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 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
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
this week, 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. 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 poem 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...”
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.” Taken together, 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.”
I love 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 Jerusalem is equated with God’s
motherhood.
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 think it’s simply wonderful
how this text portrays God as delighting 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 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, delighting God makes up the very center of the core story we use with
children at our church 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.”[1]
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 has a drug-induced hallucination 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!
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.
[1]
Peter Kreeft. Heaven: The Heart’s Deepest Longing (San Francisco: Ignatius
Press, 1989), 149.
I invite you to read part 2 of this series on delighting in God here.
I invite you to read part 2 of this series on delighting in God here.
