The God Who Walks Toward You

There is a technique that experienced wedding photographers learn early in their craft. When the music begins and every guest rises to catch the first glimpse of the bride, the photographer does not turn with the crowd. Instead, the camera swings in the opposite direction, toward the groom. Because the most breathtaking image in that moment is not the bride walking down the aisle. It is the face of the man watching her arrive. Every other person in the room disappears. The flowers, the music, the audience, all of it fades. There is only her. Grown men, tough men, find themselves speechless, tears moving down their faces, undone by the sight of the person they love most.

That image captures something true about Christianity that no theological definition quite manages to say. You can read books about love. You can study its chemistry or debate its philosophy. But eventually, love is not an idea. Love is a person. And an encounter with the right person changes everything.

That is exactly what happened one afternoon in Galilee when Jesus walked past a tax booth and a man named Matthew was sitting behind it.

A Man Everyone Else Had Written Off

Matthew was not a popular figure. Tax collectors in first-century Israel were widely regarded as traitors, men who had sold their loyalty to Rome in exchange for personal profit. They were permitted to collect more than the official tax, and most of them did. The community knew what Matthew was. They had a label for him, and they wore that label out.

But when Jesus passed by, the text in Matthew 9 says simply that he saw him. Two small words carrying enormous weight. Everyone saw Matthew. The difference is what they saw. The crowd saw a collaborator, a thief, a disappointment. They saw the worst thing about him and decided it was the truest thing about him.

Jesus saw more. He saw the man sitting behind that booth, yes, including everything Matthew had done and become. Jesus never looks at sin through rose-colored glasses. But he also saw what grace could make of this man. He saw a future disciple, a future apostle, a future author of good news. While everyone else read Matthew’s story as finished, Jesus saw it as barely begun.

Before the Shame, There Was Glory

To understand why any of this matters, you have to go back further than Matthew. Further than Rome or Moses or Abraham. All the way back to a garden, and to the first thing the Bible says about human beings.

In Genesis 1:26, God declares his intention to make humanity in his image and likeness, to give them dignity, purpose, and dominion over creation. Before there was shame, there was glory. Before there was hiding, there was home. Human beings were not created as problems to be managed. They were created as beloved children, made to reflect God’s character into the world, to receive life from him and pour it out generously.

But something went wrong. Adam and Eve reached out to grasp for themselves what could only be enjoyed in relationship with God. And the moment they did, everything curved inward. They hid. They blamed. They covered themselves. The image of God in them was not erased, but it was badly disfigured. And that disfigurement has been the family inheritance ever since.

This is not a flattering picture of humanity. But it may be a relieving one. Because the Bible is not singling anyone out. It is describing all of us. Some of us simply hide the cracks more convincingly than others. We are all, in our own way, sitting behind a tax booth of our own making, wondering how we became this person.

The God Who Comes Looking

Here is the remarkable thing about the story in Genesis 3. After Adam and Eve hide, God does not wait for them to find their way back. He comes looking. “Where are you?” he calls. Not because he had lost track of them. He knew exactly where they were. The question was for them. It was an invitation to stop hiding.

That pattern runs through the entire Bible. God comes to Abraham. God comes to Israel in slavery. God comes to a tax collector in Galilee. The whole story is the story of God walking toward people who are not walking toward him.

And so Jesus walks up to Matthew and says two words: “Follow me.”

No sermon. No list of requirements. No instruction to get his life together first. Just an invitation. And Matthew gets up. He leaves the booth, the income, the security, the identity he had built, and he follows.

The Last Adam

The Apostle Paul describes Jesus as the last Adam (1 Corinthians 15:45). The comparison is deliberate and stunning. The first Adam stood at the head of humanity and passed down an inheritance of sin, shame, fear, and death. The last Adam came to stand in his place and offer an entirely different inheritance.

Where the first Adam distrusted God and grasped for what was not his, Jesus trusted his Father completely. Where the first Adam hid behind a tree to cover his shame, Jesus was nailed to a tree to bear ours. Where the first Adam blamed his bride, Jesus took the blame for his. As 2 Corinthians 5:21 describes it, Jesus took what was ours so that we could receive what is his. Our guilt became his. His righteousness becomes ours.

The gospel is not an invitation to try harder at being a better version of yourself. It is the announcement that the Creator has entered his creation to bring his lost children home.

A Table for the Undeserving

After Matthew gets up and follows Jesus, the first thing he does is throw a dinner party. He fills his table with the only people willing to come: other tax collectors, outsiders, people the respectable crowd had written off. The religious leaders are scandalized. Jesus is unbothered. “Those who are well have no need of a physician,” he says in Matthew 9:12, “but those who are sick.”

This is exactly where he belongs, because these are exactly the people he came for.

The invitation has not changed. It is still extended to the same kind of people: imperfect, inconsistent, still-being-formed people who know they cannot fix themselves. The requirement for coming to Jesus is not that you have it together. The requirement is that you know you do not.

He is still walking toward you. He already knows everything you are hiding. And he is coming anyway.