Last time we looked together at the temple. Even when Solomon built the temple he said this.

But will God indeed dwell on the earth? Behold, heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you; how much less this house that I have built! 1 Kings 8:27

God cannot be contained in a temple, in fact he cannot be contained at all. He won’t be contained by our intellect and understanding. Remember this famous quote.

Aslan is a lion- the Lion, the great Lion.” “Ooh” said Susan. “I’d thought he was a man. Is he-quite safe? I shall feel rather nervous about meeting a lion”…”Safe?” said Mr Beaver …”Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”
C.S. Lewis, The Lion , the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Let’s not restrict God to our thinking,  our understanding of theology, our ways or our preferences. He is God!

Our God is in the heavens; he does all that he pleases. Psalm 115:3

I was listening recently to an explanation of how there were not as many miracles in the bible as you might think! We can rationalise so much. Every inch of the bible points to a God who does things continuously other worldly. For 40 years, every day the children of Israel woke up to supernatural food, they wore supernatural clothes and shoes, they were guided every day and night by supernatural means. They breathed air provided supernaturally and walked on an earth supernaturally made.

Please let’s never put God in a box and lower him to something like us, he is not like us He is utterly other.

We are in 2 Samuel 7 and through the prophet Nathan God speaks to David.

Now, therefore, thus you shall say to my servant David, ‘Thus says the LORD of hosts, I took you from the pasture, from following the sheep, that you should be prince over my people Israel. And I have been with you wherever you went and have cut off all your enemies from before you. And I will make for you a great name, like the name of the great ones of the earth. 2 Samuel 7:8-9

God had chosen David and everyone of God’s people is ‘elect.’ God has chosen us, taken us out of where we were in the kingdom of darkness and placed us into his glorious Kingdom of light.

Jesus said, “You did not choose me, but I chose you” John 15:16

There was something much deeper going on here than the choosing of the twelve.

If you have come to Jesus, the wonder is that you already belonged to the Father, and the Father gave you to Jesus. You were not chosen because you came; you came because you were chosen. That’s what Jesus said: “All that the Father gives me will come to me. . . . Yours they were, and you gave them to me” John 6:37 and 17:6.

Revel in the wonder that you are a Christian because God chose you to be one. Your roots, as a child of God, are in eternity — in the infinite mind and heart of God. Your faith, and all its fruits are God’s eternal gift.

Hallelujah! Paul says that God chose us according to the riches of his grace (Ephesians 1:7).

Take God’s Old Testament people Israel, for example. Why did God set his favour on Israel above all the peoples of the earth? What was the basis of God calling them “my chosen?” (Isaiah 45:4)

This is what Moses says,

The Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth. It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the Lord set his love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples, but it is because the Lord loves you and is keeping the oath that he swore to your fathers. Deuteronomy 7:6-8

This is amazing: “The Lord set his love on you and chose you . . . because the Lord loves you.” He loves you because he loves you! That’s the deepest, and ultimate, basis of God’s choosing Israel.

Paul underlines the wonder. Why was Jacob the father of the nation of Israel, chosen over his twin brother Esau? Paul answers, “Though they were not yet born, and had done nothing either good or bad — in order that God’s purpose to choose might continue, not because of works but because of him who calls — their mother was told, ‘The older will serve the younger” Romans 9:11-12

So, behind our believing, behind our coming to Jesus, behind our responding is a work and that work is that our salvation came though grace alone. There are no grounds for our being chosen apart from the all-wise and incomprehensible love of God. Maybe our appropriate response is this.

Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! Romans 11:33

As I write this there is much in our media about race and racism.

It is a wonder that in God choosing a people for himself, he nullified the promotion or oppression of all races, tribes, backgrounds and ethnicities. “You are a chosen race…a holy nation” says Peter. A chosen race is not black or white, it’s not brown or yellow, it’s not marked by your history or your current situation. It’s nothing to do with the nation you live in or the nation your government is opposed to, it has nothing to do with religion, culture or borders. 

The chosen race are people who are “born again to a living hope”  (1 Peter 1:3)

Their new identifying DNA is from the Holy Spirit. Race and ethnicity are not unimportant in our common cultural life but they are not what unites us to God or to each other in Christ. We are a new creation, a new humanity. Peter even says, a new race! A “chosen race.” A race taken from all races.

God chose us freely without respect to race to be in this new race. Then he sent his Son to purchase us from all the ethnic groups of the world: “You were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation” (Revelation 5:9)

In this way, he nullified all racism. For he bound together every race and every ethnicity into one new family with one glorious Father, and he did this in eternity when he chose to make a people from every race into one new race.

It’s time to revel in our choseness and to wonder at the variety of God’s choice, and if you can’t, then learn who you are and who others are. Learn what it means to be a “chosen race.”

For he himself is our peace, who has made us both one and has broken down in his flesh the dividing wall of hostility by abolishing the law of commandments expressed in ordinances, that he might create in himself one new man in place of the two, so making peace, and might reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross, thereby killing the hostility.  Ephesians 2:14-16