Thoughts for another day

Aug. 16, 2013.

Today's verse: Hos. 11:4. I led them with cords of human kindness, with bands of love. I was to them like those who lift infants to their cheeks. I bent down to them and fed them. (NRSV – copy. ack.)

(Pls. read the above before you read further.  Thanks)

If there’s something called love supreme, then it has to be found only in God Almighty.   In no other, will we find this, unless of course we’re suffused with God’s Presence, so much so that at that time we are so much of Him that we’re not and He is – reflect on Paul’s ‘It’s no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me, Gal. 2:20. Yet, even then it’s God; for it’s just our bodies, but His Being and because of His Being we’re so much in love with everything.

Only God can epitomize love the way it should be – platonic, pure and unconditional: A kind of love that really doesn’t exist in the human dimension for who can love someone who always irritates and offends?  Yet think of how God loves us even when we’re in sin, and mind you, all sin is an affront to God, not merely the person we offend.  Scripture says, Rom. 5:8, ‘…while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us!’  In our above Scripture God says, ‘I led them with cords of human kindness, with bands of love.’  Who’re this, ‘they’?  They’re the people of Israel, unfaithful, unyielding and ever rebellious.  A read through the Book of Kings or Chronicles will reveal the hardness of heart of the Israelites and their wickedness.  It’s simply appalling: they go about their tasks as if God had not decreed any laws for them or for their kindred.

But God bore it all stoically if I may say, and He even pardoned them for He couldn’t bear to see their misery. Therefore He bent down and fed them.  He held them like infants close to His cheeks and He nursed their wounds.  My friend, if ever there was something God ever told us to show His love, here it is.  Today too, despite the whole world laden in the utter and dense smoke of sin, He reaches out to us in ways unknown and manners uncommon.  He sends us Grace in abundance to draw close to Him – ask me for I know, how He pulls us back to Him, even when we’ve nothing to offer apart from our sins and our backslidings.  Though centuries have gone by and perhaps, many more may go, God will never change.  Sin may increase in dramatic proportions and men may become as wild as animals, yet will His love linger…over a fallen race, a fallen man, not because men repent, but because He loved us and will always love us.