David Eckman says that God has a “delighted passion” for you. When I quizzed him about that, he said that the Septuagint (the Greek translation of the Old Testament that most of the early Christians used, including many of the writers of the New Testament) used the word agape in the Song of Songs to translate the Hebrew word for love.
Thus in his mind when the New Testament uses that word to describe God’s love for us, it takes on the notion of the delight that the lovers in Song of Songs have for one another.
This had an interesting impact on me, because while I believed that God “loved” me in the theological sense, I never felt that he loved me in the way that would cause him, say, to want to hang out with me on a Saturday afternoon. Eckman’s point started to change my thinking on this.
But another factor that entered in is the fact of my sinfulness. I screw up and wreak havoc in so many ways. So God can’t love that, can he? And, in fact, many people have a model of God’s love for us that involves him playing a kind of mind game: “God looks at us but instead of seeing us, he sees Christ.”
But I don’t believe that God plays mind games. Instead, he sees us as we really are, with all our warts and weaknesses.
The next step in this spiritual odyssey came when I heard some talks on the 2 Corinthians 12 passage that says, “My grace is sufficient for you; my strength is made perfect in weakness.” Denise Matsuoka described her own struggle with her weakness of not being able to form attachments. Instead of saying that God used her in spite of this weakness, she said that God used her through this weakness — to give her insight into others who struggled with this weakness. And this notion is confirmed by Paul’s statement in this passage that “when I am weak, then I am strong.” Or as I like to put it, Paul asked the Lord three times to take away his thorn, but God said, “It’s OK, Paul. I like you like that. You’re a lot easier for me to use.”
So … the last piece of the puzzle is how we see one another. As I think about my grandkids, I find that I have a delighted passion for them. Even their weaknesses feed into that delight. I know how they are and I want the best for them and nothing they do makes me love them any less, or even enjoy them any less. I don’t look at them and say, “Well, you aren’t good enough, but I’ll just pretend you are Christ and that will make it OK.” Rather, somehow the love of Christ overflows in my heart and, seeing them as they are I rejoice in who they are.
I am absolutely convinced that this is how God looks at us, and how he wants us to look at one another. Often we are like wine connoisseurs: “It’s a naive domestic burgundy without any breeding, but I thought you’d be amused by its presumption.” We pick and choose, evaluating one another down to the finest detail. And those who don’t make the grade — thumbs down.
Instead I believe God wants us to simply take joy in one another. As the psalm says: “Your strange people — they are incredible. I get happy just watching them” (Psalm 16:3, my translation). Forgiveness undergirds this — never holding anything against one another because that gets in the way of the joy. And even when we see weaknesses and faults, we don’t jump to conclusions or try to fix them, but instead we think, “I wonder what glorious thing God will do with this person to show how amazing his new creation is” or maybe even “It’s amazing what God is already doing with that person even through their weaknesses.”
Because that’s how God sees us. We’ve trusted him and he is so jazzed about it that he makes everything work for our good — even our weaknesses, just like he did for Abraham.