Jealousy Demanding as the Grave

 

I’ve been thinking this morning about the jealousy of God.  Trying to fit it all in my head is just pointless, but He wants to be gazed upon, even with my feeble and incapable eyes and mind and heart.  So here I am, blogging.

 

 ⁶ Place me like a seal over your heart,
       like a seal on your arm;
       for love is as strong as death,
       its jealousy unyielding as the grave.
       It burns like blazing fire,
       like a mighty flame.  

 ⁷ Many waters cannot quench love;
       rivers cannot wash it away.
       If one were to give
       all the wealth of his house for love,
       it would be utterly scorned.

Song of Solomon 8:6-7

God is jealous for me.  He’s jealous for you.  He wants us, and He won’t stop wanting us.  How ridiculous.  Little old me.  Holy Jehovah.

He wants all of me and is unwilling to settle for less.  We wonder why He takes things away from us or asks us to wait.  Duh.  He wants us to be dependent on Him and knows that in no other state will we be happy.  Thin, worn out versions of happy are all around us, and they cost us far less than intimacy with a holy God.  But who else loves like He does?

I can’t contain it!  Unlike earthly lovers, He doesn’t express His jealousy by defensiveness or sarcasm or withholding His own love.  He takes His hurt heart, seeing our prostitution and rebellion and obstinacy, and decides instead of wrath to again and again give us more of Himself and pour out His love and mercy on us.  I have no choice but to return in the wake of the flood.  And there’s wrath, yes, but even that is love, for He knows nothing else.  What kind of uncaring, apathetic God would allow us to remain in our denial?  Not the Sacrificial Lamb, that’s for sure.

I just, I wish sometimes, in my fleshiest moments, that He didn’t want me so badly.  Or maybe if He could want me just as badly, but only desire part of me. 

Really, I am grateful for every last, painful-to-me attribute of God because after all, He IS perfection.  But this dying to self is hard to bear.  I’m crushed so often under the weight of His desire for me.  It presses me down and is my unlying mirror.  It’s the flood that “washes my house away but also makes me clean”. 

I want to love like that.  Toward Him and toward everyone.  How would the world (we) be changed if our days were a constant pouring out of oneself and that self really was wrapped around the Almighty?

I am just blown away.