His Hand is on the Door

The Beauty of God, Pt. 1: the Beauty of the Sardius God…

July 31st, 2007

I never get tired of hearing about or meditating on the sardius God on His fiery throne in Revelation 4 and Daniel 7.  I love to think about the complete and total focus of God’s affections and emotions towards His creation.  My heart comes alive when I consider how comprehensive His involvement is with us and how fully committed He is to bring us into the fullness of relationship with Him.

I am captured by His wholeheartedness and His devotion, fueled by a fiery jealousy for us to be with Him.  When faced with love so consumed and complete, I have no choice but to work to respond in kind.  Such fiery passion leaves me no option towards lukewarm indifference - His stubborn, continual pursuit of my heart forces me to open myself to His invasive gaze.  The only other option to such abandoned pursuit of my affections is to close myself off from Him and forcibly and angrily retreat.  To be confronted with such zeal for my life - to come into understanding of how much He desires relationship with me - marks me as one incapable of being numb or unresponsive.

To be confronted with such a glorious, fiery, zealous passion can only evoke a passionate response from deep within me - a passionate “yes!” or an equally passionate “no!”  The provocation of the Holy Spirit on my heart and His whispered invitation to my soul awakens and stirs me to cry out for power to encounter His holy affection more and more.  What choice do I have?  How could I not love with my whole heart One who so fully and perfectly loves me?  I want to be fully given because He so fully gives Himself to me.

So many see the display of holy passion in Revelation 4 and relegate it to a one-time action of God in which all of His zeal and love for us happened in the past on the cross.  The cross is the ultimate and most important statement of the focused and abandoned love of God for us in all of history.  It is not, however, the only statement or the only moment.  Yet it is too easy for believers to only focus on yesterday’s display of love and turn away from the present reality of God’s abandoned love for them.  Yesterday’s sacrifice of love for us causes the heart to pause and, from the deep places, say “thank you”.  We must be filled with an overwhelming sense of gratitude and awe when we consider the cross.

The sardius God, however, forces us to deal with that same fully abandoned zeal today.  Now.  That same love that drove Him to the cross is the same love that consumes His heart fully for you and I today.  It is almost offensive to consider and reflect upon a God so given in love to another.  To many, such devotion and affection seems weak.  It is preferable to redefine His love into something more dignified and regal, as if we could reimagine a God more cool in His affections for humanity.  Try as we may, however, we cannot cool the fiery red, sardius-like passion of God towards us.  He is more devoted and given in love than we are comfortable with.

For if we can cool His passions, then we can cool our own.  If we can reimagine His love to be lesser, than we can live with our own love being lesser.  It is not possible to want God, to long for Him, more than He wants and longs for us.  We can only love to the measure that He loves us, and our love will always be far lesser than the holy reality that awaits us in His presence.  Thus, we can only pant and thirst for Him because of what He has initiated in His heart towards us.  This is unheard of!  This is unthinkable!  A God that “pants”, a God that “longs”? And yet, where did such love originate?  Why would the Bible use such strong language related to love?  Would God require a love, a longing for Him, that is more extreme than His love for us?  How could this be?

The One who is like a sardius stone in appearance did not reveal this about Himself to leave us appreciative.  He revealed this to us to show us the depth of His commitment, the fullness of His passion, and the extent of His emotional involvement in the lives of those who would endure the greatest trial and testing in all of history.  He begins the book of Revelation by revealing a love that provokes, confronts, and offends in its depth, width, height, and breadth.  I am convinced that we mostly meditate on His passion and love according to our own sensibilities and mostly nod and smile.  This will not do.

When the length, height, width, and depth of the ocean of His love for us begins to stretch our limits and capacities, we must begin to be stirred, troubled, and a bit uncomfortable with a love this awesome in scope.  We must move from “aaaahhhhh….” in the place of prayer to “AHHHH!”  This is a love, a focused abandonment, and a full givenness that can only leave us trembling when we comprehend the God that desires, hungers, and thirsts for more of our heart.   What can we do?  What can we say?  His love must and will overwhelm us.  It will shake and stir our sensibilities.  It will reshape our very foundations.

Once His love accomplishes this in our heart, He will have conquered our resistance.  His consuming passion will have finished its redemptive work.  He will have consumed us as He is consumed.

David

Entry Filed under: beauty of god, bible