The Beauty of God: He is One Consumed with Desire

One of the central passages in the Bible that puts the beauty of God on display for us to study, wonder at, and talk to the Lord about is found in Revelation chapter 4 - the revealing of God as one radiating sardius and jasper brightness and glory from His fiery throne.  The Father is showing us Himself in a rare and stunning way, to express the complete and total focus of His affections and emotions towards His creation.  Our hearts come alive when we consider how comprehensive His involvement is with us and how fully committed He is to bring us into the fullness of relationship with Him.

The Father’s desire is that we might be captured by His wholeheartedness and His devotion towards us, fueled by His fiery jealousy for the Church to be with Him where He dwells.  When faced with love so consuming and complete, we are provoked and pierced to respond in kind.  Such fiery passion leaves us without the option of lukewarm indifference - His stubborn, continual pursuit of my heart forces us to open ourselves to His tender but invasive gaze.  The only other option to such abandoned pursuit of our affections is to close ourselves off from Him and retreat in shame or rejection of His affections.  To be confronted with such zeal for our life - to come into understanding of how much He desires relationship with us - lovingly and relentlessly wars against the heart that drifts towards numb or unresponsive.

To be confronted with such a glorious, fiery, zealous passion evokes, over time, a passionate response from deep within our hearts - a passionate “yes!” or an equally passionate “no!”  The provocation of the Holy Spirit on our hearts and His whispered invitation to our soul awakens and stirs us to cry out for power to encounter His holy affection more and more.  What choice do we have?  How could we not love with our whole heart One who so fully and perfectly loves us?  I want to be fully given because He so fully gives Himself to me.

Some might see the display of holy passion in Revelation 4 and relegate it to a one-time action of God in which all of His zeal and love for us happened in the past on the cross.  The cross is the ultimate and most important statement of the focused and abandoned love of God for us in all of history.  It is not, however, the only statement or the only moment.  Yet it is too easy for believers to only focus on yesterday’s display of love and diminish the present reality of God’s abandoned love for them.  Yesterday’s sacrifice of love for us causes the heart to pause and, from the deep places, say “thank you”.  We must be filled with an overwhelming sense of gratitude and awe when we consider the cross.

The Sardius God on the throne of Revelation 4, however, forces us to deal with that same fully abandoned zeal today. That same love that drove Him to the cross is the same love that consumes His heart fully for you and I today.  It is almost offensive to consider and reflect upon a God so given in love to another.  To some, such devotion and affection might seem weak.  It might be preferable to redefine His love into something more dignified and regal, as if we could reimagine a God more cool in His affections for humanity.  Try as we may, however, we cannot cool the fiery red, sardius-like passion of God towards us.  He is more devoted and given in love than we are comfortable with. Imagine a love so fierce, so wholly and completely given in passion and determination, that it is unsettling to us to contemplate.

For if we can cool His passions, then we can justify cooling our own.  If we can reimagine His love to be lesser, than we can live with our own love being lesser.  It is not possible to want God, to long for Him, more than He wants and longs for us.  We can only love to the measure that He loves us, and our love will always be far lesser than the holy reality that awaits us in His presence.  Thus, we can only pant and thirst for Him because of what He has initiated in His heart towards us.  This is unheard of!  This is unthinkable!  A God that “pants”, a God that “longs”? And yet, where did such love originate?  Why would the Bible use such strong language related to love?  Would God require a love, a longing for Him, that is more extreme than His love for us?  How could this be?

The One who is like a sardius stone in appearance did not reveal this about Himself to merely evoke appreciation.  He revealed this to us to show us the depth of His commitment, the fullness of His passion, and the extent of His emotional involvement in the lives of those who would endure the greatest trial and testing in all of history.  He begins the book of Revelation by revealing a love that provokes, confronts, and offends in its depth, width, height, and breadth. 

When the length, height, width, and depth of the ocean of His love for us begins to stretch our limits and capacities, we must begin to be stirred, troubled, and a bit uncomfortable with a love this awesome in scope.  As stated earlier, it is “taking” deep within us when we are awestruck and a bit unsettled. This is a love, a focused abandonment, and a full givenness that can only leave us trembling when we comprehend the God that desires, hungers, and thirsts for more of our heart.   What can we do?  What can we say?  His love must and will overwhelm us.  It will shake and stir our sensibilities.  It will reshape our very foundations.

 Once His love accomplishes this in our heart, He will have conquered our resistance.  His consuming passion will have finished its redemptive work.  He will have consumed us as He is consumed.