Knowing the Heart of God - The Unfaithful Bride of Jesus
Most every Christian has a favorite Bible verse, something that resonates with them or has deeply personal meaning for them. A few might even be able to tell you where to go when you are hurting or in distress, or what chapters to read for healing and blessing. In almost forty years of being a Christian, I don’t think I’ve ever had anyone tell me what to read if I wanted to know the heart of God. Song of Songs comes to mind, but most translations turn it into something almost pornographic. Psalms 23 comes to mind, but it is the words of David about God, not the words of God himself. So where do we go to find such a passage? Is there anywhere in the Bible that God Himself tells us what His heart is for His people and for His Bride?
There is such a chapter, but it is not what you think. Ezekiel 16. It is a chapter about how God made Israel His bride and how she betrayed Him with her many lovers and sins. At first glance, it seems hyperbolic, merely a prophetic message to dramatize Israel’s fall from dedicated followers of Yahweh to debased slaves of Baal, Ishtar, and Moloch. But it is so much more than that.
I have an assignment for you, the reader. Read this chapter in the New Living Translation or in The Passion Translation. Read it and reread it until it shatters your heart…and then read it again. And again. And again. Until you see Him. Then you meditate on what you now understand about Him. On who He is as a person, not as just a position or a concept.
See, we’ve got it all wrong. We look at the Old Testament books of the prophets like Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, and Isaiah and see only wrath and judgment so we shy away from reading them and really understanding their message. Or, worse, we cherry-pick the “happy” verses such as Jeremiah 29:11 (“I know the plans I have for you…”) while ignoring the uncomfortable verses like virtually all of Ezekiel 16. Why? Because judgment is painful. Because intimacy requires exposure. You can’t be intimate with your spouse without exposure of some kind. We don’t like these verses because they require us to be naked before the Lord, a nakedness that is piercing and unyielding because He knows us down to the very last atom.
When you read this chapter as I have instructed you to do, you will start to see a side of God you never knew existed. We have been taught that He is a God of wrath and vengeance who hates sin and must see it punished. Following Him is sold to us as an edict from a king who rules with an iron fist. But when you read this chapter, that imagery is peeled away to reveal, not an angry, sullen monarch who is punishing His followers for daring to defy him, but a tender, compassionate husband who is completely heartbroken and appalled at the treachery and adultery of His bride.
“I gave you expensive clothing of fine linen and silk, beautifully embroidered, and sandals made of fine goatskin leather. I gave you lovely jewelry, bracelets, beautiful necklaces, a ring for your nose, earrings for your ears, and a lovely crown for your head. And so you were adorned with gold and silver. Your clothes were made of fine linen and costly fabric and were beautifully embroidered. You ate the finest foods—choice flour, honey, and olive oil—and became more beautiful than ever. You looked like a queen, and so you were! Your fame soon spread throughout the world because of your beauty. I dressed you in my splendor and perfected your beauty,” says the Sovereign Lord. “But you thought your fame and beauty were your own. So you gave yourself as a prostitute to every man who came along. Your beauty was theirs for the asking. You used the lovely things I gave you to make shrines for idols, where you played the prostitute. Unbelievable! How could such a thing ever happen? You took the very jewels and gold and silver ornaments I had given you and made statues of men and worshiped them. This is adultery against me!”
Smitten…
Shaken…
…shattered. The God of the Universe…the Creator…is bawling his eyes out over His bride. It’s not, “How dare you!” but “How could you?!” To know the heart of God is to know betrayal and loss and suffering the likes of which the human mind cannot even comprehend. It seems rather dark, but in it you will find “life, and life more abundantly.” Why? Because He chooses to suffer for me. For you. For all of us, really. God needs nothing. He owns everything. He’s not sitting up in Heaven wringing His hands over His inability to fix things or to save us from destruction. He has given us a choice to follow Him or not. To embrace the Lover of our Souls or to reject him.
Think of the person you love more than life itself. The one who gives you a reason to live. Now think of how much they love you and how that makes you feel. If you want them but they don’t want you then think of how you wish they would love you. Now imagine that you have the power to force them to love you, against their will. Would you want it? Would you want the love of someone else knowing that if they had a choice, they wouldn’t choose you? Knowing that it’s a fraud? Of course not. No one in their right mind would want that. And yet we expect God to have different emotions than us when we are made in His image.
If you want to know the heart of God then you must know the suffering of God. To love is to suffer because it requires you to be exposed, to be vulnerable, and to be joined to another. Join yourself to the Lord. If, indeed, we desire to see reformation then it starts with the Bride of Jesus first. In what ways have we been an unfaithful bride? Have we had eyes only for the Bridegroom King? Or have we chased after other lovers looking for comfort and affirmation in the arms of another? We must purify our hearts and purify our lives. We must open ourselves up to the heartbroken cry of our God and acknowledge how miserably unfaithful we have been. In this we will find the only path forward. In this we will finally know His heart.