This morning a chain of thought began as I watched my daughter going off to school. It’s difficult to explain but a wave of love suddenly welled up within me and I actually felt a physical pain within me. This started me thinking of God’s love for us. I have always said that I have begun to understand God’s love far more since having children. One of the images that God uses to illustrate God’s love for us is that of Parent-Child.
I love my children in a way that is different from the way I love my wife – not less, just different. The love I have for them is different from the love I felt in the early days of my relationship with my wife – that young love of infatuation that also caused a physical pain within me (you know what I mean). And I thought, “Wow! God loves me like that too. I wonder if it also causes that kind of pain for him?”
My children irritate me at times, they frustrate me, they even make me really angry at times – but I still love them with a love that is so deeply entrenched within me. One of my greatest fears is of something bad happening to them – it would . . . I don’t know really – but it would hurt – BIG TIME!!! It would even destroy a part of me. That’s how God loves us.
But then I thought, God also uses images of loving us like a spouse and even like a lover (just read Song of Songs). Then I thought of Hosea and how God used Hosea’s life to illustrate God’s love for us. God asked Hosea to marry a prostitute – an outcast, one who is un-loved and God asked Hosea to buy her back even after she had betrayed Hosea and ended up being sold into slavery – and God used Hosea to show how God loves us.
That’s how God loves us. Are you getting it? God’s love is BIG – VERY BEEEG!!!! And, nothing can separate us from that love.
In view of all this, what can we say? If God is for us, who can be against us? Certainly not God, who did not even keep back his own Son, but offered him for us all! He gave us his Son---will he not also freely give us all things? Who will accuse God's chosen people? God himself declares them not guilty! Who, then, will condemn them? Not Christ Jesus, who died, or rather, who was raised to life and is at the right side of God, pleading with him for us! Who, then, can separate us from the love of Christ? Can trouble do it, or hardship or persecution or hunger or poverty or danger or death? As the scripture says, "For your sake we are in danger of death at all times; we are treated like sheep that are going to be slaughtered." No, in all these things we have complete victory through him who loved us! For I am certain that nothing can separate us from his love: neither death nor life, neither angels nor other heavenly rulers or powers, neither the present nor the future, neither the world above nor the world below---there is nothing in all creation that will ever be able to separate us from the love of God which is ours through Christ Jesus our Lord. (Rom 8:31-39)
1 comment:
Hey! Found your blog through facebook and am enjoying it (though I suspect I am a bit more liberal in my theology than you are (?) ). At any rate, I can really relate to how being a parent changes how we understand God's love. Becoming a mother has totally transformed how I view God and how I understand how much God loves us (and has healed some of the self-hatred I used to carry around having been raised in a pretty misogynistic church where I was told that women were abusive and could unleash demons...). I wrote about that here: http://musings-musings-musings.blogspot.com/2008/07/loving-being-mama-part-1.html Anyway, glad to have stumbled upon your blog! :)
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