Fierce love

Ezekiel 20 is one of the fiercest expressions of the love of God in the whole canon of Holy Scripture.  The majority of the chapter is given over to a narration of Israel's history, from the devastating perspective of the people's constant rebellion.  The Lord visited them in the land of Egypt, but they rebelled and would not listen (vv 1-8a); the Lord brought them out from there and taught them his good and life-giving laws, but they rejected his rules (vv 8b-13a); the Lord preserved them in the wilderness, but they turned after their idols (vv 13b-26); even after the Lord brought them into the land of promise, they filled the land with their idolatrous shrines (vv 27-31).  He has been good to them; they have been wantonly rebellious.

At each step along the way, the threat of destruction has loomed.  "Then I said I would pour out my wrath on them..."  But at each stage the Lord restrained his anger.  Why?  Because there was still something good about Israel?  Not at all!  There is no record of anything good here in Israel.  But God is good, and is determined in his love to have this people for his own.

“What is in your mind shall never happen—the thought, ‘Let us be like the nations, like the tribes of the countries, and worship wood and stone.’"

Israel wants to be free of God, despite all his blessings.  They want to be just like everyone else.  But God will not allow this.  Oh, he might let them chase after their idols for a time.  But in the end he will bring them into judgement (v 35), and bring them into the bond of the covenant (v 37).  It will happen.  He will be God to this people, and they will be his people.  Oh, their lives would be so much easier if he would just let them go.  But his commitment to them, his love for them, will not be denied.  It is a love that is not based in anything lovely in them - indeed, they have done everything to make themselves unlovely to him.  This is a love which depends wholly on the lover and not all on the beloved.  ("And you shall know that I am the Lord, when I deal with you for my name's sake, not according to your evil deeds..." v 44).  And therefore it is a love which endures.

It is also a love which burns (v 38, vv 45-49).  It is not weak.  It is not a devotion on the Lord's part which means that Israel can get away with anything, as if his love made him indulgent.  No, it is a fierce and determined love, the very fire of the Lord.

It is deeply comforting and frankly rather frightening.

Jesus wept

On Sunday our series in Luke at CCC finally reached Jerusalem, as we tackled 19:11-48.  I was struck again, as I have been before, by the way Jesus reacts as he comes over the hill and the holy city comes in sight: he bursts into tears.  Jerusalem, the city literally named after peace, has not chosen peace; the city which looked forward to the coming of the Messianic King has not recognised him or accepted him.  So Jesus wept over Jerusalem.

In Luke's Gospel this is the second lament over Jerusalem.  The first occurs in 13:31-35, and is if anything even more startling.  Jesus grieves over the city which kills the prophets and stones those sent to it as divine messengers.  And then he expresses his own frustration: "How often I would have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, but you would not."  It seems clear that when Jesus expresses his frustrated desire here he is referring not to anything that has happened in his earthly ministry, but to his actions as the eternal Word of God, the one who sent those prophets.  In other words, this is a concise summary of the Old Testament: the Word of God repeatedly reached out to rebellious Jerusalem to save and gather in, but Jerusalem was having none of it.

Just two observations:

Firstly, however we state our doctrine of the sovereignty of God, we are on dangerous ground if we rule out the idea that sin in some sense thwarts or turns aside the will of God.  Some strong statements of the doctrine of God's sovereignty - a doctrine, by the way, which I love and will happily defend and proclaim - make it sound like God stands symmetrically behind good and evil, behind the gracious turning of the penitent and the grievous hardening of the sinner.  I  don't think that is compatible with what Jesus reveals of God here.  I think we need to be willing to hold in tension that God will work his purposes out, and that God's will is in some sense frustrated.  Again, that God is sovereign means that ultimately this also is not symmetrical; he will triumph, will have his people, will work out all his good pleasure.  But it's a denial of revelation to rush to that point, or to allow it to undo the tension.  (I wonder whether the desire to reset the gospel as a system and not a narrative, which ends up effectively stripping it of eschatological force and forward momentum, might not lie behind this somewhere.)

Second, Jesus reveals God.  We can never say this too much.  If you want to know what God is like, look at Jesus.  If you want to know the heart of God, look at the tear-stained face of Jesus.  If we cannot read the character of God from the character of Jesus, then I do not believe we can know it at all.  That Christ weeps over Jerusalem - and he doesn't weep for himself, despite knowing what it coming, but he weeps over the city that has always rejected him and will finally hand him over for crucifixion - that Christ Jesus weeps over this city is a revelation of his love, and his love is the very love of God.

Giving Yourself

The good news is that God gives himself to us.  He gives himself in the sacrifice of his Son; he gives himself in the outpouring of the Spirit.  He gives himself as price, ransoming the lost, and he gives himself as presence, drawing near to the ransomed.  It is God himself who is given, and no lesser gift.  But...  God does not give himself away.  There is no risk of him losing himself in all this giving.  He is not conditioned by his giving; rather, the recipient of the gift is conditioned by his receiving of the gift.  Even as he goes to the cross, God gives himself, does not give himself away.  He remains the giver, not the one from whom anything is taken.

In Trinitarian terms, perhaps we might say that God the Father is supremely the guarantee that God does not lose control over his giving.  He gives himself in his Son and his Spirit, but he, in his own Person, remains always the giver even in his given-ness.

It is different for us.  We can hardly give ourselves without giving ourselves away.  To give ourselves is to lose ourselves; ultimately, the martyr loses himself - gives himself away.  But it is so in every little act of love.  We give ourselves, and in giving we lose ourselves.  We give ourselves away.  We are conditioned by our giving.  We diminish.

That is why the only key to radical self-giving is the remembrance that we are in the hand of the God who holds onto us even as we give ourselves away, and regathers all of the pieces of us that we have - at his command! - freely distributed and scattered throughout our lives in acts of self-giving love (and indeed without his command, in sinful acts of illegitimate attachment).  Without the promise that he, the giver who is not given away, holds onto us, how can we dare to give ourselves away?

Without the resurrection, how could we dare to let go of ourselves?

Electing love

"As this freely electing love the love of God for us is unconditional, strong and victorious.

It is a burning fire which cannot be quenched.

It is wholly trustworthy.

It is a rock to which we can cling without fear of its crumbling.

It is a refuge to which we can flee without doubting whether it will stand.

It is nourishment which is always prepared for those who hunger and thirst for love, and never withheld from them.

We have only to see that we are not worthy of it, that we have forfeited it, that we cannot secure it of and for ourselves, that we can only receive and accept it.  We can only long and trust that God is the freely electing God for us, and that we ourselves are freely elected by Him.  We then participate already in the unconditional nature and strength and victory of the love of God, in its sovereignty which consists in the fact that God is absolutely free to love man first irrespective of what he deserves or does not deserve.

We then find that we are loved by Him, and therefore genuinely, basically and effectively."

CD IV/2, p 767 (with my formatting)

How he loves us!

"God's loving is an end in itself.  All the purposes that are willed and achieved in him are contained and explained in this end, and therefore in this loving in itself and as such.  For this loving is itself the blessing that it communicates to the loved, and it is its own ground as against the loved.  Certainly in loving us God wills his own glory and our salvation.  But he does not love us because he wills this.  He wills it for the sake of his love."

-CD II/1, p 279

If you start your definition of God with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit - not with a series of attributes...

If you allow your understanding of God to be shaped by the story of redemption, of Israel and the church and the world - not by philosophical speculation...

If you see God truly and fully revealed in Jesus Christ - not a God lurking in the shadows...

That is when you begin to see that loving is not something God does as a means to end, whether that end is the display of his glory or the salvation of his people.  Love is the definition of who God is, because for all eternity the Father has loved the Son and the Son has loved the Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit.  The overflow of God's love to the world is simply God, being God.  It is his free love, it is grace, because there did not need to be anything outside of God to love at all, and given the fallen and rebellious state of what there is nothing is owed to the creation by God.  But when he loves it is nevertheless his nature.  This is who God is.

His love is first of all his eternal self-giving within the Godhead, and second of all his giving of himself in time in Jesus Christ.  He gives himself to us because he first of all gives himself to himself.  It is the love of God into which we are invited, in the unity of that same Holy Spirit who is in himself the love of Father for Son and Son for Father.

Behold, what manner of love..!

Love and Security

If it is true that perfect love drives out fear (and the Scripture cannot be broken!) then I am sure it is also the case that lingering fear drives out love.

This is a fairly obvious reflection on 1 Corinthians 13:4-7. So much unloving behaviour flows from my felt need to protect myself and my own reputation. I need to look out for number one - how can I possibly have time for being loving? Even resentment or irritability can be traced back to fear about my own identity or the way others perceive me. By reckoning up the wrongs others have done me and meditating on them - which is resentment - I am really just reinforcing my sense of having been in the right myself. By reacting instantly with anger to the slightest crossing of my own will - which is irritability - I reinforce my sense of being at the centre of the universe.

I would need to be so secure, so totally certain that I didn't need to look out for myself, to love in the way the Scripture demands. I would need to really believe that my identity is secure in Christ. I would need to be sure that God sees me truly and loves me unconditionally.

It reminds me a bit of Luther. Luther argued that mediaeval Catholicism had got people so busy chasing after their own justification that they were not able to love others. The money that should have gone to the poor went on indulgences; time that should have been devoted to service of others was wasted in pilgrimages. The Church had people so busy chasing righteousness that they didn't have time to be righteous! If justification were given by grace, on the other hand, and received only by faith - why, then people could be free to live a life of love.

How happy should I be?

We've been pondering love at church recently, working through 1 Corinthians 13. I've been challenged, rebuked and a little encouraged. It's been good.

Thinking through love, I think it's significant that the Bible doesn't exactly give us a definition of what love is. I suspect love is just too multifaceted a thing to be neatly defined. Instead, it offers us a model of love: the love of God for humanity, shown in Christ. What God does in Jesus - that's love.

It seems to me that one facet of love that we can see in Christ could be summarised like this: love is opening yourself up to the other, to the extent that your happiness depends on their good. In other words, love means I can't be happy unless the other person is prospering. Love is not the opposite of self-interest, but is extending self-interest to embrace and include other people. I want to be happy - that's natural; I can't be happy unless others are doing well - that's love.

Manifestly, people are not doing well in our world. So, how happy should I be?

Jesus was a man of sorrows, acquainted with suffering. Wasn't that because he loved the world, and pegged his own happiness to the good of the world? Through free love, God freely admitted his creation into his concern, and freely determined not to be happy without his creation.

My question is: was Jesus a man of sorrows so that I don't have to be, or was he a man of sorrows to show me what I ought to be?

God is love

Contra the mushy, somewhat insubstantial ideas of what this means that are floating around today, thus Karl Barth:

"...the love of God is, in fact, the communion of the Father with the Son, and therefore with the elected man Jesus and therefore with his people, and not in any sense a general divine love for man."

(CD II/2, p297)