3 Thoughts About How To Live as God's Unique People (The Bible, Part 3)

3 Thoughts About How To Live as God's Unique People

The Bible, Part 3

Living as God's unique people

“The primary story in Scripture is that God has called a people to be his reflection—his image—in the world. The problem is that those people always live in an empire that keeps trying to shape them in ways contrary to the ways of God. So every place in the Bible is trying to answer this question: How can we live as God’s unique people in the midst of this place that lives so contrary to his purposes?”

– Walter Brueggeman as quoted by T. Scott Daniels in "Exile" (Kindle 175-180)

That’s an excellent question.

How do we live as God's unique people in a world that seems increasingly antagonistic to the church and those who follow Jesus Christ?

Six important thoughts must be considered before considering this question. We'll examine the first three in this article and the final three in a follow-up article.

To begin with, we need to zoom back and get a wide-angle view of the biblical story, starting in the first chapter of Genesis, which contains what may be the most important and foundational verse in this whole story of creation.

Here we go!

#1 – The most important verse in Genesis 1

Genesis 1 gets a lot of attention, and a lot of people misunderstand what these poetic verses are trying to do; mainly, to crack open the heart and mind of the reader to conceive of a world arranged carefully and purposefully by a Creator, unlike the gods of other creation stories of the day. The most important verse in Genesis 1 gives us a foundational understanding of who we are as human beings and the purpose for which we were created: