You guys remember Venn diagrams right? Little-known fact: my husband proposed to me with a Venn diagram! You can ask me about that later.
This week at overnight camp our camp speaker Marissa used the Venn diagram to teach the kids about God‘s presence.
In the beginning, in the beautiful perfect garden of Eden, God‘s space and human’s space were not separated at all. They were one. It’s as if God space were represented by the color red, and human space were represented by the color blue, in the garden it was all one glorious purple presence.
Then of course when sin entered the world, God’s space could no longer dwell with human space. God’s holiness would kill human’s unholiness. Can somebody say ouch? Our access to God was broken.
But does everybody know that God still loves his kids? And God is a great planner! So God made a plan and he said I still wanna move back into your neighborhood but it can’t be the same way it was in Eden.
There’ had to be an extensive system of substitutionary sacrifice at the temple and even then, God would only show His presence to one guy, one day of the year, in one room of the temple.
It was no longer the full glorious purple presence of the Lord, just a teeny tiny little overlap of his holiness here on earth. Can you feel the sadness of that? There was access to God, but it was certainly not free or confident.
So when Jesus came to move into our neighborhood, he was truly and perfectly God’s perfect purple presence on earth. He was God’s temple. He got to have God’s very holiness walking around with him everywhere he went.
But it still wasn’t like Eden where all the space was God space and human space completely overlapped. It was still only God‘s presence in one person at one place at a time.
Remember when Jesus said it’s better that he goes away so the Holy Spirit can come?
That is because it means every believer in Jesus gets God’s space inside their human space. Every believer in Jesus is now a walking, talking temple. Every believer in Jesus is now the walking purple presence of God: in our schools, in our neighborhoods, in our workplaces, and in our homes.
God‘s perfect purple presence is in you and it’s in me and it’s in the kids who are now new believers in Jesus as a result of responding to this good news at camp.
I hope you’ll never forget the Venn diagram of the gospel that says that through Jesus, God‘s perfect presence is now all over the earth and it’s with you forever! And that is fabulous news.
“In Him and through faith in Him, we can approach God with freedom and confidence.” Ephesians 3:12.