Dwelling Place
Louise Duval
MA, LPC, LAC, CAC
8/5/2022
My daughter was in a ballet back in June, and it got me thinking about what a loving and wonderful God we have. The ballet was called The Dwelling Place and it was a visual demonstration of how God from the beginning of time has reached out to us and desires to dwell with us despite how sinful we are. In the beginning, God made a beautiful, perfect world from nothing and then knowing humans would sin, He created us anyway because He wanted to have a relationship with us. Before sin, the relationship between humans and the triune God was perfect. God the Father, Jesus the Son, and the Holy Spirit were in a perfect relationship with Adam and Eve. However, when Adam and Eve sinned, the perfect relationship was broken, but it was so important to God that He have that relationship with us, He made a plan to get us back! The Bible is constantly pointing forward to when He would send His son Jesus to earth as a man. Throughout the Old Testament, God reaches out to His children drawing them back to Him, He gave his people rules to live by because since He is the creator, he knows the best way to live life, but God’s people chose to disobey. God continues to reach out to His people and instructs His people to construct a tabernacle and then a temple where He dwells with His people. However, the relationship with them is never perfect because of sin. God’s plan to fix that comes when He gives His people the ultimate gift of sending His perfect Son, Jesus to earth. Jesus, the Son, dwelled here with us and showed God's love through his teaching and His miracles. Then, He gave His life to pay for our sin so that we would be able to have a relationship with God. When we choose to accept that relationship and His forgiveness, He makes His dwelling place in us. At that time, God’s Holy Spirit lives in us to guide us, love us, and help us live this life. Once he comes to live in us, He wants to use us to reach as many others as possible so He can dwell with them as well until we experience the ultimate gift of spending eternity dwelling with Him.
God loves us so much that He used His whole self, the full trinity to reach us and make it possible for us to dwell with Him forever. The full trinity dwelt perfectly with His people before sin. God reached out to us throughout history despite our sin. God the Father dwelt among the people in the tabernacle and temple, Jesus came to dwell with us on Earth to make a way to fix the relationship we destroyed with sin, and once we accept that gift, the Holy Spirit dwells in us while we live on earth, until ultimately we go to be with God forever, perfectly dwelling with the trinity as it was in the beginning.
We get a glimpse of what our final dwelling place will be like in Revelation 22:1-5. In a world with so much pain, sin, and hurt, we can find comfort in knowing that the God who created everything is going through this life with us and at the end of time we will see God face to face and our forever dwelling place will be with our creator who loves us more than we can ever imagine!