For you shall worship no other gods for the Lord, your God, whose name is jealous is a jealous God. So, Lord, we come before You with divided hearts, loving and worshiping a myriad things, and you desire singleness, undividedness, and purity in our love towards You. And so we ask that which only You can do. Grant us undivided hearts that love You fully. We pray this, not because of our own righteousness, but because of the righteousness of Your son, Jesus Christ. Amen. Amen.
We have two more Sundays, this Sunday and the next, in our winter sermon series, titled Thy Very Heart, My Heart Healed By His. We have been taking our timid and tired and weary heart and putting it before God's tireless and great and strong heart. And we've seen, as we've done this over the past seven weeks, we've seen many things about the heart of God. The Lord's heart is gentle and lowly. It's not proud and rash. It's comforting. It's not cold and indifferent. At times, it burns with anger, but only when that which it loves is threatened. It's marked by mercifulness that's born out of a deep compassion and last week, as we saw, it's steady. It's steadfast.
It's utterly committed to what it loves, committed in the depths, and committed over the long haul. This is the heart of God. Well, what else is there to say? Two things. Next Sunday, we're going to ask more practically, how does this heart of God heal our heart. What is the healing of the heart of God? And how does it heal our own? This Sunday, today, we look at that affection in the heart of God that is beneath or is the fountain of all other affections. We look today at His loving heart.
Jonathan Edwards, in his consideration of the role that affections or emotions play in true faith, wrote the following. The scriptures do represent true religion as being summarily comprehended in love. The chief of the affections and fountain of all other affections. Everything we say about God's heart can be rightly understood as flowing out of God's love. You know, how you have motives beneath your motives? And sometimes they're not so genuine. The motive beneath all the other motives of God is love. Like streams from a headwater, our Lord's gentleness, His comfort, His righteous anger, His mercy, His steadfastness, it all flows from a fountain of love.
As the Apostle John puts it so simply, but so profoundly in three words, God is love. But we need to immediately recognize a challenge or a difficulty at this point. Talking about love is not so straightforward or easy. And this is because in the English language, this four-letter word, love, is overused, misused, and it's often used to refer to things that have nothing to do with each other. So for example, your grandfather says, I love vanilla ice cream, and in doing so, he uses the same word as Mother Teresa when she says, I love the poor.
Does love in these two sentences at all mean the same thing? C.S. Lewis, in his wonderful book The Four Loves, reminds us in fact that this single English word, love, tries to be adequate to translate at least four different Greek terms when we look at ancient literature. Lewis notes that our English word love may render eros which means romantic love, love where one hungers for the other. It may render philos, which speaks of friendship love, where two people delight to be comrades and walk side-by-side in the journeys of life. It could refer to the Greek word storge, which means affection. The kind of affection you may have for your old La-Z-Boy recliner or your old sweater.
Lastly Lewis talks about the word agape. It which love is a love characterized as sacrificial pursuit of another's wellbeing. So we can see immediately when we talk about love we need to be careful, and we need to define it in a way that doesn't lead to it meaning anything and everything, and therefore meaning nothing. So I want to ask us to avoid two pitfalls at this point. Pitfall number one, when we come to the Bible, which we'll do in a moment, to ask what it says about God's love, I want us to avoid reading into the Bible, our modern notions of love, and we have many, but we go to scripture to draw from it understanding not to impute into it, our view of things. So we need to hold very lightly views of love we may have as we go and look at the Bible in a moment.
The second pitfall is a pitfall common to religious types like me. This is the pitfall that in a quest to save love from all notions of selfishness, you can reduce it to plain self-denial. What's loving is to deny yourself and give everything you have for the sake of another. Of course, that has something to do with love, but as we'll see, as we turn to the Bible, the self-giving and sacrificial nature of love is not divorced from joy and pleasure and satisfaction in the one who is doing the loving. We don't want to separate these two things, which I think in religion can happen often. So how are we going to study God's love with these pitfalls and challenges in mind?
We're going to do it by entering into a climactic scene in the Bible. It's in Exodus 34. You can turn there if you have a Bible. And I like this scene because it places God's love, not in the abstraction of a philosopher, but rather in the concrete vicissitudes and unexpected turns of real life, in this case, the life of Israel. In this scene in Exodus 34, we essentially see something called a covenant renewal. A covenant, what was an amazing type of relationship in the ancient world, and what we're seeing in this scene, and I'll show you more of this in a second, is that Israel has abandoned the relationship with God and in Exodus 34, He is renewing it, and at the heart of why and how he does it is divine love.
Let me familiarize us with what's going on in the broader context of Exodus here. So in Exodus 32, Moses, the leader of Israel, has gone up to the top of Mount Sinai. And on the mountain, he's receiving the law from God. It's written on stone tablets. This law represents the terms by which God and Israel will maintain their relationship. While this is happening, while the relationship is being solidified, down the mountain Israel is getting impatient. They asked their leader, Aaron, to make them another god. He does so in the form of a golden calf, and they begin to worship this god and speak of this god as though it brought them out of Egypt and it will take care of them. These things are happening simultaneously. Moses comes down the mountain. He's furious when he sees the revelry. He smashes the two tablets on the ground.
Exodus 33 is Moses pleading with God, negotiating with God saying, look, even though your people have abandoned, you please don't abandon them. And so the tension becomes, what will God do when His people reject Him? Exodus 34 is the answer. He gives them literally another chance. And it unfolds with Moses going back up the mountain with a new set of tablets to receive the law once again. Now Moses is aware now just how rebellious these people are that he has to lead. And so he wants to be sure that God is not going to abandon him in this job. So he says, Lord, look, I not only want you to renew your covenant with the people, but you have to show yourself to me. I have to really know that you are for me, if I'm going to do this. And so in Exodus 34 in one of the most climactic two verses in the Bible, God reveals himself via a declaration to Moses.
It's in Exodus 34 verses six and seven. I'm going to read it to you. The Lord says, or the passage says, the Lord passed before Moses. And He proclaimed the Lord, the Lord, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness. Keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children's children to the third and the fourth generation. So here's where I want to enter into this passage. The word love or steadfast love is used twice right in the middle. And this is a term we actually looked at last week.
If you were here, you remember I said that the word steadfast love translates one Hebrew word, hesed. And that we lack a single English word that can render what hesed means. Last week we focused on this aspect of God's hesed as total commitment, His steadfastness. This week, we're going to broaden out and look at more facets of it. So using this passage, I want to make a few statements about God's hesed or about God's divine love. And then I want to ask what it might feel like if that love were to touch your life. So first, a few statements about divine love. Number one, God is the author and source of divine love. The phrase in verse six, abounding in steadfast love is used in the Bible only to describe God. Humans are never described as abounding in love.
The word abounding signals an ever-increasing multiplication, an inexhaustible abundance. The term that we translate abounding is related to another word that literally means a downpour of rain. The image here is like showers of love pouring forth from the heart of God. What's the point? The point is that God's very being gives rise and from it issues forth love. If you were to ask what God is, you might be able to answer, as one person does, He is an infinite, an incomprehensible fountain of love. Now, this is very different than us. We humans, we're lovers. We feel sentimentality. We feel romantic feelings. We feel longing and commitment, but love doesn't come naturally to us. We can't control it. We can't turn it on and off.
And you know, there are times when you want to love and you can't find the energy or the feelings for it. Maybe you're coming home from a long day at work and you pull up to the house and you think this would be the perfect time for me to be loving, but I have nothing inside me. We are no more the source of love than a Deer Park water bottle is the source of the spring water inside of it. We may hold it for a moment. God is the spring. It flows from Him. This is why John says in 1 John 4:7, "Beloved, let us love one another for love is from God." Did you hear that? Let us love one another. Why? Because love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God. We are always in a posture of needing to be filled with love, needing to receive it so that we can hold it and share it. God, on the other hand, is an infinite and never-ending source of love.
It is always who He is. In the second observation, we've seen that God is the source and author of love. The second observation is that God's love seeks more than your happiness. It seeks your holiness. If all God wanted was for Israel to be happy, in this scene He could have let them keep their golden calf. He could have entered back into a relationship with them in grace and said, it's clear you can't keep the law so I'm going to throw out all the standards and just love you exactly how you are, but he doesn't. He sends Moses down the mountain to pulverize the golden calf. He smashes it up and he puts the dust in their drinking water. So they have to drink it so the next time they see their golden calf, you can figure that out. Then God sends Moses back up the mountain, verse four, with two tablets of stone like the first.
In other words, he is not going to lower the bar. His grace will not reject them, but neither will God let Israel, because she's too precious to Him, wallow in the mud of idolatry and moral deformity. God's love shows grace, but not by removing standards of righteousness. In our modern understanding of love, in our world today, we basically equate love with kindness. Kindness means affirming people just as they are, right where they are, and getting everything out of their way for their pursuit of happiness on their terms. Kindness seeks the other's happiness by affirming them. But kindness does not probe more deeply to see that others become good, especially if becoming good would require pain.
To return again, to C.S. Lewis in his book, The Problem of Pain, he compares this notion of love as kindness with a very different thing called God's love. He writes by love most people mean kindness, the desire to see others than the self happy, not happy in this way or that, but just happy. What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happen to like doing, what does it matter so long as they're contented. He goes on. There is kindness in love, but loving-kindness is not coterminous. Kindness merely as such cares not whether its object becomes good or bad provided only that it escapes suffering. It is for people whom we care nothing about that we demand happiness on any terms. With our friends, our lovers, our children, we are exacting and would rather see them suffer much than to be happy and contemptible and estranging modes.
If God is love, He is by definition something more than mere kindness. He has never regarded with contempt. He has paid us the most intolerable compliment of loving us in the deepest, most tragic, most inexorable sense. God's love is filled with grace that will not let you go. But God's love is filled with a passion that wants to see you perfected. His grace is applied when He doesn't give up on Israel. And His love is applied when He doesn't give up on the righteous standards by which they are meant to grow up into their real selves. In fact, God will not only give them stone tablets with the law but for His people, for His child, He will see to it that the beauty and righteousness of the law are written on their very hearts. They will not only be happy, but they will also be good.
Humans are created in the image of God. The Bible teaches us this. A Bishop in the early church, Irenaeus, wrote that the glory of God is man fully alive. This means what God wants when he looks upon you is for you not to be a boy, but a man, not a girl, but a woman. And He will see to it that you grow into your full glory. God is not after our mere happiness. He's after our holiness. And our holiness is when, from the depths of our being, we truly love and delight in that which is true, and that, which is good, and that which is beautiful. That's the second thing we see. God's love seeks not mere happiness, but it seeks its beloved's holiness. The third observation, God's love works for your wellbeing, but it burns to win your heart.
A common expression of love today in our world is to work hard for the wellbeing of others. This means advocacy. We advocate for people's religious liberty. We advocate for their basic rights. We love people when we work for their basic welfare and dignity. This is precisely what God has done for Israel. If you follow the story, if you go back to the beginning of Exodus, Israel is enslaved. God frees them for two purposes. The first is religious liberty. He says to Pharaoh, free my people. Why? So they can go and worship me. God is for religious liberty. Second, though, He frees them so they're no longer oppressed, so they don't have to be slaves, so they can get on with being a real nation. And so He provides them with this promise of a promised land, flowing with milk and honey, where they can have economic and social wellbeing.
This is His agenda. His love is expressed this way. However, and here's the question, why does He spend decades in the wilderness working on His relationship with them? He's got them their rights. Isn't he done loving them? But what you see when you study the story is that God is after more than working for their wellbeing. He wants to win their hearts because He loves them like a father. He loves them like a spouse. He desires not just their flourishing. He desires that they would turn, and as the middle schoolers say, love him back. He desires a union of souls. Where do we see this in our passage? We see it in verse 14, chapter 34. If we just follow Moses along, remember he's gone back up the mountain. He's being given another set of the law on these two commandments. And then God begins to tell him, look, if I enter back into this relationship, you need to go tell Israel that when they go into the promised land, I am going to deliver all these nations out of there because these nations would crush them, but Israel needs to be careful.
Moses tells them they can't enter into relationship. They can't enter into covenants with these people because if and when they do, they will begin to go after their gods and worship them, and they will break the covenant with me. Now, why is God nervous about that? Is He nervous about it because if they worship other gods, they'll lose their economic or social wellbeing? No. That's not what He says. Listen to what He says in verse 14. This is why God doesn't want them to break the covenant. Verse 14, "for you shall worship no other God." Why? For the Lord, because the Lord, whose name is jealous is a jealous God. We have almost an entirely negative view of jealousy, but here God literally says, My name is jealous. He couldn't be more emphatic. God's jealousy does not indicate that He covets or that He envies. Rather it indicates something of the quality and depth of how He loves. God here is conveying that His love for Israel is not born out of a cool sense of duty, but a burning desire.
Often in the Bible, God's love is communicated to us via familial metaphors, a father-son, husband-wife, and this language of jealousy pick up on the relationship of God with His people where God is a husband and His people are a wife. And so what good husband, if his wife began to share her love with another man, would not burn with jealousy. He cannot be indifferent. Another woman who he doesn't know may decide to give her attention to five different men, he'll think it's immoral, but it won't affect him. But if it's his bride, he boils. The word we translate as jealousy sometimes is rendered as zealous and zealous, it literally comes from the idea of water getting so hot it begins to boil. It speaks of being earnest of setting one's heart passionately upon one object and being completely intent upon that. What does all this mean?
It means that God wants His people. He's not merely working for them to give them a nice life. Of course, He wants them to have a nice life. He's pursuing them though to win their hearts, to win their undivided love back towards Him. Now here's why this is important because when you get to this type of meaning in the Bible, you are going to the deepest need in the human heart. Humans need to be wanted. We need to know we are the object of somebody's affections. The creature needs to know that their creator wants them. People need to know that their father desires them. I grew up loving the show, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. I think Will Smith is just the coolest guy. Will Smith, the main character, if you know the story, he is being raised in West Philadelphia by his mom in a single-parent home and the neighborhood they're in is really rough so his mom, worried for him, sends him all the way to Bel Air, California, to live with his uncle, Phil, and Phil's family.
Phil's far better off in a safe neighborhood with good education, so Will gets placed there. In what I think is the most moving episode, Will's father, his biological father, shows back up after 14 years of absence. He promises Will that they'll do a trip together. And he's sending all the overtures of wanting to now be fully in his son's life. Then suddenly plans change and Will's father tells him he's going to have to leave without him. Abandoned again, Will fights his emotions for a few minutes with denial. Then standing before his big Uncle Phil, he breaks down, and in tears, he asks, "How come he don't want me?" If you watch the scene, you see the paradox. Will is standing in a mansion. He has everything he could possibly need for a flourishing life, nice clothes, nice educational opportunities, food, safety, freedom. He even has people around him, an aunt and uncle, cousins, friends who love him.
But he lacks one thing, his father's love. His father doesn't want him and this crushes him. Some of us have enjoyed being desired by our earthly fathers. Others of us have not. This is not the main point here. There were plenty of families in Israel where the dads were doing a great job at loving their kids. But God still needed to show up with a different and deeper kind of love. Israel still needed to know that God, their father, wanted them. So, yes, God will work for your wellbeing. He will advocate for all the rights you need, but He is no cool and distant lover. Above all, in all these things, He desires to win your heart. God is a being from whom love flows naturally and constantly. When that love touches its people, it doesn't seek merely to keep them happy. It seeks to perfect them. And when it draws near to its people, it's not just to give them a nice life. It's to draw them into an eternal family of love.
God is love. This is who He is. It's His very nature. In Romans 5, Paul says something very stunning considering what we have just said about the heart of God. He writes in Romans 5:5, God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit. This love of which we cannot conjure it up, this love that is so great and eternal, this love that has existed before the foundations of the earth. Paul says it has been poured into our hearts. I want to conclude, therefore by asking what this means. I want to ask, in our lives, what does it mean to be touched or to taste God's love? So it'd be an interesting question for you to ask later with your small group. In your life, how have you been touched or how have you tasted God's love? I'm going to give you four ways, as I look back over my own life, that I see tastes, actual taste experiences of divine love.
Number one, the spirit opens the eyes of your heart to see God's love for you in Jesus. You see in this man, in His life, in what He says and what He does for you, in His gentleness and lowliness, in His power. You see a never-ending fountain of love flowing towards you. You see it in His forgiveness, in His mercy in the fact that He will never give up on you. And this becomes sometimes in small degrees, sometimes in great degrees, sweet to your soul. In 1737, Jonathan Edwards was riding his horse in the woods of New England. He dismounted for a time of prayer and quiet contemplation, and something of the beauty and love of Jesus touched his heart in an extraordinary way. And he wrote about it in his journal.
Having alighted from my horse in a retired place to walk for divine contemplation and prayer, I had a view that, for me, was extraordinary of the glory of the son of God, as the mediator between God and man and His wonderful, great, full, pure, and sweet grace and love and meek and gentle condescension. This grace that appeared so calm and sweet appeared also great above the heavens. The person of Christ appeared ineffably excellent with an excellency great enough to swallow up all thought and conception, which continued as near as I can judge for about an hour, which kept me the part of the time in a flood of tears and weeping aloud. I felt an ardency of soul to be what I know not otherwise how to express emptied and annihilated, to lie in the dust, and to be full of Christ alone. To love Him with a holy and pure love, to trust in Him, to live upon Him, to serve and follow Him, and to be perfectly sanctified and made pure with the divine and heavenly purity.
Sometimes the love of God appears to your heart through Jesus in such a way that you taste something like this. This is not the normal experience of Christians, but it does happen. I've tasted moments like that. Number two, how we taste the love of God, how it touches us. Number two, you know this, when you are spared the bondage of a golden calf. Whether by frustrating your plans or by the constant prick of your conscience, somehow God has kept you from giving your life and your heart to a golden calf, might be in the form of a career, might be in the form of sex, might be in the form of [inaudible 00:34:02], might be in the form of fame, but in some way, you know that that golden calf is simply not what it's all about. It's frustrating. You don't fully understand why it hasn't satisfied or why it's been outside your grasp. But that experience of frustration is God sending Moses down the mountain and saying, I will not give my people up to a pathetic golden calf.
Third, the third way you may be touched by this love, you are met by the presence of God in a Christian friend. The times when you feel weary and forlorn, your own faith, your own heart feels dead. You realize that there are these people in your life. There's a few of them, and they call you, they sit with you. And looking back, you realize that something of the presence of God was there communicating to you that you are hedged in and He will never abandon you. Fourth and finally, you experienced the love of God when you begin to see other people as the burning desire of God's love, not as creatures who need judges, first and foremost, but you begin to see others, especially the downtrodden and forlorn, especially your enemies, as people for whom God's heart burns with desire.
If you've ever felt that in the slightest way, you may not have known what was happening, but you were feeling a love that is not of this world. It was flowing down from above, pouring out like a shower from God upon you. I want to conclude with Jesus' great prayer in John 17, where Jesus prays that you and me, that His church, would actually get to share the love that exists between the father and the son. And as I pray this, we conclude:
Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, maybe with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world. Oh, righteous Father, even though the world does not know you, I know you and these know that you have sent me. I've made known to them Your name and will continue to make it known that the love with which You have loved me may be in them. Amen.