Backwards Love

 

God's love works backwards from ours.

When we are looking for someone to love, we look for somebody attractive, someone who meets our standards of beauty.  They have to have the right face, height, shape, and size.  Preferably someone with plenty of money and a good job.  We look for status, affluence, and attractiveness.

We want to find somebody who will satisfy and fulfill us sexually, and someone we can satisfy in return.  We want to have our needs met.  Our ideals of love and sex are tied to our emotions and the chemical fireworks that go off in our brain when we meet someone attractive.

Once we find someone who can check off all the appropriate blocks, then we gradually give that person our love.

Even as we give that love, we hesitate.  If we don't feel that love reciprocated, if they don't love us as much as we love them, then we will take our love elsewhere.  If, for some reason, we feel our own love dim and grow cold, then we feel entitled to find someone else to give us a fresh spark.  If our partner cheats or fails in one way or another, we feel we have the right to turn our love into anger and resentment.

I certainly felt this way for much of my young adulthood.  I was looking for those fireworks, the chemistry.  I wanted to meet someone and the stars would align, and I would be carried away on a flood of emotion.  I wanted to be dazzled with a woman's beauty and fall hopelessly in love.  I was not concerned so much with status or money, but appearance was a concern.

But this is not how God works, and this is not how he intended relationships to work.

In Ezekiel 16 we find a parable describing God's relationship with the nation of Israel, and it is a dramatic contrast with the view of romance most of us have.

"3. Thus saith the Lord God unto Jerusalem; Thy birth and thy nativity is of the land of Canaan; thy father was an Amorite, and thy mother a Hittite.

4. And as for thy nativity, in the day thou wast born thy navel was not cut, neither wast thou washed in water to supple thee; thou wast not salted at all, nor swaddled at all.

5. None eye pitied thee, to do any of these unto thee, to have compassion upon thee; but thou wast cast out in the open field, to the loathing of thy person, in the day that thou wast born.

6. And when I passed by thee, and saw thee polluted in thine own blood, I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live; yea, I said unto thee when thou wast in thy blood, Live."

Here we see the nation of Israel portrayed as a newborn infant who was unwanted by her parents.  When Ezekiel writes about Israel being descended from Amorites and Hittites, he is making the point that their lineage was nothing to be impressed with.  They were not from any sort of royal stock or upper-class family.  Nothing about their roots was impressive, quite the contrary.  It would be like someone today saying that they were descended from slave owners or from Nazis.

The images are striking in this passage.  We find a newborn infant, with afterbirth still clinging to her, the umbilical cord dangling, tossed out on the side of the road like a piece of trash.  If her parents even looked at her, they found nothing desirable in her, she was disgusting, and without so much as a bath to clean her, or a blanket to wrap her, they discarded her.

I can't help but compare this to the modern abortion industry.  So many in our society think of unborn children as little more than an unwanted clump of cells, to be discarded if they are not desired.  These precious children are tossed away like garbage.  As verse 5 says, "None eye pitied thee... [No one had] compassion on thee; but thou wast cast out in the open field, to the loathing of thy person."  We wouldn't take a living infant and toss it out like this, why would we do it to a child still in the womb?  But this is all too often how we treat the children in the womb.  Every abortion is a tragedy.

Israel in this infant state was unwanted, unloved, filthy, and worthless.  There was nothing that made her desirable.  She was not beautiful; she was not prosperous or powerful.  She was less than nothing.  She was a liability.

But it is as if all that makes her undesirable to men, makes her desirable to God.  He sees something no one else sees, something no one else can see, because God can see into the future with his eyes of redemption and restoration.  He sees beyond what she is to what she could be.  He sees through this page in her history into the glorious conclusion that they can make together.

We looked at Ephesians 5 last week and saw that the purpose of marriage is to symbolize God's unfailing love for us.  Our bodies and sexuality are meant to tell God's story of grace and redemption, and if we are going to truly tell this story, Ezekiel gives us a good example to follow.  We will not look for the cover girl or the macho man.  We will look into a person's brokenness and not be appalled but find something appealing.  We will pass on the person of the year or the rich and famous.  Our desires will be shaped not by appearance or by race, status, or riches, but we will seek only to fulfill God's redemptive purpose.  What will be most attractive to us is when we see God's restoring grace at work in a person's life.  We will not ask, "How can this person fulfill and satisfy me?"  We will ask, "How can this person help me tell the story of God's redemptive love to this lost and dying world?"  Our desire will not be for perfection, but for redemption.

In the traditional telling of Cinderella, after the ball, the clock strikes midnight and her beautiful gown disappears.  The coach turns back into a pumpkin, and Cinderella must return home to live among the dirt and ash her stepmother and stepsisters have subjected her to.  She is much like Israel, cast aside and rejected.  But then the prince finds the glass slipper and sets out to find her.  Sure enough, he finds her, in her uncleanness and obscurity, no gown, no glory, her beauty faded in the morning light.  Still, he finds her desirable, he sees the majesty and potential no one else does, and he takes her from the ashes and gives her glory.

This is what God does for each and every one of us.  He finds us in the uncleanness of our sins, washes us in the priceless blood of Christ and makes us clean and new.  We were outcasts, and he makes us his adopted children.  We were broken and he made us whole.  We were lost and alone and he invited us into his family.  He saw through our sin and saw eternal glory lying dormant inside of us, and through Christ he calls that glory into reality.  There was nothing desirable about us, but God still found us desirable.  He saw our eternal potential.  All we had to offer God was our sin, and he gives us his eternal glory.  He gives us beauty for ashes.  He turns our graves into gardens.

When God chose Israel, he did not look for a people that could give something to him, but he looked for a people he could bestow his grace upon.  He looked at what he can give, not what he could receive.  He measured her desirability by his own heavenly, eternal standards.  This goes far beyond the stereotypical boy meets girl story.  This is a story of sacrifice and redemption, where God's love meets the most unlovely.  This is a story of redemption and transformation, a story we will have to pick up next week.