There are some phrases we’re all familiar with if we read the Old Testament of the Bible…

The God of Israel
The God of Jacob
The God of Jerusalem

We’re told that Jerusalem is “His holy city,” especially in the Psalms. So much of the poetry and songs revolve around that city, the Temple, and the God who has claimed it as His own. Who dwells there. Who protects the place and the people.

For the Ancients, this wasn’t a weird thought. In the polytheistic societies that surrounded Israel thousands of years ago, each city had its own patron god. It was that god’s protection that led to prosperity; it was that god’s abandonment that led to its demise. If one city and its king defeated another, the assumption was that their god had triumphed as well…but also that by taking over the city, one became the new darling of its god. Victors would incorporate worship of that town’s god into their own worship, but also introduce their new, stronger god to its citizens.

Then there was Israel. Israel, who claimed “No, there is only one God. He is our God whether we win or lose. He is our God in exile. He is our God whether we’re in Israel, in Jerusalem, or in Babylon. He is our God when we prosper. He is our God when we starve.” And they dared to add something no other ancient society claimed about their gods: “He loves us. Everything He does is for love of us.”

As Christians, we still lay claim to that old covenant between God and Israel, even though many of us have no Jewish blood. Why? Because Christ’s blood fulfilled that covenant and extended it. The promise God gave to Abraham was not “and through you I’ll have one city to claim as my own.” He promised, “From you will come a nation, and through them, all the world will be blessed.” That’s how children in Sunday School can sing, “Father Abraham…” and claim him as their own patriarch. We were adopted into God’s family.

But…what does that mean in terms of nations?

It’s something I pondered, and then pondered some more as I heard so many Americans claiming, especially during the last election cycle, what basically amounted to God being the God of…America. I’ve read some HUGE bestselling books that spell out how America has taken on that old covenant with Israel for its own. How we’re the new Israel, more or less. And so He is our God. The God of our freedom, the God of our land. We pray His blessings upon us, from sea to shining sea.

We should pray for our nation–for our leaders, for our neighbors, for the people. But the idea of Christians claiming God as the God of their land comes with some definite problems. I’ve quite literally been chewing on this for a couple years, so let’s see how coherent I can be in parsing it, LOL.

First of all, what about the Christians who live in other countries? What do they think when Americans claim this? I can tell you, because I’ve heard from them–they’re offended. God is their God as much as He’s ours, after all. He adopted them too, whether they’re English or Spanish or Mexican or African or Scandinavian. He loves the Russian farmer as much as the Chinese factory-worker as much as the politician from D.C. Do we really think about that as we contemplate how proud we are to be American? Or have we linked where we live with the God we serve?

Last month, I read a book called The Lamb’s Supper that put a new lens on the book of Revelation for me–but in fact, a very old lens. It talks about how the book makes sense when viewed as a liturgy, and how, in fact, nearly every step of liturgy is there in Revelation–they informed each other, built each other, as a matter of fact. In Revelation, we see the New Jerusalem descend. The new dwelling of God. It’s part of the new heaven, the new earth. And do you know what it is?

The Church.

The “holy nation” that Peter talks about in 1 Peter 2–what is that? Is it Israel? No. It’s the Church.

That is the nation to whom we should be most loyal. Not America or Canada or Britain, not Mexico or Germany or Australia, not Portugal or the Netherlands or Uganda. The Church. Those other places…those are where we live. Where we serve. Those are the neighbors we’re called to love and show the ways of God. We are supposed to have affection for our homeland–it’s built into the human DNA. God made us that way–tribal. But we have to be careful. We have to be careful not to begin thinking we’re superior, that God loves us more, has favored us more, has blessed us more. We have to be careful we haven’t begun to think of ourselves, as citizens of a human nation, as the caretakers of God’s Word and His promises.

We are that–but not because we’re American or Western or Eastern or even Israeli. We are caretakers of His Word and His promises by virtue of the cross. By virtue of being members of His bride, the Church.

In Back to Church by pastor Cara Luecht, she asks, “Are you an American who happens to be a Christian, or are you a Christian who happens to be an American?” That, I think, is a great focusing question. Because He isn’t the Lord of our land–He is (or should be) the Lord of our hearts. When we are baptized into the family of God, we don’t gain a citizenship in an earthly country–we gain a citizenship in Heaven.

God is still the God of Jacob. He is the God of Israel. Jerusalem is still His holy city–but Jerusalem, the new Jerusalem that John saw descend, is us, my friends. We are the Church. We are His dwelling place. Where we live…that’s nothing but a circumstance. It’s not a definition.

Before I’m a West Virginian, before I’m an American, before I’m a Westerner, before I’m even an Earther, I am this:

I am a Christian. All else is just smoke and vapors.

It’s winter in the northern hemisphere. January has turned to February, February will soon be March, and we’ll start looking for the first signs of springs. Daffodil greens … buds on the trees … the return of birds that migrated south. We’ll start looking, but the temperatures where I live will still be mockingly low. It’s cold. It’ll be cold for a while yet. Every day I’ll hope it’s a little warmer, and every day when it’s not, I’ll think, Will spring ever come?

I know it will. But when winter refuses to loosen its grip, it’s easy to forget. It doesn’t feel like spring is on its way.

This weekend, we’ll celebrate my son’s fifteenth birthday, so of course my thoughts drift back in time, to when I was, to put it biblically, “large with child.” I remember sitting at my mom’s birthday party, what turned out to be three days before Rowyn came, but still three weeks from his due date, and thinking, I am so uncomfortable. I need this kid to come soon. That pregnancy hadn’t been fun–I’d been sick the whole time, I hurt from my insides to my skin, and while the thought of actually giving birth again gave me a rather hilarious moment of panic, I also felt that impatience that pregnant women are rather famous for feeling. Is this ever going to be over? I want my baby NOW! We know that days in the womb equal health for the baby (most of the time), but even so. We’re impatient. We want to move from potential to actual. We want fulfillment.

We know they’ll come. The child in our womb will not stay in our womb. But it doesn’t always feel that way.

God, when He created the universe, created it with motion. We mark that motion and call it time. He made us that way, as creatures who live in time and rely on time. He gave us minds capable of dividing that time into smaller and smaller portions, down to nanoseconds … and into larger and larger portions, counting millennia and epochs. We can count it. But we can’t escape it. We are children of time.

And we’re impatient. We look at the march of seconds and hours and days and weeks and months, and always, we yearn for that next fulfillment.

We wait for things–and we don’t always wait well.

We wait for the next season. The next break. The next vacation. We wait for that promised child, the promised job, the promised raise. We wait for the healing we need, the new treatment, the answer.

We wait. And we resent the now that isn’t the then, when we have the thing we need or want. We stretch always forward, thinking the future a bright and sparkling thing, and we look back, remembering the past as something better than where we are. How long, Lord, we pray along with the psalmist. How long must we wait for You?

But we don’t serve a God who is slave to the motion of time He created, as we are. We serve a God who exists outside it, who looks on all of creation through all of time with omniscient eyes. He sees the then. He sees the now. He sees the was and the will be. He shapes time in His hands, sets us exactly where we need to be within it.

And He makes us promises.

I remember the days when my kids were toddlers. The span of their lives was so short–every day felt BIG to them. Every promise seemed to take forever to happen. “Is it time yet?” and “Are we there yet?” and “Mama, now?” were familiar phrases.

I remember a few snippets of those days from my own life. Do you? I remember being maybe four or five and visiting my grandparents. My parents were telling a story–I don’t remember about what–and they said it had happened a week ago. “It did not!” I remember yelling. “It was months ago!” It wasn’t. It’s just that it seemed so long ago to me, and I would have sworn–did, as a matter of fact–that it had been far longer than a few days.

How often is time, is fulfillment, is the promise skewed by our perception?

As I read through the Bible in a year last year, I marveled time and again at how this plays out in Scripture. God made a promise to Abraham. He promised him, first, a son. It took decades for this promise to be fulfilled. Decades! How many of us would be that patient? If a child is the deepest desire of our hearts and God had promised us one, would we just wait on Him to fulfill the promise? Or do we think, Maybe He meant I’d be a parent through some other means? like Abraham did.

God made promises to David, to the prophets, to Israel as a nation. He promised them a Savior, He promised that they would be the means by which the whole world was blessed, He promised them they would be His people and He would be their God. He made a covenant with them–far stronger than just a promise, than just words–and that covenant came with expectations. Things they needed to do–things He would do.

But it took time. Decades. Centuries. Millennia.

Is it any wonder, then, that Israel got impatient? That they forgot? That they slipped away? To their eyes, God was taking too long. He’d forgotten them. It didn’t feel like the promise was ever going to come.

Looking back from the 21st century, we know that it did. That He kept His word, gave His Word, and fulfilled His covenant. We know that in another blink of His eternal eye–whether that’s a day or another million years–He’ll fulfill the final promise of a Second Coming, of a New Heaven, a New Jerusalem. We know that eternity will overtake us and time will pass away.

But it doesn’t feel that way, as we’re struggling and striving against our own sins, our own limitations, our own weaknesses. Does it?

It’s never easy to wait. Not for the things we most need, we most yearn for. It’s never easy to be stuck in time and yet serve a God who is outside it. And yet … and yet there’s comfort there, too, really.

We can rest assured that what we mess up in the moment, He will redeem in the ever-after. When we can’t see the next step on the path, He’s looking on from above the maze, already knowing how it will turn out. When we think we can’t make it one more day, He already knows their full number and stretched them out just so for us.

We can know that those pieces we least understand will ultimately be for His glory; and that His glory means our good.

We don’t serve a God of the get-rich-quick, the instant-results, or the satisfaction-guaranteed. But we serve a God of eternal promises. A God of covenants. A God of His Word.

It isn’t easy. Neither is waiting for spring, or the arrival of that precious newborn, or the cure. But we wait, because that’s how He made us–creatures bound by time. We wait, and we learn, in the waiting, something more about Him. We learn what eternal means. And we learn, a little more, how awesome is our God.