Belonging to God

God is our Maker and Sustainer

So the first thing the Israelites were taught was that there is only one God, who has made all things and keeps everything living alive.  So it is he who is also our Maker and Sustainer.  He has made us for himself alone, and has given us a soul – the real you and the real I which can never die – so that we may in the end see him and share his life in Heaven.  In other words, we are his property.  He owns us more than we own our pets, which are his anyway because he made them too.

Jesus died to save us

But when we human beings sinned and went against him by doing deliberately what we knew to be wrong, then we left his keeping and got into the hands of the Devil.  But God would not let us be lost as easily as that.  He came into this world of ours and was born in Bethlehem, becoming a human being, in order to rescue us, so that we might be his again.  But he had to pay for us.  Make no mistake about that.  He had to pay for us with his life.  He was willing to give his all for us, and he did so on the Cross.  So in the hymn we sing:

“He died that we might be forgiven,
he died to make us good,
that we might go at last to heaven,
saved by his precious blood.

There was no other good enough
to pay the price of sin,
he only could unlock the gate
of heaven and let us in” (1)

Thus by his death on the Cross, Jesus has bought us back or redeemed us.  So now we are doubly his, for not only has he made us but he has also paid for us with his own life to bring us back to his safe keeping.  As St Paul puts it, “…do you not know that…you are not your own?  For you were bought with a price…” (NRSV, 1 Corinthians 6: 19, 20).

Putting God first in our lives

So we can see how the First Commandment applies to us even more than it did to the People of Israel.  “You shall have no other gods but me”.  And because we belong to God before we belong to anyone else, we must put him first in our lives before anyone or anything else.  That is what God demands of us and we have no right to refuse it.  As Jesus himself has said, “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me…” (NRSV, Matthew 10:37).