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Hidden Love

Wednesday, June 27th, 2012 | Author:

See how great a love the Father has bestowed upon us, that we should be called the children of God; and such we are.  For this reason the world does not know us, because it did not know Him.  1 John 3:1  NASB

For this reason – Did you notice that John claims the world doesn’t know us because we have experienced the love of the Father?  Does this call into question most of what we have been taught about God’s love?  Have you heard the usual claim that once God’s love takes over in your life, the world will see it and want to know more?  Doesn’t John imply just the opposite?  How do we make sense of this backwards statement?

It seems to me that we must first recognize what John says is true – regardless of our theological platitudes.  When God’s great love saturates our lives, we become unexplainable oddities in the world.  We just don’t fit anymore.  We act against expectations.  We think in different ways.  We stand outside the paradigm and are outlaws to the world’s economy.  It is God’s love that makes us strange – so strange that we often appear insanely fanatical and are written off because of this.  Yeshua said much the same thing when he warned his followers not to expect any sympathy from the world.  In fact, the world is our enemy.

And that is precisely the basis for our insanity.  Because we love our enemies.

Adin Steinsaltz says, “Love begins when this caring is not only an objective appraisal, but becomes a personal attachment, when the object is not just ‘a thing’ or ‘a person’ that is judged by itself, but when one becomes involved in the relationship.”[1]  And relationships require involvement and time – lots of time.  “Love is something that people have to learn,” says Steinsaltz.  He notes that any relationship that provides gainful benefit to the subject (the one loving) is not selfless love.  Such love, common to most of our involvements, actually functions as a means for enhancing our own image.  If we love because we recognize the other as loveable, doesn’t that mean that we gain something of personal value from the arrangement?  Steinsaltz remarks, “What matters is the relationship, not the benefits derived from it.  My beloved exists, and therefore all is well.”[2]

My observation is that most people love in order to be loved.  It is the mutual equation of gratification that matters.  But this certainly isn’t true of God.  God loves – and in His relationship with the creation, all is right with the world.  God loves us – and it is the relationship that matters, nothing more or less.

Perhaps we have missed the point entirely.  Perhaps our attempts to love our enemies are not based in the joy of their very existence but rather in our desire to “bring them into the fold.”  The transparency of our exchange equation causes them to recognize that we do not love them because they are, but rather for what we wish them to be.  Can you imagine if God determined to love on such a basis?

The world does not know us when we love others simply for the joy of their existence.  Such love defeats all exchange value and reflects the face of the Creator.  But until this love is hidden in our hearts, we are recognized for what we really are – religiously converted exchange takers.

Topical Index:  love, relationship, 1 John 3:1, for this reason, hidden


[1] Adin Steinsaltz, Simple Words, p. 189.

[2] Ibid. p. 200.

Category: Today's Word  | Tags: , , , ,  | 28 Comments

God in the Dark

Sunday, March 06th, 2011 | Author:

“Why is light given to a man whose way is hidden and whom God has hedged in?” Job 3:23  NASB

Hidden – We all want to know what’s really happening.  Too bad life doesn’t tell us.  That’s pretty much the summary of real human existence.  I don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow.  Neither do you.  No one does.  Our paths are hidden.  In spite of our delusion that we can plan for the future, the future is as opaque as coal.  Great plans often fail, not because they weren’t great but because the tide of time is controlled by no man.

The Hebrew verb sathar is the perfect word for this situation.  In this verse, it is passive.  That means we receive the action of someone else who is hiding my path from me.  That someone else is God.  Sathar means preventing someone from knowing or seeing something.  Who else could prevent us from seeing the path we so desperately need to know?  As Job says, “God hedges us in.”  I know I have felt this kind of constraint.  Maybe you have too.  Maybe we are not so far from Job after all, even if we are not blameless and upright.

Why would God do this?  Why would He make it so difficult to know the way?  Wouldn’t it be so much easier if God just delivered His daily orders to each of us when we got out of bed?  If we are in the King’s army, why is the General so often silent?  That’s no way to run the military.

I can think of two acceptable answers.  I can think of more unacceptable ones (like God doesn’t care), but they contradict the character of the God of Scripture, so they can’t be correct.  The first acceptable answer is this:  God protects me by not letting me see where I am going.  This might sound paradoxical, but think of it like this.  If I wanted my children to grow up with the experience of free choice consequences, of real fulfillment and some sense of self-direction, would I outline for them a full life plan, every corner and curve already in place and then ask them to just follow the bouncing ball?  Of course not!  I would oversee their decisions, provide good advice and help to shape their thinking, but I would not take away their own choices.  Furthermore, I would realize that if I told them everything that would happen to them during a lifetime of choices, they might be unwilling to go forward.  The specter of failure, the height of the obstacles and the possibility of injury might dissuade them from even trying.  I would protect them by not telling them too much.

That leads directly to the second acceptable answer.  Yeshua hinted at the answer when He said, “I have many things to say to you but you cannot bear them now” (John 16:12).  Perhaps God hides our path because we are not yet strong enough to bear what He would love to reveal.  Growth takes time – sometimes a long time.  Consider Abraham.  One hundred years before the mast summarizes his life (to borrow a Herman Melville metaphor).  Then he saw the path.  Then he knew.  But until he reached the place of Moriah, he could not bear what God would reveal.

Where are we today?  Are we sulking in unacceptable answers, answers that challenge the character of God?  Or do we assume God is protecting us even in our discomfort with the unknown?  Or are we still too weak to bear it?

Topical Index:  hidden, sathar, John 16:12, Job 3:23

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The Hidden God

Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009 | Author:

“Yet these things you have concealed in Your heart; I know that this is within You.” Job 10:13

Concealed – Job’s complaint is our complaint.  In the time of his crisis, he cries out to God.  “I loathe my life.  You made me, Lord.  You know everything about me.  You understand me right to the core.  And You can do with me as You wish, for You are my creator.  But, Lord, why?  Why do you churn me like butter?  Why do you pour me out like spilt milk?  I know that You are loving and kind and full of grace.  I know this!  But yet, these things seem hidden from me.”

The Hebrew word tsafan is used for concealing something, like hiding the baby Moses from Pharaoh.  It has both positive (God treasures His people) and negative (the wicked lie in wait) applications.  Perhaps most intriguing are the occasions when this word is used to describe God’s hidden and secret actions and habitation (see Ezekiel 7:22).  The consonants Tsadik-Pey-Nun paint the picture, “a desire or need to open or speak life.”  God conceals what must be revealed if we are to have life.  Does that mean He is an ogre, maliciously withholding something essential for living?  May it never be!  What it means is that God understands the mystery of existence and we recognize that He alone plumbs the depth of this mystery.  What it means is that everything is not reducible to a known set of universal laws.  Behind it all is mystery.  To stand in the presence of God is to face the unknowable, not just the unknown.  The result should be awe.

But we live in a world dominated by the paradigm of the supremacy of reason.  We think everything can be explained, including God.  That’s why we expend centuries of effort writing systematic theologies.  We attempt to reduce the experience of the mystery to a set of explainable categories.  We have a well-thought-out God; not a God of unique and hidden splendor.  In our culture, truth is timeless and detached.  It consists of uniform laws that govern all repeatable events.  Truth is discovered by uncovering these eternal, comprehensive rules of operation.  And whatever cannot be explained according to the timeless laws of the cosmos is really not real at all.

The biblical view is radically different.  “Here truth is not timeless and detached from the world but a way of living and involved in all the acts of God and man.  The word of God is not an object of contemplation.  The word of God must become history” (emphasis added).[1] Contemplate this insight.  Biblical revelation, God’s disclosure of His point of view about us, is tied directly to unrepeatable, unique historical events.  It comes from outside the schemata of general laws.  It has no precedent and no subsequent parallel.  If we are to understand, we must realize that God’s word is, in itself, an incarnation.  It is God becoming history – our history.  The hidden mystery of God splits our chronos, repeatable experience and leaves us with a slice of the divine, exploded in an event in life here and now.  The hidden quality of God is discovered in His desire to open a window into heaven.  It could not be more momentous.

Is that what you realize when you read His word?  Do you find yourself captured by a mystery?  Are you consumed by the event of His disclosure, stunned by His presence?  Do you read the words trembling that God allows you to peek behind the curtain, even if only for a split second?  Are you in awe?

Or do you read in order to categorize, systematize and universalize?

Topical Index:  hidden, tsafan, Job 10:13, disclose

[1] Abraham Heschel, God In Search Of Man, pp. 196-197

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The Other Point Of View

Friday, February 27th, 2009 | Author:

on earth, as it is in heaven  Matthew 6:10 

Earth/ Heaven – Startling!  Uncomfortable!  Of course, it isn’t for us because we are not saturated in the Hebrew Scriptures.  But the disciples were.  They would have expected “heaven and earth” not “earth and heaven.”  Glance through the Old Testament and you will find the phrase over and over, but not in the order that Yeshua suggests.  Why?

Don’t you find it a little uncomfortable that even in this so-familiar prayer there are many things that should have caused us to ask questions?  Isn’t it just a bit disturbing that we never really asked?  Maybe we have been so anesthetized by our own religious culture that we really don’t hear what Yeshua is saying.  We need to go back.  We need to pry and dig and question and wonder – all the time – in order to get out of the insulating shell of our religious training.  If we want to see the wonder of Jesus’ insight and education, we have to somehow ask deeper questions.

Heaven and earth is a pretty big question.  The reason that the Hebrew Scriptures use the words in this order (heaven, and then earth) is that the Hebrew Scriptures are about God, not about men.  All authority belongs to the Creator of the heavens and the earth.  The perspective of the divine revelation is from heaven.  Sure, God deals with those on earth, but His involvement has a cosmic point of view.  This isn’t the local fertility god we’re dealing with here.  This is El Shaddai – the Almighty.

Then Yeshua shifts the perspective.  Now we are praying, and that means we must recognize our footing, not God’s.  What we see is that Yeshua’s model prayer assumes that there is a disparity between earth and heaven.  This is not the viewpoint of the sovereign God.  His will is always done.  This is the viewpoint of the man who has just declared that the Father will be manifest in him.  From our point of view, God’s sovereignty must still become our reality.  It is earth and heaven until the Father rules and reigns over all.  Then we will return to the beginning, when God created the heavens and the earth.

But that does not mean that this petition is consumed in human effort or human vision.  No, it is still about the inscrutable will of God.  The creation is still His.  What we voice in this petition is our desire to see Him govern without opposition, in us and in all His creation.  In addition, this petition calls for the revelation of God’s active will in earth as it is in heaven.  No being in the heavenly realm has a single doubt about the power and majesty of God, nor do they lack visible demonstrations of His might and glory.  But we do!  “The will of God in both past and present goes almost in secrecy through the world” (Lohmeyer).  And that’s the problem.  We must pray that His will becomes paramount here on earth; that the hidden hand of the Almighty be uncovered in us and revealed to the world.  That is what it means to be salt and light. 

Say these words with me.  “Your will be done, on earth, in me, in my house, in my neighborhood, in my city, in my culture – that You be manifest and that I be Your light – as it is in heaven.”

Topical Index:  heaven, earth, will, hidden, Matthew 6:10

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