Olympics ultimately interesting is that each athlete that is coming to participate is representing his or her people.

And being part of a people is more than just meaningful.

Being part of a people is something that in many ways shapes your identity and shapes who you become. And every Olympic Games, as we watch people who stand on the platform with great delight or cross the finish line with incredible disappointment, we recognize that they feel that not just for themselves, but for their people.

And it reminds us that we too are part of a people. This morning we continue our series which we are calling From Old to New to You. This is a series in biblical theology.

Biblical theology is the term that’s used that talks about tracing the threads of the themes of God all the way from the Old Testament from the beginning all the way through the end.

Think about the thread that is woven through the tapestry of Scripture from left to right or top to bottom. We’re looking at important aspects about who God is and how he interacts with us in the Old Testament, in the New Testament, and what it means for you today. And on this day, we are looking at the theme of the people of God.

God makes a people. For himself. Not only did God create all of humanity, but within all of humanity who are created in his image, he creates for himself a unique, specific people with an identity and an eternal purpose.

And if you are here today and you call Jesus your Savior and you’ve trusted him to forgive you of your sins, then the story of the people of God from beginning to end is also part of your story.

And so this morning I want to ask you to come along on the story of the people of God with me.

And just so you understand where we’re going from old to new to you, To tell this story of the people of God, we necessarily have to lay some pretty substantial groundwork through the Old Testament. But if you hang with it, the payoff is coming because what it means for you, because this is part of your story, is not only incredibly encouraging, but it will alter your perspective on your life and your spirituality.

In Abraham, God makes a covenant. And he says in Genesis chapter 17, verses 7 and 8, “I will establish my covenant between me and you, your offspring after you throughout their generations, for an everlasting covenant, to be God to you and to your offspring after you. And I will give to you and to your offspring after you the land of your sojournings, all of the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession. And I will be their God.”

God’s covenant with Abraham has at least three components to it. The first one is that he would bless Abraham and make him into a great nation. He would form out of the seed of Abraham a people.

Secondly, he would give this people a land, the land of Canaan. And thirdly, and most importantly, that he would be their God. And they would be his people.

God was not forming in Abraham just any people. He was forming his people.

He was forming his people unto himself. Now Abraham followed God in faith. and he had a son named Isaac. And Isaac followed God in faith, and he had a son named Jacob.

And Jacob was renamed Israel, and his 12 sons became the 12 tribes of Israel.

These were God’s people. And over the next 400 or 500 years, his people Israel would indeed grow from a small group of people, one family, into a good-sized nation.

This people would be enslaved in Egypt, but God would not forget his people nor the promises that he made to them. Instead, he delivered them, and he did so by raising up another man named Moses, a prophet who would deliver 10 plagues upon the nation of Egypt as judgment upon them. and deliverance for God’s people. And those plagues would culminate in God sending the angel of death to visit the firstborn of everyone in the nation except for the people of God who had faith and painted their doorposts with the blood of the lamb. They were passed over.

Time would continue. And by the time God’s people left Egypt, Exodus chapter 12, 37 says there were 600,000 men along with women and children.

God’s people now numbered over 2 million. And from there, They were led through the wilderness by God with a cloud of smoke during the day and a pillar of fire by night. They were given the law through the prophet Moses.

God dwelt among them in the tabernacle, and they eventually made it to the land in which he had promised them. Time would continue, and Israel would have seasons of… and faithfulness to God and seasons of rebellion against God. God was to be their father and their king. They were his people. And yet Israel wanted to be like the other nations and establish their own king. And they did just that. A temple would ultimately be built in which God would dwell among them for the sake of his presence in their midst and their worship to him.

But eventually the people would rebel again. God would discipline them and send them into captivity. And after years of apathy or rebellion against God, they would again repent, turn back to God. He would bless them, restore them, and establish them once more. Israel would eventually split into two kingdoms.

The northern kingdom of Israel, the southern kingdom of Judah. But the cycle would continue.

Seasons of faithfulness to God and thus blessing as a result and seasons of unfaithfulness to God and hence judgment and discipline as a result. But God, even though his people went through seasons where they turned away from him, God never turned away from them. He did not forget his promises.

They were his people, and he was jealous after them. Now, if your bride starts to show attention to another man, you become jealous. If your children start to call another man their father, You become jealous. And so it is with God and his people. God had formed these people. He had loved these people. He had blessed these people.

He had delivered these people. They would not be let go by God. He would not go back on his promises to them. God was jealous of them. They were his people. And eventually, God would send a savior for these people. that would restore them to him forever.

As you look at the Old Testament people of God, there are some key components that made these people his people. And here are just a few of them. The first one is that these people were chosen by God. Deuteronomy 7, verse 6 says, “For you are a holy people to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for his own possession out of all of the peoples who are on the face of the earth.” Now this is important because it shows that no amount of effort, status, or initiative is enough to bring someone into the people of God.

These people didn’t choose God. God chose them. Another key component of these people is that they were not only chosen by God, they were redeemed by God. Isaiah chapter 43, verse 1, the prophet writes, “Thus says the Lord, your creator, O Jacob, and he who formed you, O Israel, do not fear, for I have redeemed you. I have called you by name. You are mine.”

God not only redeemed these people, but he redeemed them, and he has a specific purpose for them. The purpose of God’s people is twofold, and it’s found throughout the Old Testament, but notably in Isaiah 49, 3, and Isaiah 60, verses 1 through 3. Isaiah 49 says, ““And he said to me, you are my servant Israel, in whom I will be glorified.””

God will be glorified, that’s the purpose. Isaiah chapter 60 says, “Arise and shine, for your light has come, and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you. For behold, darkness shall cover the earth, a thick darkness, the darkness of the peoples, but the Lord will arise upon you, and his glory will be seen upon you. And the nations shall come to your light, and kings to the brightness of your rising.” God’s purpose in having a people was that, yes, to bless those specific people, to bestow his favor upon them. But even more than that, God’s purpose of having a people was to display his glory to the rest of the world in them.

Let me say it again. God had a purpose for these people. It was to bless them. But his greater purpose was to display his glory in the world through them.

And that’s really important to understand because once you understand that interaction of God and his people and his purpose for them, now you can understand the arc of the Old Testament and its framework as God interacts with them in love, in blessing, in discipline and judgment. God makes his glory known through these people. And it also gives you the requisite understanding, the foundation for how he interacts with people in the New Testament as well. And so pause with me for a minute. Pause in the story and think about where we’ve been over the last couple of weeks and how all of these things start to relate together. Because the threads to the tapestry of the story of God are all interconnected. as you might imagine, in many ways comes together in this idea that God has a people for himself that he has formed. We saw that God makes promises and covenants as the framework for how he relates to people and specifically to his people.

And the culmination of those covenants is found in the phrase, “I will be your God and you will be my people.” And it was faith that led those people to obey the stipulations of those covenants with God, and it was a lack of faith that led them to disobey their part of the covenants with God. The new covenant in the Lord Jesus Christ culminates to the promise of God of how he would relate to his people through faith and forgiveness forever. The next week we saw how God established priests in the tabernacle and ultimately the temple as the mechanism by which a holy and just God could relate to a sinful people. The people needed a mediator between them and God.

And the priests served as that mediator. They desired for God to dwell among them, and the tabernacle and ultimately the temple served as that dwelling place. But we also saw that the ultimate mediator between God and humans is the Lord Jesus Christ, that he is the one through his work on the cross serves to mediate the relationship between sinful me and holy God and restore me to him forever through faith. And then we saw how God sends his Holy Spirit in the Old Testament to empower servants of God to do certain things by coming upon them.

And in the New Testament, by working in their hearts to show them their need for a Savior, to give them the gift of faith, and then ultimately to empower them for a life of faithfulness to God by taking up residence inside of those who call Jesus their Lord.

God would not only dwell among his people, God would dwell in his people. And when you stop and try to consider the magnitude of a promise and a gift like that, that the holy God of the universe would not create a people and stand all the way back here and watch, would not create a people and even stand and draw near and listen, but that God would take up residence in the lives of his people is absolutely amazing.

And so, Christian, your body is called the temple, the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit. And the church is called the temple, the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit. And God doesn’t do these things for every person throughout all of history.

He doesn’t. He does these things for specific people. And it points to the fact that he chose, he established, he redeemed his people, the people of God. And you might have noticed the key thread through many of his people, that God works and people respond. And the way that people respond is in faith.

Yes, in the Old Testament, the people of God, the Jewish nation, were marked by an ethnic identity. However, the marker of the people of God throughout the entire Old Testament was faith. It was faith that allowed Abraham to have righteousness credited to him. It was faith that compelled Jacob to honor the crooked agreement of his father-in-law. It was faith that God would work things out that empowered Joseph to endure false imprisonment and as a result be in a position to provide for his kin. It was the faith of Moses who did not want to speak to go into Egypt and speak. It was the faith of David and Solomon and the prophets that allowed them to experience the power and the blessing of God and allowed the people of God to experience that same power and blessing. It was faith. Faith was the marker all along of the people of God. They trusted him for what they needed. They did not see the whole picture clearly when they were imprisoned in Egypt or when they were in the wilderness or even when they were in the promised land or even when the kingdoms divided or when they were in exile. But faith, a faithful remnant of people was preserved to trust God, even though they didn’t see their life clearly.

Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “you don’t have to see the whole staircase, you just take the first step.” That’s faith. J. Gresham Machen once said that “the more we know of God, the more unreservedly we will trust him. The greater our progress in theology, the simpler and more childlike will be our faith.”

So after 400 years of the story of faith and faithlessness and faithfulness and struggle and blessing, God sends his son, Jesus, to be born of the people of God, to be born of the Jews, in line with the new covenant of Jeremiah 31, to provide for his people again and to provide for them in such a way that the People of God would expand exponentially because they would not be marked externally now by their ethnic identity.

They’d be marked externally by the same way they’re marked internally. Faith.

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This transcript was generated using AI transcription technology and reviewed for accuracy, but may contain errors. Please refer to the original audio for precise wording.