Ephesians 3:17 so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith…
Galatians 2:20 I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
Jesus living in us is a central theme in Christianity, and there are many scriptures to back this up. The verses above are just a sampling of them. When we invite Jesus into our hearts, He literally comes in and lives in us.
Matthew 25:40-45 And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’… Then he will answer them, saying, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did not do it to one of the least of these, you did not do it to me.’
In the scriptures above, Jesus is talking about doing good or withholding good from others, but the concept is the same. What we do to someone else who has Jesus in them, we are also doing to Jesus, be it for good or evil. Since Jesus lives in us when we invite Him in, He is in us when we are going through anything, whether good or bad. When we are being abused, He is there in us, also being abused. This is encoded in scripture in many ways. Let’s look at the story of Dinah, the daughter of Jacob, who was raped.
Genesis 34:2 And when Shechem the son of Hamor the Hivite, the prince of the land, saw her, he seized her and lay with her and humiliated her.
The verse above says Shechem “…lay with her…” This is a mistranslation. In the original Hebrew the word translated as ‘her’ is אֹ תָ֖הּ . This is the aleph, tav, and hey from the Hebrew alphabet. The aleph, tav, by themselves do not spell anything, but have great significance. The hey added at the end means to behold or reveal, indicating special emphasis on the other letters. Many places in the Bible where the aleph tav appears there is no translation. Other times it is translated as she, you, or a variety of other words.
In the Hebrew alphabet, every letter has words attached to them, among other things. One of the words connected with the aleph is Adonai, which means Lord in Hebrew, and one of the words attached to the tav is covenant. Add the hey to this, and it is translated as “behold Adonai of the covenant.” Jesus shed His blood on the cross, He is the covenant between us and God.
What this is saying is that when Dinah was raped, aleph tav was there with her, or more precisely, our covenant Jesus was there with her. Jesus was in the midst of her suffering, being humiliated just as she was humiliated.
Recently the Lord gave me a vision. He brought me back in my memory to one of the times when, as a child, my mother was beating me. All I could do was curl up in the fetal position for protection, enduring the blows from her fists. He showed me how He was inside of me, His head was just beneath the bones of my skull, His arms were where my arms were, His feet were where my feet were. As I lay there curled up in the fetal position, so was He. As she was pummeling me with her fists, she was also beating Jesus.
When we suffer like this, we are not alone. Jesus is there with us, He is suffering along with us. He is not some distant God who doesn’t care about what happens to us, but is one who loves us so much that He is in the midst of our suffering, no matter what we are going through.
This brings the verses in Matthew 25:40-45 to a whole new level. The Lord then made it clear to me how my mother was not off the hook when I forgave her. Forgiveness helped me to heal, but she still had to give an accounting for the abuse she perpetrated directly against Jesus.
Hebrews 10:29-31 How much worse punishment, do you think, will be deserved by the one who has trampled underfoot the Son of God, and has profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has outraged the Spirit of grace? For we know him who said, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay.” And again, “The Lord will judge his people.” It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.
The same Jesus that loved us so much that He chose to take our place on the cross, and die in pain and agony rather than to go through eternity without us, is the same Jesus who lives in us. He is there with us even when things go terribly wrong, and He is there with us when we have to forgive what seems unforgivable.
Hebrews 13:5 …“I will never leave you nor forsake you.”