TUESDAY 13th
Deuteronomy 7:6-11
NIV (v6) – ‘For you are a people holy to the LORD your God. The LORD your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be his people, his treasured possession.’
ESV (v6) – ‘For you are a people holy to the LORD your God. The LORD your God has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth.’
Deuteronomy 14:2 ‘For you are a people holy to the LORD your God. Out of all the peoples on the face of the earth, the LORD has chosen you to be his treasured possession.’
Immediately these verses remind me or take me to 1 Peter 2:9-10 which is talking about the Church. (‘But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for his own possession, that you may proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light. Once you were not a people, but now you are God’s people; once you had not received mercy, but now you have received mercy.’)
In the Old Testament it was the people of Israel who were God’s treasured possession, when we get to the New Testament, God is about to do something new, and from this he is going to call out from the nations of the world a new people to be his treasured possession, and he would do it through the redemptive work of his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. This new treasured possession is the Church, those who have been purchased by the precious blood of the Lord Jesus Christ. (‘Pay careful attention to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to care for the church of God, which he obtained with his own blood.’)
The verses in Deuteronomy says that they (the people of Israel) were a holy people and so also with us as the church we are a holy people. The New Testament uses in many places the word ‘saint’ unfortunately this word has been hijacked by the Roman Catholic Church to be used as a title that is conferred upon an individual who they see had accomplished something extraordinary, or above and beyond the normal, and the person having this title conferred upon them has often times been long time dead before it happens. In the NT the English word saint comes from the Greek ‘hagios’ which is linked to holiness and purity and is a word that is used to describe every individual who has been born again, or sanctified, made clean by the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ, it is a ‘title’ that is given not because we ourselves have accomplished anything extraordinary or above and beyond, but rather as a result of what the Lord Jesus Christ has done on our behalf. 1 Corinthians 1:2 makes this very clear, ‘To the church of God that is in Corinth, to those sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints together with all those who in every place call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, both their Lord and ours: . . .’
So, rejoice today that in Christ you are a saint! One who has been washed in his blood and set apart and called to be a saint together with every other believer, to make up the household of God, his possession so that you can proclaim the excellencies of him who called you out of darkness into his marvellous light.
The same verse in 1 Peter 2 continues that once we were not a people but now we are a people, we were outside of what God was doing, we were outcasts, aliens, strangers as we read in Ephesians 2:12, but because of God’s mercy and grace we are now his possession. One of the old hymn choruses says, ‘Now I belong to Jesus, Jesus belongs to me, not for the length of time alone, but for eternity’.