12.07.2008

God is my lover


To be loved is to be known and to be known is to be loved…

Moving away from home was harder than I ever imagined. I knew it would not be easy but I never thought it would be quite this hard. I knew that I would be lonely but I never imagined loneliness would feel quite this lonely. I moved away from all of the friends I had ever known and the majority of my family. I felt completely alone. Sure I have made some friends in the city I will call my home for the next few years, but there is a problem; they do not know me. People here are beginning to get to know me but nothing will ever replace the ten-year friendships that have formed by way of fun and laughter, but also by way of hardship and tears.

In my moments of loneliness something beautiful happened to me; God met with me. He transcended and filled this longing in my soul for something deep, something great. This feeling was tangible and I fell in love. It felt much like looking into the eyes of your first love and feeling a sense of oneness and completeness with them. Except this time I knew what I had been missing all of these years and why I had felt the need to constantly have a girlfriend. I was trying to fill this void in my soul, a longing for connection with God.

While all of this was taking place my roommate Adam mentioned something to me, a thought that I had never entertained. Our marriage relationship on earth points to and is directly related to our relationship with Christ. How could I have missed the parallels? Paul writes clearly in the book of Ephesians, “Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself for her[i]”. We are the church and the church is the bride of Christ. Isaiah prophesied about this saying, “I will greatly rejoice in the Lord; my soul shall exult in my God, for he has clothed me with garments of salvation; as a bride groom decks himself like a priest with a beautiful headdress, and as a bride adorns herself with her jewels.2” It is a love story. It is our love story.

We have been born into a sinful world, born into darkness and are disconnected from God and as a sinful people we are unable to approach God because He is righteous and we are not, He is light and we are not. Therefore he must sanctify us, bringing us into righteous in Him, allowing us to have a relationship with the Father. John puts it like this, “In him was life, and the life was the light of men. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it[ii]. ”

God desires to have a relationship with us and desires to bring us back to Himself, reuniting us with him.

It’s a love story and his bride has cold feet.

Hosea prophesies about the unfaithfulness of Christ’s bride saying, “For their mother has played the whore; she who conceived them has acted shamefully. For she said ‘I will go after my lovers, who give me my bread and my water, my wool and my flax, my oil and my drink.’ “. It gets so bad that God sends His son Jesus to live perfectly and die as an ultimate sacrifice for the sins of his bride.

Once Jesus spoke to a crowd of Jewish people in Capernaum saying, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him[iii].” This is such a beautiful metaphor because the Jewish custom was for the Father to send someone he trusts to the bride’s family to find out the price for their daughter, and then the family would have the option of giving consent[iv]. So we see God the Father sending the Holy Spirit to the bride and drawing her to Jesus.

We are adulterous and God still loves us. He sends his son to suffer and die for us because He loves us. He sends his Holy Spirit to beckon us to come back to him even though we keep running away. The really beautiful part is when we come back to him. In the Bible we read a story about a guy who asks his father for his inheritance, leaves town, squanders his money and winds up having to eat pig slop to survive. When he finally decides to go back and beg for forgiveness, his father sees him off in the distance and runs out to greet his son and then throws him a party![v]

“For thousands of years, the poets have known that love is risky. There’s a scene in the Song of Songs, a collection of poems in the Bible, where the woman sees her lover, whom she calls her “beloved’ and he’s coming toward her. She says, “look! Here he comes, leaping across the mountains, bounding over the hills.”[vi] When he makes it to her house he invites her to join him saying, “arise, come, my darling; my beautiful one, come with me.” This guy has just put himself out there. The ball is in her court. Does she leave the safety of her home and run off with him? Love is risky. What if it doesn’t work out?

The beauty of our relationship with Jesus Christ is that this love isn’t risky. He is our constant lover and if we stray, He pursues us like a Sheppard pursues a lost sheep. And rejoices when we turn back to him[vii]. God’s love is not risky.

God gives us the gift of marriage here on earth so that we may have a deeper understanding of who God is. In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul says, “For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.[viii]” This is why there is no need for marriage in heaven. We will no longer need a mirror relationship. We will be fully face-to-face and fully known by God!

Our marriages here on earth points to what it will be like when we are face to face with Jesus, our lover. Every characteristic of our marriage relationship has the potential to either point to Christ or to point away from Christ. Think about it! Every time we live out giving love, grace and mercy to our significant other we are showing them how loving, graceful and merciful God is.

Marriage is not just about playing the game of life. It’s about something so much bigger! It all points to God. God works through us in order to glorify and show himself to each one of us.

Our lover is standing behind our wall, gazing through the windows, looking through the lattice. He is speaking to us saying “arise my love, my beautiful one, and come away, for behold the winter is past; the rain is over and gone. The flowers appear on earth, the time of singing has come and the voice of the turtledove is heard in our land. The fig tree ripens its figs, and the vines are in blossom; they give forth fragrance. Arise, my love, my beautiful one, and come away.[ix]” He is inviting us to live a new life in Him, a life of love without risk.

“ ‘Hallelujah! For the Lord God Almighty Reigns. Let us rejoice and exult and give him glory, for the marriage of the Lamb has come, and his Bride has made herself ready; it was granted her to clothe herself with fine linen, bright and pure’ for the linen is the righteousness deeds of the saints.[x]

“…Blessed are those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb…[xi]

 


 

[i] Ephesians 5:25

2 Isaiah 61:10

[ii] John 1:4-5

[iii] John 6:44

[iv] We see this custom played out in Genesis Chapter 24 when Abraham sends his servant to find a wife for Isaac.

[v] The story of the prodigal son is told in Luke 15:11-24

[vi] Bell, Rob. Sex God: exploring the endless connections between sexuality and spirituality. Zondervan, 2007.

[vii] Luke 15:7

[viii] 1st Corinthians 13:12

[ix] Song of Solomon 2:8-13

[x] Revelation 19:7-8

[xi] Revelation 19:9