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A
God Who Delights
by
Troy Cady
I invite you to think of
someone you like a lot, the kind of person that lifts your spirit whenever you
are around them. Try to think of just what it is you like about them and describe
the qualities you admire with specific words or phrases. Maybe you’d like to take a moment to
give thanks for the gift of that person in your life.
Now consider this: the
way you think about that person is the way God thinks about you. God
delights in you. In fact, God is full of delight for the whole world. That,
quite simply, is all I want to look at in this essay.
God is not a killjoy
I don’t know about you but for the better part of my
life I didn’t think of God as someone who is full of delight. At various times
I have thought of God as a standard of perfection to which I could never
measure up, a God who could only be pleased with me if I performed well for him
and others. I’ve gone through seasons where it seemed I could never stop
committing a certain sin and at different points I was sure I had reached the
limit where God would say, “Okay, that’s it. I’m done with you. You’re
hopeless.” I imagined that if I ever saw God face to face, he would want to
know why it is that I can come up with lots of good ideas but never complete
any of them. This God is the God of regret, a God defined by all my lost
chances and failed tests. This is the killjoy God.
But this is not the kind
of God the Bible describes. The God of the Bible is a God whose mercies are new
every morning. This God never says, “I’m done with you.” This God says, “You’re
mine and I love you so much. I made you: I will never stop loving you.” This
God believes in you and sees good things in you, because this God is the one
who put those good things in you. This God loves you so much that he actually
likes you.
That might sound like a
strange thing to say because we tend to think that loving someone is greater
than liking them, but when we apply that notion to God we end up with the
twisted thought that perhaps God has found a way to love us without actually
liking us. We might quote the verse “God is love” but somewhere inside us there
is a disconnect between the love of God and the delight of God. Yes, God loves
us—but is it possible, could it be…that God delights in us so much he actually
likes us?
The prospect of this is so
wonderful that I encourage you to spend an entire month letting that simple
truth sink into your heart, mind and body. Because God loves, God delights.
This truth is brought out
beautifully by a key verse I encourage you to meditate on over and over again.
It’s from Zephaniah 3:17 where it says,
“The Lord your God is
with you,
the Mighty Warrior who
saves.
He will take great
delight in you;
in his love he will no
longer rebuke you,
but will rejoice over you
with singing.”
Just soak that in now. If
there was ever a doubt that God delights in you, this verse lays that doubt to
rest: “he will take great delight in you.”
In my study of that text,
I looked at the word delight and discovered that there are several words in
Hebrew that can be translated as delight. It’s as if God’s delight is like a
diamond with many faces. Turning the diamond to see a different side brings out
different colors, each one fascinating to behold.
In this verse, a certain
variety of delight holds center stage. Notice that the verse is formed by five
lines. Lines one and two provide a set-up for lines three through five and the
latter three lines form their own triplet. In this case, some Hebrew scholars
render the last three lines like so:
“he will rejoice over you
with gladness;
he will quiet you with
his love,
he will rejoice over you
with singing.”
The phrase “he will take
great delight in you” conveys the image of God “rejoicing over you with
gladness.” I love that: God is joyful…filled with gladness.
The set-up to this establishes
a situation of close, personal safety. It describes God as a Mighty One,
someone who is strong enough to save you from trouble. This “mighty one” is named
and located in the first phrase where it says: “Yahweh, your God, is in your
midst.”
Yahweh is God’s name, not
God’s title. The writer here is calling God by name and reminding us that Yahweh
is very close to us (in our midst) keeping us safe. Within this place of
intimate, personal safety, God freely rejoices over you with gladness (line 3)
and with singing (line 5). Thus, line 4 makes it clear: when we experience that
kind of love, that kind of delight, it quiets the uproar in our hearts.
How we need that kind of
love today! This verse tells us quite simply that God is not a killjoy. He is
up-close and personal. He is safe. He sings gladly over you. He quiets you,
loves you, delights in you.
God is not an It
This verse also suggests to us another myth we need to
lay to rest about God and it is this: God is not an It. This poem speaks of God
in personal terms. You’ll notice that in this particular verse, the poetry
would fall flat were it to speak of God in terms of an It: “it will take great
delight in you, it will quiet you with its love, it will rejoice over you with
singing.” That kind of textual rendering
would sound kind of creepy, actually!
In this instance, the
verbs happen to be in the third person masculine singular which indicates the
“he” pronoun: “he will take great delight in you, he will quiet
you, he will rejoice over you.”
The emphasis, however, is
not on the “he” but on the personal nature of God. God is not an It, but
nor is God solely a “he.” Other texts dealing with the delight of God also
bring out the feminine personal aspect of God, speaking of God in terms of
“she” or “her.”
Look at Proverbs 8 for a
great example of this. In this text, God is very closely identified with Wisdom
who is portrayed as a woman. In fact, Wisdom is so closely associated with God in
this text that many interpreters feel it is like God talking about God's self
in the voice of a woman. In my study for this topic, I looked closely at this
text because it tells us in verses 30 and 31 that Wisdom is “filled with
delight.” In wanting to learn what kind of delight the text is describing, I
discovered other ways of translating how God talks about Herself here. And I
love this translation, which says:
"I was an artisan
with God.
I was filled with delight
day after day,
playing, laughing always
in God's presence,
playing, laughing,
enjoying the whole world,
delighting in all humanity."
One popular translation of
the Hebrew text renders “playing, laughing” as “rejoicing” but really the idea
of delight here is one of playing and laughing. Additionally, the phrase “I was
constantly at his side” could be translated literally as “I was an artisan.” This
text encourages us to think of God as a laughing, playful painter or
sculptor who happens to be a woman—which is very different than how we
normally think of God.
Another delightful
feminine image of God draws a parallel between God and the city of God’s
people, Jerusalem—the “City of Peace.” In Isaiah 66:12-13, God and this city of
peace are closely identified when God says,
“I will extend peace to
her like a river,
and the wealth of nations
like a flooding stream;
you will nurse and be
carried on her arm
and dandled on her knees.
As a mother comforts her
child,
so will I comfort you;
and you will be comforted over Jerusalem.”
Notice how the text
surprises us here. In the first part, it sounds like God is describing
Jerusalem as a mother but then in the last three lines the mother Jerusalem is
equated with the motherhood of God.
Though this picture of a
city of peace has a literal counterpart in the land of Israel, it also
expresses a desire of God’s to see every city, including ours, to become a
place of peace. Notice that, for that to happen, God plays the role of mother,
nursing us, carrying us on her arm, playing with us like a mother playing with
her toddler on her knees. It’s a picture of comfort, of being nourished by
God’s delight, carried by her and enjoying her.
I just love the thought
here that God delights in our city neighborhoods. When we think of the
city we often think of all the problems that need to be fixed, but when God
thinks of the city God doesn’t start with the problem, God starts with delight.
And God’s delight is our very peace. And God’s delight is personal.
God is not Plato’s Unmoved Mover
Another myth we need to dispel about God is something
we’ve inherited from a long tradition of European philosophy. It comes from
Plato who described God as “the Unmoved Mover.” This God is distant and stoic,
unmoved by our plight.
In Isaiah 38, we get
another image of God’s delight in the story of Hezekiah who became so sick he
was on the verge of death. He cried out to God and, when he recovered, Hezekiah
wrote a song to thank God for answering his prayer. In verse 17 we get a
beautiful picture of another side of God’s delight, where Hezekiah writes: “In
your love you kept me from the pit of destruction…”
The imagery in Hebrew,
however, is even more vivid than this. It is a picture of attachment
where God actually gets into the pit with Hezekiah, who testifies: “You attached
to me, and loved my soul out of the pit.” It’s a picture of a God who not only
moves to restore life but who jumps right into the pit of hell to wrap his arms
around us and love us back to life. In this text, God’s delight is God’s
passionate, merciful attachment to us.
This image of a leaping,
attaching, loving, delighting God makes up the very center of the core story I use
in my work with children year after year. We start the story by saying that God
dances so hard he leaps right out of himself back into himself. We say that God
was so joyful, he leapt into our world in love. “And now,” we say, “God is
inviting you to dance with him.”
Contrary to Plato’s
Unmoved Mover, the God of the Bible is not static…the God of the Bible is
ek-static, which means “out of oneself.” When you are in a state of ecstasy,
you have the sensation that you are having an out-of-body experience. It’s
transcendent.
The philosopher Peter
Kreeft says that’s what joy is. It’s the state of leaping out of your own skin
into another and back again. When we talk about “falling in love” this is the
kind of thing we’re really talking about. It would probably be more accurate to
say we’re drowning in joy. All at once you feel nothing like yourself
and more like yourself than you ever have before.
I love how Kreeft
describes this in the specific terms of Christian faith. He writes: “We leap to
God because he leaped to us in Christ, and God leaped to us because he is
eternally leaping within himself like a flea circus. The whole of reality is
ek-static leaping, a cosmic dance, God engaging in a wild acrobatic display with
humanity.”
This is a picture of the
amazing love of God for each of us; it’s a love that’s immersed in an
inexhaustible ocean of joy, whose depths we could never completely plumb. In
Jesus, God leapt into who we are so we could leap into who he is. For us to
fully grasp the significance of this kind of love, I think that instead of
saying “God is love” we might do better to say, “God is always falling in love
with us.”
God is beyond reason
If we think of God this way, it will help us put in
place another common misconception we have about God, and it’s this: somehow we
have got it into our head that God always has to make sense to us. We equate
God to reason. And, though God is wise, wisdom is greater than reason. When we
equate God to reason, we end up trying to put God in a box.
The older I get, the more
I am convinced that the only way we will be able to make sense of God is if we
stop trying to make sense of God all the time. If it is true that God is always
falling in love with us and longing for us to return those affections, it
follows that at various points in life we’ll be carried away by that love, even
irrationally so.
God’s love and God’s ways
may be reasonable but they are not merely reasonable. God’s love, God’s
delight goes beyond reason. It’s because of God’s delight that we will
always encounter God as a mystery.
In Isaiah 11 we have a
vivid picture of God’s mystery where we read that “infants will play near the
hole of the cobra.” That image of play is an image of delight, but for Pete’s
sake…notice where the kid is playing! It’s like Isaiah was watching some movie
where the hero is given LSD to induce a dream-like state and we see all kinds
of weird things like wolves sharing a house with lambs, cows feeding with
bears, lions eating straw and Indiana Jones as a toddler, laughing while
sitting on a carpet of snakes. It makes no sense! It makes me want to say, “Okay,
Izzy: just lay down while I go put on a pot of coffee for ya.”
Thankfully, looking back
on the text now, we can make some sense of it, but even then its meaning still
defies all logic and reason. Today we know that in the advent of Jesus we witnessed
a child for whom Satan, the great serpent, was nothing more than a plaything. And
this is so not because Jesus became so great but rather because God became so
small, a child. The delight of God
confounds how seriously Satan takes himself and how seriously we take
ourselves, too. God overcomes our desire for greatness by becoming a child who
delights.
Conclusion
And therein lies the key if we are to comprehend even
the slightest fragment of this God who delights: we must become as God became;
we must become like a little child.
I love how G.K.
Chesterton relates God to childhood. He writes:
“Because children have
abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they
want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, ‘Do it again’; and the
grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are
not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to
exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to
the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon. It may not be automatic
necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy
separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that he has the
eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father
is younger than we.” -from Orthodoxy
It's true: we encounter
the Ancient of Days most fully when we encounter God as an eternal child,
filled with wonder and joy, delight and irrational but truly free love. We
cannot reason our way into the delight of God. The delight of God is a leap,
it’s a foolhardy attachment, it’s a continual falling in love with those of us
who haven’t the first clue how very, very, very much God loves us, how she
sings over us, dances his life away, nurses us, carries us, rescues us, and
asks us to come out and play. The invitation is to change and become like a
child because God is an eternal child. The invitation is to simply enjoy a God
who delights. Amen.
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