God is no longer just meeting individuals. Yes, it is important for us as Christians to receive Yeshua, because this individual experience of believing in Jesus the Christ brings us salvation and into the covenant that the Lord holds for us. This is a very personal and individual thing that happens between you and the Father who has given His Son to bring about redemption for you. But our salvation goes far beyond this. God does not just save us individually and keep us in a relationship with Him as individuals. He makes us into something that expands the covenant and expands His promises—He brings us into His Body as His people.

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Show Notes:

In the beginning, God made covenants, promises, and relationships with individuals. He had a covenant with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob. He had a covenant with Noah. He had a covenant with Moses. And in these covenants and promises, He would expect certain things of these individuals, and they would be promised certain things. Everything God did was in relationship to an individual.

But at Passover, when we get to the Exodus story, a significant change takes place. All of a sudden, God becomes the God of a covenant with a community. “I will be your God, and you will be My people.” He takes the elements of His covenants and promises with individuals and He brings them to bear, but now the covenants and promises themselves begin to expand and God carries them into a greater covenant with His people.

Key Verses:

• Exodus 3:15–16. “I am indeed concerned about you.”
• Exodus 6:6–8. “I will take you for My people, and I will be your God.”
• Deuteronomy 4:31–39. “For the Lord your God . . . will not fail you nor destroy you nor forget the covenant with your fathers which He swore to them.”
• Deuteronomy 7:6–9. “The Lord your God … keeps His covenant and His lovingkindness to a thousandth generation.”
• 1 Chronicles 17:20–24. “Your people Israel You made Your own people forever.”
• 1 Peter 2:9–10. “Once were not a people, but now you are the people of God.”
• Exodus 19:4–6. “You shall be to Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”
• Revelation 5:9–10. “You have made them to be a kingdom and priests to our God; and they will reign upon the earth.”

Quotes:

• “Some people believe in replacement theology—that because the people of Israel failed, God has broken His covenant with them and has replaced Israel with Christianity. That cannot be. If God violates His covenant, then He is a liar.”
• “Just as the Passover judgments were against the gods over Egypt, when Christ came He brought judgment on the gods of this age—and set us free from bondage, not just to sin, but to the oppression of being servants to the god of this world.”
• “God is coming not just to save us individually, but He wants to solidify us, to mold us, to create us into His great Body that experiences something further and greater than just the personal promises and covenants that He would make with us individually, so that we will rule and reign with Him as He establishes His Kingdom on this earth.”

Takeaways:

1. God always starts by making promises and covenants with individuals. He did that in Israel by choosing Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Then God begins to expand that covenant. God carries elements of those individual covenants and promises, and then He creates for Himself a people and a nation with expanded covenants and promises.
2. God does that to Christians within their salvation. Our salvation experience begins as a personal meeting with God, with the promises of eternal life and resurrection that He gives us. But like the children of Israel, Yeshua is molding us individually into His Body, a holy nation, a people for God’s own possession, with expanded promises and covenants concerning the Kingdom that is coming in this earth. We should believe for this with all our hearts, thank God for it, and enter into it in the name of the Lord.