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 Hearts
Revealed, part 2: God
The Stories of Genesis
October 27, 2002
There inevitably comes a point in every relationship when you have to decide to begin to trust your heart to somebody else. Maybe you’ve been hanging out with an acquaintance from work or school—you have found common interests, maybe this person likes the same music or movies as you do, maybe you play the same sports, or like to hang out at the same spots, or you both have kids the same age. Somehow there is a connection. Your relationship of acquaintance is developing into a relationship of friendship. But there comes a point in your conversation when you have to expose something about yourself—and it is in that moment that you must decide,
“Can I trust my heart to this person? If I open up like this, I risk being disappointed and hurt. This person might take that information and use it against me, or (what might even be worse) they might not really even care.”
So you make the decision—to take the risk or not. If you do not open up, you will remain shallow in your friendship, happy to a point but missing so much more of what human relationships are meant to be. If you do open up, you can dive deeper into what it means to be a human being in relationship, but you also run the risk of being hurt. The question that burns in the depths of your being is this:
“Can I trust my heart to someone?”
Of course, nowhere is this more played out than in that interesting game that we call “dating.” A guy and a girl meet, they find each other attractive for one reason or another, and they go out on their first date. And what do they do in order to develop a deepening relationship with each other of mutual trust, opening their hearts up to one another?
They go to the movies.
They sit side by side in a dark movie theatre that is way too loud with way too many explosions and where the couples on the screen do not take the time to develop their relationships before they jump into bed with each other. Then they drive home and wonder if they too will be able to develop that kind of intimacy with that other person sitting in the car.
Somewhere along the journey of relationships, though, a heart-to-heart connection sometimes can occur. You might find somebody who you can talk with into the early morning hours, when all you want to do is dive deeper into knowing that person, and are not overwhelmed by whether or not you might make out on the couch. And as you start getting into that heart-connection conversation, you realize that you have to make that decision again.
“Can I trust my heart to this person? If I open up like this, I risk being disappointed and hurt. This person might take that information and use it against me, or (what might even be worse) they might not really even care. It might just be easier to get physical, so that my heart-need for intimacy might be satiated for a moment, but there is less risk involved.”
So you make the decision—to take the risk or not. To trust your heart to someone is to allow yourself into the joy of a relationship that may eventually lead to marriage. To not trust might be safer, but it does not have any great rewards. This is why break-ups are so often ugly, and why divorce is particularly ugly. It is the ripping apart of two hearts that have been joined together in trust.
What we experience in our relationships on earth is only a mirror of what is true for us spiritually.
When we hear Christians say that God is love and read verses from the Bible saying that
“God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son…”
(John 3:16) and then the Son himself telling us that the most important command is to
“Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength”
(Mark 12:30), we quite naturally
wonder, “Is God really asking me to love him back? Can I DO THAT? Can I trust God with my heart? Isn’t he out to get me? Doesn’t he hate me for being so sinful? What is the heart of God toward me? If he is wrathful toward me, then I cannot trust my heart to him. He seems so distant from me—if only he would show his heart to me so that I could trust my heart to him!”
You see, making matters more difficult are our preconceptions of God. We might picture God as wrathful; we might picture preachers screaming Hellfire and Brimstone. The predominant image of Christianity is a judgmental man on a talk show damning all who do not believe exactly as he does. With these images in our heads conflicting with the message that God loves me and has a wonderful plan for my life, I have to be guarded. I must protect my heart!
Today I want us to explore the story of God’s love displayed throughout the Bible. My understanding of the Bible is this: It is God’s written love-letter to us. God is the lover of our souls, seeking to let us know him through this love letter. Like someone seeking to let the object of affection get to know him, he writes a full-orbed account of his life—explaining through these stories who he is and what he is like and the lengths to which he goes to win the hearts of those he loves.
That is the Bible. That is our message today. We want, no, we NEED to know that God’s heart is good.
If I am asked to give my heart back to God, if I am going to take the risk of loving God with everything that is within me (heart, soul, mind, and strength), then I had better know that I can trust my heart to him.
So let’s start at the beginning—Genesis 1. “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.” (Genesis 1:1)
1. God’s creation of the cosmos shows his heart.
When you look at the paintings of different artists, or listen to the music of varying artists, or watch movie by diverse directors, or read books by different writers, within that which they created you see either a heart full of the love and beauty, or a heart that is tortured by an obsession with darkness.
Kurt Cobain was a troubled man, taking his life at an early age. When you listen to the music of his rock band, Nirvana, you hear the angst, the suffering soul. His creation shows his heart. When you listen to the symphonies of Bach, you hear the heart of a joyful and worshipful person.
When we look at creation, we get a hint of the heart of God. What do you learn of God when you go for a walk on a crisp Autumn day? When you go to the ocean? What kind of person would have created this symphony?
Psalm 19 starts out with words that reflect our awe when we stop and reflect on all that has been created.
“The heavens tell of the glory of God.
The skies display his marvelous craftsmanship.
Day after day they continue to speak;
night after night they make him known.”
Dallas Willard relates a story of when he went to the beach.
“…when we came over the rise where the sea and land opened up to us, I stood in stunned silence and then slowly walked toward the waves. Words cannot capture the view that confronted me. I saw space and light and texture and color and power…that seemed hardly of this earth. Gradually there crept into my head the realization that God sees this all the time. He sees it, experiences it, knows it from every possible point of view, this and billions of other scenes like and unlike it, in this and billions of other worlds. Great tidal waves of joy must constantly wash through his being. It is perhaps strange to say, but suddenly I was extremely happy for God and thought I had a sense of what an infinitely joyous consciousness he is and of what it might have meant for him to look at his creation and find it ‘very good.’…he is simply one great inexhaustible and eternal experience of all that is good and true and beautiful and right. This is what we must think of when we heat theologians and philosophers speak of him as a perfect being. This is his life.”
Does it seem odd to you to think of God as a person who can experience beauty and happiness? Perhaps you need to begin to think of God in more personal terms. God is person, and he wants to show you his heart—that he loves you. And what God has created shows his heart.
And even before he created all this, he was thinking of you.
2. God’s eternal love for you shows his heart.
Listen to Eugene Peterson’s paraphrase of Ephesians 1.
“Long before he laid down the earth’s foundation, [God] had us in mind, had settled on us as the focus of his love, to be made whole and holy by his love…Long before we first heard of Christ and got our hopes up, he had his eye on us, had designs on us for glorious living.”
(The Message)
John Eldredge (in The Sacred Romance Workbook and Journal) tells us that when we receive a greeting card from a far-off friend that simply says, “Thinking of You” we are reminded that
“we are loved because we are remembered, we are in the thoughts of someone who might be far away. Though time and space separate us, how comforting to hear that we are not forgotten…What is it like to consider that God has been thinking of you for a very, very long time?”
So, even before God’s creation revealed his heart of joy and goodness, his heart was already focused on loving you and me. That is the heart of God.
3. God’s creation of us shows his heart.
When God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness” (Genesis 1:26), he created beings bearing his ability to love and relate and rule. He gave us deep and rich and wondrous hearts capable of loving and laughing and living to the utmost. What does this tell me about God’s heart? If everything that is good in us is a reflection of all that is in God, then God must have a very good heart indeed.
And the fact that he has given us freedom to love him also indicates his heart. If I were to create something to love me, I would create something closer to a dog. Your dog loves you no matter what. Lick, lick, wag the tail, “Oh boy, oh boy! Daddy’s home! I LOOOOOOVE You!” No matter what you do to some dogs, they just come back for more!”
Or I would create a robot to love me unconditionally. In the movie, AI, a robot boy is created by a company seeking to make a profit. This little boy robot is programmed to love his mommy no matter what, even to the degree that the movie seems sad in showing the robot boy’s compulsion to love. Is the love real? Or is it a program? Does the little boy robot have the free-will choice not to love?
That is the difference with God. His creation of us shows his risk-taking love. God is willing to take the risk with us by creating individuals who can freely choose to love him back or to turn our backs on him. It is our choice—a very real choice.
Robots must serve; free-will creatures love.
Robots cannot truly love. God gives you and me the ability to love by giving us the ability to not love. What does this tell us about God’s heart?
Eldredge writes, “The whole thing turns on the issue of love. If you want a world where love really matters, then you have to have a world where we have free will. Love is love only when it’s freely chosen. And to give us free will, and not to take it back when we misuse it, means that God has to take a tremendous risk.”
What is that risk? The same as when you risk loving someone. That love might be betrayed.
4. The Fall shows God’s heart.
How have you understood the fall of Adam and Eve in the Garden? As a crime of disobedience? I hear God’s anguish when Adam confesses what they did.
“What is this you have done?” (Genesis 3:13).
The Fall is not just a crime of disobedience. It is a betrayal of God’s love. It is Adam and Eve deciding to step out of the trusting love relationship they have had with the lover of their souls. I think that when they chose to eat the forbidden fruit, God must have felt like a jilted lover, he must have felt like he caught his spouse sleeping with someone else.
This shows the heart of God. He has risked the possibility that his most beloved creatures would have the free-will to not love him. And when they indeed choose not to love him, you can imagine the hurt in his heart. A good heart hurts when its love is scorned.
What do most people do when they catch their loved one cheating on them? Divorce is the first thought in their heads. What does God do? He shows grace. The consequences of Adam and Eve’s sin could not be reversed, but God placed into motion events that would be redemptive for Adam and Eve and all their children.
The first thing he did was make for them clothing of animal skins to cover them.
“The LORD God made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them.”
(Genesis 3:21) Theologians see a spiritual significance here—God sacrifices the first animals in order to cover that which shames humanity. This is a foreshadowing of the ultimate sacrifice of Jesus Christ to cover our sin.
Next, he places them out of the Garden. While we may see this as part of their punishment, maybe we should see it as something else. Adam and Eve could never regain their innocence, so it would be a terrible thing for them to have access to the Tree of Life, for that would mean that they would live forever in their sinful bodies, with their falleness never ending. Instead, God says,
“He must not be allowed to reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever”
(Genesis 3:22). In other words, Adam and Eve will now die physically, but that will give them the opportunity to live spiritually innocent again, since God has covered them with the sacrifice.
The Fall shows God’s heart in that when he is obviously hurt by being scorned, he continues to show love by doing what only One with pure love would do.
And he continued to seek to woo back his people into that love relationship with him.
5. The Old Testament shows God’s heart.
The entire Old Testament, when you read it and seek to understand God’s heart from it, shows a God who continually is seeking to woo people back to himself.
Philip Yancey writes, “In the Prophets, two images prevail: that of an angry parent and that of a spurned lover…When [God’s] love is spurned, even the Lord of the Universe feels in some way like a parent who has lost what she values most, or a mother hen who watches helplessly as her brood flees toward danger. In Jeremiah the speeches shift, sometimes in mid-sentence, from the parental point of view to that of a lover. Again and again God uses the startling language of a cuckolded lover. He says of Judah, “You are a swift she-camel running here and there, a wild donkey accustomed to the desert, sniffing the wind in her craving—in her heat who can restrain her?” (2:23-24)
“The tone of God’s speeches in Jeremiah varies wildly, moving abruptly from these outraged cries of pain to warm entreaties of love, and then to desperate pleas for a new start. The wild swings of mood may be baffling—unless you’ve been through an experience such as God describes. He is responding like a jilted lover.
“As I read through the pages of the Bible, I was haunted by the reality of a God who lets our response to him matter that much…After two weeks of reading the entire Bible, I came away with a strong sense that God doesn’t care so much about being analyzed. Mainly—like any parent, like any lover—he wants to be loved.”
The Old Testament is story after story of God going to tremendous lengths to show his love to a people who continually spurn his love. Even though He sees himself as their “husband,” they turn their back on him and leave him as a jilted lover. So God goes to the ultimate length to show his love—he dies for those he loves.
6. The New Testament shows God’s heart.
John Eldgredge writes, “The Incarnation, the life and death of Jesus, answers once and for all the question, ‘What is God’s heart toward me?’ This is why Paul says in Romans 5, ‘Look here, at the Cross. Here is the demonstration of God’s heart. At the point of our deepest betrayal, when we had run our furthest from him and gotten so lost in the woods we could never find our way home, God came and died to rescue us.’ We don’t have to wait for the Incarnation to…learn something of his motives. But after the Incarnation there can be no doubt.”
Look again at those verses that we think we understand:
“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him.” (John 3:16-17)
God so LOVED…God did not send his Son…TO CONDEMN…but TO SAVE.
The heart of God displayed.
“This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.”
(1 John 4:10)
How have you understood the death of Christ? As some obscure, gruesome thing to make you feel guilty of your sin, or as the ultimate act of sacrificial love? The greatest heroes are those who give up their lives for the sake of others. We rightfully honor the firefighters who lost their lives as they rushed up the World Trade Center Towers, or those brave people on Flight 93 who gave up their lives to perhaps save the White House from being destroyed. That is heroism.
Who is my greatest hero? Jesus of Nazareth. This was God in the flesh who came to earth for the primary purpose of giving up his life for me. This was the ultimate act of love.
And now, God says to us, “Will you love me back?”
I would expect Jesus to answer the question “Of all the commandments, which is the most important?” with something like, “Obey your Lord, no matter what. He is, after all, God!”
But Jesus’ answer is shocking when you think about it.
“The most important one,” answered Jesus,
“is this: ‘Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater than these.” (Mark 12:29-31)
The most important thing to God is our LOVE. Our sacrifices of worship are meaningless if our hearts are not motivated by love.
That shows his heart to us, doesn’t it? He wants us to obey him not out of “have to” but out of “want to,” out of the motivation of LOVE. He wants a RELATIONSHIP with us more than a bunch of puppets who go through the motions of religion.
So can you trust your heart to God? Can you love him with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength? Yes, you can. And when you do, when you trust him with your heart, you will find the satisfaction of the deepest love relationship the human heart can experience.
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