Taking Off Our Sandals

When Stephen faced certain death before the Sanhedrin, he took this last opportunity to remind them and us of a simple truth. God is god and we are not.

In recounting the highlights of Biblical history to drive home his point, Stephen describes Moses’ encounter with a holy God. “I am the god of your fathers, of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob” Moses trembled with fear and dared not to look. Then the Lord said, “Take off your shoes for this is holy ground.” Acts 7:32,33

Of all the things we could learn about God and about ourselves in the story of Moses, why did Stephen choose to remind the Sanhedrin that God told Moses to take off his sandals? And why would it be important to us?


Like the Sanhedrin and other jews of Stephen’s day, perhaps we tend to forget that God is so “other”--that He is so holy. We often think we know so much more than we do to the point that we would dare tell God how to do his job. How often, like our Sanhedrin forefathers, do we fail to recognize God’s work in our lives because it doesn’t arrive in the way we imagined or expected?

Like Moses’ detractors and Jesus’ detractors centuries later, we often fail to understand the very things God is rescuing us from. As creatures of a material world, made up of molecules and living in the day-to-day, we focus on the material and the molecular. We want better health, good government and a good economy. And while those are good things, God wants to rescue us from so much more--from death, sin and eternal destruction. His picture of our future is so much bigger, his concerns for us so much greater than what we see or understand.

Taking off our sandals is literally an act which brings home to us in a way few things can that we are in the presence of our Superior. God is not our peer or our buddy. He is sovereign ruler and creator of the Cosmos. And of us.

Taking off our sandals reminds us that we can trust that His work in our lives will be of even greater value than our focused frustrations with bills, illness or the disappointments and struggles of our lives.

Yes, He also wants us to ask for our “daily bread” and He numbers every hair on our head. And if he clothes the flowers in the field we can trust that He will care for us too. God reassured Moses that He heard the groanings of His people and that He was coming to rescue them. God cares for us and about us. But He is also God and worthy of our trust even when life happens in ways we don’t understand.

God’s purpose is bigger. His ways are not our own. We are asked to trust Him--take off our sandals and simply know that He is God.