The Old Testament as the unfolding purpose of humanity becoming God in life and nature, but not in the Godhead
In this essay
- The Purpose Beneath Everything
- Before Religion, There Was Something to Eat
- The Other Tree and the Wrong Kind of Godlikeness
- Babel Builds; Abraham Leaves
- The Gift Must Yield, and the Strong Man Must Limp
- Brought Out to Be Brought to God
- The Lamb, the Bread, and the Water
- He Is Your Life
- A Dwelling, Not Merely a Building
- When the Glory Leaves
- The Heart God Must Make New
- We Have Left the Fountain
- Come Without Your Accomplishments
- They Shall All Know Me
- My Spirit Within You
- Organization Cannot Breathe
- The Life Must Be Allowed to Flow
- Let Everything Else Take Its Place
1. The Purpose Beneath Everything
I want to begin with what I believe we have spent centuries making secondary. God intends to give Himself to man. He intends that His life would become our life, that His nature would find expression in our humanity, and that we would live from Him. This is the purpose I see gathering the whole Old Testament into one story.
We have made so much of the things surrounding that purpose. We have built systems around the commandments, the sacrifices, the temple, the promises, and the history. We have become experts in explaining what God has done. But the question beneath all of it remains: have we received the life He intends to give?
I am speaking of man becoming God in life and nature, but not in the Godhead. We never become the self-existent Creator, the source of deity, or objects of worship. We participate in what belongs to Him. His love becomes more than a command we struggle to imitate. His holiness becomes more than an accusation against our failure. His life becomes the source of our living.
That is what I mean by Zoe. I am using the word for the divine life received and lived in us.
I read the Old Testament through Christ, its fulfillment. Its images point forward; its promises become increasingly direct. The tree offers life. The wilderness teaches dependence. The sanctuary declares God’s desire to dwell among His people. Finally, God promises His Spirit within them.
We should allow that movement to determine what matters. God is bringing humanity into participation in Himself. Everything He gives must serve that purpose. Nothing He gives is entitled to replace Him.
2. Before Religion, There Was Something to Eat
Before there was a priesthood, there was a tree. Before there was a temple, there was something to eat. God placed the tree of life in the garden before humanity fell, before a sacrifice was required, and before anyone had constructed a religious explanation of the human problem (Genesis 2:9, 16–17).
That order matters. God’s purpose did not begin with correcting sinners. Life was already there in His original provision. Genesis later connects eating from this tree with living forever (Genesis 3:22–24). The question of life belongs to the beginning.
Genesis does not call the tree Christ. I see its meaning through the completed scriptural picture, where the tree of life appears again in the city of God (Revelation 22:1–2). Read through Christ, the tree becomes a picture of the life God intends humanity to receive.
And the appointed action is wonderfully simple: eating. Food enters us. It becomes our inward supply. We can admire food, describe it, defend its value, and teach a class about it without being nourished. Its purpose is fulfilled when we take it in.
I think this exposes much of what we call spiritual knowledge. We can become thoroughly familiar with the language of life while continuing to live from anxiety, ambition, and the need to establish ourselves. We can speak about Christ without allowing Him to become the source of our speaking.
The tree stands against that confusion. God did not place life before humanity merely to become a subject of study. He provided something to receive.
The question is personal: what am I taking into myself? What is actually supplying the life I am living?
3. The Other Tree and the Wrong Kind of Godlikeness
The serpent promises a kind of godlikeness in Genesis 3:5. Humanity is invited to take for itself what God has forbidden and to regard His word as an obstacle to its advancement. The temptation reaches beyond a piece of fruit. It invites the human creature to become its own deciding center.
Here we must distinguish the godlikeness humanity grasps from the participation God gives. One reaches for independence. The other receives life in communion with its source.
This is why becoming God in life and nature has nothing to do with the serpent’s ambition. The serpent directs humanity away from dependence upon God. Divine life brings us into a dependence so complete that His life becomes our living. We do not seize His place. We receive Him.
The fall establishes a self that wants to determine its own existence. That self can be openly wicked, but it can also become moral, disciplined, educated, and religious. Its accomplishments may change without its source changing. Even goodness can become material for self-establishment.
I do not believe God is satisfied because the independent self has learned to behave more respectably. The question remains whether the person lives from God. An impressive natural life is still unable to supply what only He can give.
We often examine the fruit of a decision while leaving the source of the decision untouched. Was it useful? Was it successful? Did people approve? The two trees ask something deeper: from where did it come?
The distinction runs through the whole Bible. Humanity repeatedly reaches for a life it can possess and manage. God repeatedly calls humanity into a life that must be received from Him.
4. Babel Builds; Abraham Leaves
At Babel, people gather to secure a name and prevent their scattering (Genesis 11:1–9). Their unity serves their determination to establish themselves. They possess a common language, a common project, and a convincing reason to continue. None of those things makes the project an expression of God.
Then God calls Abraham to leave his country, kindred, and father’s house (Genesis 12:1–3). Babel undertakes to make its own name. God promises to make Abraham’s name great. One story gathers humanity around what it can build. The other begins with a man responding to a word from God.
Abraham must leave more than a location. He must leave the assumption that his inherited world determines his future. His identity will no longer be secured by what his people have accumulated or what his natural circumstances make possible.
I see something searching here for anyone who has mistaken a religious inheritance for living faith. We may have received a vocabulary, a history, and an account of what God did among earlier generations. But there comes a point when we must hear Him ourselves. The inheritance cannot answer in our place.
Abraham’s promise eventually confronts him with the failure of natural possibility. Sarah is barren, and both grow old. The son cannot arrive merely because Abraham has a vision and works hard enough to fulfill it (Genesis 17:15–21; 18:9–14; 21:1–3).
God is teaching him where the promised life must come from. The delay strips the promise of any easy explanation in Abraham’s own strength.
Faith begins to mean something more than confidence that a cherished project will succeed. It becomes dependence upon the One who has spoken.
5. The Gift Must Yield, and the Strong Man Must Limp
Genesis 22 tests whether Abraham will withhold even the promised son. The narrative does not tell us that Isaac had become an idol. It tells us that Abraham was tested and that his response demonstrated his fear of God (Genesis 22:1, 12). The spiritual force of that test is immense: the gift remains subject to the Giver.
Even what God has promised cannot become something we hold against Him. We cannot say, “You gave me this, therefore I will never surrender it.” The calling, the work, the place among the saints, and the understanding we cherish must remain open to His hand.
Jacob’s story reaches another part of the same problem. Jacob wants the blessing, but he knows how to scheme for what he wants. He calculates, bargains, and attempts to secure the future. At Bethel, he discovers a heaven opened by God. At the Jabbok, his own strength is touched (Genesis 28:10–22; 32:22–32).
He leaves the encounter blessed and limping. That is a remarkable combination. We tend to imagine blessing as the strengthening of everything that makes us effective. Jacob carries a wound in the very body by which he has acted.
I read his limp as a picture of dependence replacing confidence in himself. His humanity remains, but the man can no longer walk as though his strength were untouched.
God’s dealings reach what we possess and what we trust in ourselves. Abraham cannot make the gift supreme. Jacob cannot make his natural ability the final resource. Both lives point toward a person whose sufficiency rests in God.
The blessing is bringing them closer to the source.
6. Brought Out to Be Brought to God
God gives His own account of the Exodus in Exodus 19:4: He has brought Israel to Himself. That sentence should govern our reading of the entire deliverance. The people are released from Pharaoh because they belong to God.
The destination is God.
Freedom has a purpose. The people are not delivered merely to become an independent nation with better circumstances. God intends to dwell among them and be their God (Exodus 29:45–46). Deliverance opens the way for a relationship in which His presence determines their life.
Yet Egypt continues to speak within them after they have left it. They remember its food. They fear the wilderness. They question the deliverance when it no longer supplies the comfort they expected (Exodus 16:2–3; Numbers 11:4–6). Their bodies have crossed the sea while their inward desires still look backward.
This is why leaving religion outwardly is not enough. We can walk out of a building and carry its whole way of life with us. We can reject its leaders and still crave the authority they possessed. We can renounce its system and immediately begin constructing another around ourselves.
The departure must reach the inward person. Otherwise, the new place becomes another setting for the old life.
God’s wilderness dealings expose what governs His people when familiar support disappears. Their need becomes an opportunity to discover His faithfulness. Their fear reveals how little they yet know the One who has brought them out.
The purpose is deeper than escape. God intends to become the present reality from which they live. He is bringing them to Himself, and He will not allow Egypt’s provisions to remain the measure of His goodness.
7. The Lamb, the Bread, and the Water
At Passover, the blood marks the houses, and the lamb is eaten (Exodus 12:7–11). The people receive nourishment for the departure. The provision that belongs to their deliverance also belongs to their living.
In the Christian fulfillment, Christ is our Passover (1 Corinthians 5:7). The picture leads beyond protection from judgment into participation in the One who saves. We need Him as our inward supply. A correct account of our standing cannot substitute for the daily experience of His life.
Manna continues the instruction (Exodus 16:4–5, 16–30). On ordinary days, Israel receives what it cannot preserve indefinitely for itself. The Sabbath provision comes according to God’s distinct instruction. The governing lesson is dependence upon His word, including when to gather, when to rest, and what He will preserve.
Deuteronomy 8:3 makes the point explicit: human life depends upon what proceeds from God’s mouth. Hunger and provision have been teaching the people that their existence cannot be secured by bread considered apart from the One who gives it.
Water from the rock brings the same necessity into another form (Exodus 17:1–7). A thirsty person cannot survive on an explanation of water. Knowledge of provision does not relieve thirst. The water must be received.
Paul identifies the spiritual rock with Christ (1 Corinthians 10:3–4). Here Scripture itself gives the Christian connection. The wilderness provision points us toward a people eating and drinking from a divine source.
I do not want to turn these pictures into another vocabulary we admire. Their force lies in the ordinary necessity they express. We need Christ as surely as the hungry need food and the thirsty need water.
His life must become the supply of our actual day.
8. He Is Your Life
Deuteronomy 30:19–20 brings the argument into direct speech. Israel is called to choose life by loving the Lord, obeying His voice, and holding fast to Him. Then comes the declaration that deserves to stand at the center of our attention: “He is thy life.”
The immediate promise concerns Israel’s covenant life and continuance in the land. Yet notice where the passage places that life. The people are directed to God Himself. Loving, hearing, and cleaving belong together because life is found in relationship with Him.
This is stronger than saying God can help us conduct our lives. He is our life. We are being called away from treating Him as assistance for an existence centered somewhere else.
Earlier in the chapter, God promises to circumcise the heart so that His people may love Him and live (Deuteronomy 30:6). The One who requires wholehearted love also promises to work within the heart. The inward need and the divine provision are already meeting.
Moses’ refusal in Exodus 33:12–16 expresses this priority in the face of a great outward prospect. The land remains ahead, but Moses will not proceed without God’s presence. Reaching the destination cannot compensate for losing the One who makes the journey meaningful.
The promise serves the presence.
I think we need to let that judgment fall on our spiritual ambitions. A successful ministry without inward fellowship with Christ is not an acceptable exchange. Neither is a respected religious identity. Neither is the satisfaction of proving that our understanding was correct.
God’s gifts cannot become the reason we cease to need God. His presence is the treasure, and His life is the purpose. Whatever we possess must remain beneath that.
9. A Dwelling, Not Merely a Building
God’s instruction in Exodus 25:8 tells us why the sanctuary is to exist: He will dwell among His people. The structure serves the indwelling. Its importance comes from the presence for which it is prepared.
This is a remarkable intention. The God who delivered Israel will accompany the people in their actual journey. His dwelling stands within their life, and His presence governs their movement and rest (Exodus 40:34–38). He does not remain a distant power they invoke when they are in trouble.
The wood overlaid with gold gives us a further picture (Exodus 25:10–11; 26:15, 29). I read these materials typologically: humanity bearing divine expression. The text specifies the materials; the spiritual correspondence is a reading of the picture in light of God’s larger purpose.
The wood remains wood. It bears something it could never produce from itself. In that sense, the picture helps us see a humanity preserved while brought into the expression of divine glory.
But the decisive statement is the plain one: God desires to dwell among His people. We do not need to make every measurement prove the entire argument. His declared intention is already extraordinary.
His dwelling also changes the meaning of corporate life. The people exist around a presence greater than any individual among them. No gifted person can become the source of what belongs to God alone.
This is what I long to see in the ecclesia: a people whose reality comes from the One dwelling among them. Their gathering has meaning because His life is present, shared, and expressed.
The building points beyond itself. God is preparing humanity for a habitation that will reach into the inward person.
10. When the Glory Leaves
The sanctuary can become a substitute for the presence it was built to contain. Jeremiah confronts people who repeat the name of the temple while continuing in lives that contradict the God they claim to worship (Jeremiah 7:1–15).
The building has become their assurance. Because it stands among them, they imagine themselves secure. Their religious association becomes a reason to resist the word that would expose them.
God refuses that arrangement. The temple cannot protect the rejection of His nature. Injustice, falsehood, and the oppression of others reveal the contradiction between the people’s claims and their living.
Then Ezekiel sees the glory depart (Ezekiel 10:18–19; 11:22–23). The structure does not immediately disappear. The outward thing and the inward reality can become separated.
That possibility should disturb us. An institution can continue after the life that gave it meaning has been displaced. Meetings continue. Contributions arrive. Positions are filled. The history is told again, and the existence of the organization is offered as evidence of God’s approval.
But what life is being expressed?
I am not willing to make institutional survival the test. The issue is whether Christ is being lived among the people. The patience, truth, mercy, and inward peace of His life cannot be replaced by the importance of the organization’s claim.
The temple’s history gives us no permission to worship religious continuity. God Himself judges what He once appointed when its use contradicts His purpose.
Our loyalty must reach Him. Otherwise, we may spend our strength preserving a form while resisting the very presence for which that form originally existed. The shell can remain impressive long after it has ceased to disclose the glory.
11. The Heart God Must Make New
David asks God to create a clean heart and renew a right spirit within him (Psalm 51:10–12). He knows that the problem has reached deeper than a damaged reputation. Something within must be addressed.
We can regret an action and still live from the impulses that produced it. We can promise to improve, punish ourselves with remorse, and compensate through religious effort while remaining governed by the same inward life.
David asks God to act where David cannot recreate himself. His prayer gives us a bridge toward the prophetic promise of a new heart. The inward need requires more than another demand placed upon it. It requires God’s work.
The Psalms also disclose what the heart begins to desire when it turns toward its true portion. God becomes the object of thirst in Psalm 42:1–2 and Psalm 63:1. In Psalm 36:7–9, abundance, drinking, light, and the fountain of life gather around His presence.
The language is intimate because the need is intimate. These people are not merely trying to obtain a correct account of God. They are seeking Him as the satisfaction of their existence.
Psalm 73:25–26 carries that desire beyond favorable circumstances. Flesh and heart may fail, but God remains the enduring portion. The final good cannot be made dependent upon health, prosperity, vindication, or the preservation of our preferred life.
This is where the question becomes searching for me. Do I want God because He can secure everything else I love, or has He become the One I desire above those things?
The psalmist has found a possession that cannot be reduced to anything God gives. God Himself is the portion.
12. We Have Left the Fountain
Jeremiah 2:13 gives us one of the clearest diagnoses in Scripture. The people have forsaken the fountain of living waters and dug broken cisterns for themselves. They have left a living supply to construct something they can possess.
I think this describes far more of religious history than we are willing to admit. A person encounters God. Life is expressed. Others receive something through that expression. Then the teaching, the method, or the memory becomes something people attempt to preserve apart from the immediacy of the original source.
The cistern may carry the fountain’s name. That does not make it living water.
A tradition can tell us what happened without giving us the reality that happened. A vocabulary can preserve the description of an experience without bringing us into the experience. A gifted person can help us, but cannot become our permanent substitute for knowing Christ.
This is why our inherited language must never be allowed to end the inquiry. We may say “life,” “Spirit,” “body,” and “recovery” with complete confidence. The words themselves do not tell us what is supplying our actual living.
What happens when our importance is threatened? What rises when our preferred work is questioned? What do people encounter when they come near us? These moments expose more than our ability to explain the teaching.
Jeremiah calls us back to the source. The answer is not a more elaborate cistern or a better defense of its history. God Himself has been forsaken, and God Himself must be received.
We cannot be satisfied with preserving the language of a fountain while remaining thirsty beside it. The need is for living water now.
13. Come Without Your Accomplishments
Isaiah 55:1–3 invites the thirsty to receive water and the hungry to receive food without money. The question presses upon our whole life of expenditure: why spend ourselves on what cannot satisfy?
The invitation does not wait for us to accumulate spiritual purchasing power. God calls us to come, hear, and live. His abundance precedes our achievement.
I want that to reach the person who has spent years trying to become qualified to receive what God gives. We can turn even spiritual growth into a system of earning. We imagine that enough discipline, suffering, or understanding will eventually make us worthy of fullness.
But the thirsty are invited because they are thirsty. Their need brings them to the provision. They do not have to manufacture the water before they drink it.
Coming still requires a real turning. We must cease demanding that the things which have failed us should somehow become sufficient. We must bring our hunger to God instead of protecting the arrangements that keep us hungry.
Isaiah 57:15 gives another astonishing declaration. The High and Holy One dwells with the contrite and lowly, reviving the spirit and heart. His greatness does not keep Him remote from human need. He comes into the place where the proud self has ceased insisting on its own sufficiency.
Here holiness becomes more than a demand hanging above us. The Holy One becomes the reviving presence within the humbled person.
This is how the likeness to God begins to appear. A person opens to the One whose life can supply what the person cannot generate. The heart becomes responsive because God has drawn near to revive it.
We come with hunger. He comes with Himself.
14. They Shall All Know Me
Jeremiah 31:31–34 promises a covenant reaching into the inward person. God will write His law in the heart. His people will know Him, from the least to the greatest. Their knowledge will rest upon His gracious action, including His forgiveness of their sins.
I cannot read this and accept a spiritual arrangement in which ordinary believers are expected to live indefinitely on someone else’s acquaintance with God. Help can be given. A word can be shared. But the purpose of that help must be that the person knows Him.
No one can receive Christ in my place and make that my inward reality. No gifted brother can become the life of the ecclesia. What he has received must direct us toward the same living source.
The promise that all will know God carries immense weight. The least is included. The person without eloquence is included. The one who will never lead a conference or write a book belongs within the promised knowledge.
And the law is written within. God’s will no longer stands only as a demand confronting the person from outside. He undertakes to establish an inward response.
This is where the argument about life and nature becomes more direct. What God desires is to find expression through people whose hearts He has reached. His faithfulness is to become visible in their faithfulness. His love is to become active in their relationships.
The promise is larger than an educated religious community. It concerns a people who know their God.
I want to give that promise its full place. The ecclesia cannot be fulfilled by a few who know and many who merely repeat. God intends His people to participate in the reality themselves.
15. My Spirit Within You
Ezekiel 36:25–27 brings us to the plainest inward promise. God will cleanse His people, give them a new heart and a new spirit, remove the heart of stone, and put His Spirit within them.
Here we are no longer depending chiefly upon a symbolic reading of a tree or a sanctuary. God expressly promises His Spirit within His people. Their new walk will arise from His action.
The stone heart cannot make itself living by accepting more instructions. Its condition requires something beyond its own resources. God undertakes to give what He requires.
This is the heart of my argument. God intends to supply Himself within humanity. His presence reaches the place from which we desire, choose, respond, and live. The result is more than the imitation of an admired character. It is the expression of a life received.
This is what I mean by becoming God in life and nature. We participate in His life and express His character. We never become its independent origin. God remains the source, and our union with Him never gives us a separate deity of our own.
But dependence does not make the transformation imaginary. A new heart is actually given. The Spirit is actually present. The person’s living is actually affected.
We should not reduce this promise to a religious way of saying that people become more determined to behave. God has promised something far greater than renewed human resolve.
The Spirit within supplies the walk that follows. His life becomes active in our humanity, reaching the ordinary places where we previously reacted out of fear, self-interest, and the need to prevail.
God is preparing a human expression of Himself. The inward gift makes that expression possible.
16. Organization Cannot Breathe
The valley of dry bones presents a condition beyond improvement (Ezekiel 37:1–14). The bones do not need a better account of their potential. They need life.
As Ezekiel speaks, the bones come together. Sinews, flesh, and skin appear. Then the narrative makes a distinction we should never forget: there is recognizable form, but there is not yet breath.
Organization cannot breathe.
The immediate vision concerns Israel’s restoration. God promises to open His people’s graves, bring them back, and put His Spirit within them. Its spiritual force also exposes the limits of anything we attempt to assemble without the life God gives.
We can arrange a community. We can agree upon its language, define its practices, and identify who belongs. We can even remove the things we believe have damaged other communities. None of those actions, by themselves, imparts life.
A gathering without titles can still be governed by the strongest personalities. A meeting without a sermon can still proceed entirely from natural energy. An organization opposed to organization remains capable of the same inward death.
This is why I keep returning to Zoe. Changing the arrangement cannot be our final hope. We need the life that makes the body living.
When breath enters, the people stand. Their existence is corporate, but its source is divine. They become a people together because God supplies what none can produce alone.
That is the ecclesia I am looking for: humanity made living by the Spirit, with each member sharing in what belongs to the whole. The unity proceeds from life. It cannot be secured by the importance of a leader or the cleverness of a design.
God must breathe, and we must receive.
17. The Life Must Be Allowed to Flow
In Ezekiel 47:1–12, water flows from the house of God. It deepens, reaches the dead waters, and brings life. Trees bear fruit, and their leaves provide healing. The presence of God becomes the source of a flow reaching beyond the dwelling itself.
The fruit is the expression of the life.
I do not read this as a religious instruction to turn people into a numerical measure of our success. The image concerns life making fruitful what it reaches. Its significance lies in the source and the transformation.
Where God’s life is received, His nature begins to appear. Love has a living origin. Truth can be spoken without the desire to crush. Mercy reaches someone without making that person indebted to our importance. Peace becomes possible without our winning the contest.
These are not small matters beside a great outward work. They are evidence of the life the outward work exists to serve.
Zechariah 4:6 places the accomplishment of God’s purpose in His Spirit. Joel 2:28–29 promises the Spirit poured out across the people: sons and daughters, old and young, servants as well as others. The divine supply is not confined to those whom a religious culture considers impressive.
I see here the hope of a people expressing one life through many members. No member is the fountain. Each receives, and what is received becomes available to the others.
The river gives movement to the whole picture. God dwells, life flows, and what is reached becomes fruitful. The purpose is fulfilled through participation rather than possession.
We cannot own the river. We can live in its supply and cease obstructing what God desires to express through us.
18. Let Everything Else Take Its Place
If this is God’s purpose, then we must allow it to determine what is highest. We cannot keep granting His life a place among our many competing concerns and then wonder why the inward reality remains so faint.
Our religious identity is secondary. Our understanding is secondary. Our usefulness, reputation, ambitions, and cherished place in a work are secondary. Even the things we have received from God must remain beneath God Himself.
I am not asking for another movement organized around the teaching of Zoe. We have already demonstrated how easily a living word can become the vocabulary of another system. We can defend the supremacy of life while continuing to live from the need to be right.
I am asking that we receive Him and allow Him to become our living. Let Him touch the place where we defend ourselves. Let Him expose what we cannot bear to surrender. Let Him become our satisfaction where we have demanded recognition, control, or the fulfillment of our own story.
The question will meet us in ordinary moments. When another person disappoints us, what life answers? When our work becomes invisible, what sustains us? When the future does not follow our plan, where do we turn? These moments bring the whole argument into our actual existence.
There is no higher achievement than God finding expression in a human vessel. There is no more meaningful community than a people sharing His life.
Let the gifts serve that purpose. Let the forms yield to it. Let the human insistence on its own importance come to an end.
The life God intended to give is Himself.
God received, God lived, and God expressed in humanity.
