All of Me

What is love? The world has plenty of different definitions for it, but I'd like to think that love looks a lot like this picture right here; this was a selfie from my mom and dad's date this evening: top down, smiling, laughing, so in love. It's something I admire, and it's something I want.

I held off from writing about relationships during Valentine's Day because I felt that it was just a little too cliche, but I knew that this week it was time to talk about love. Recently, I've been reading in the book of Hosea and it's all about love and relationships, but not in the way that we think.

Hosea is a prophet that is instructed by the Lord to take a prostitute as his wife: Gomer. Despite her sleeping with other men, leading a life that is unclean, and placing things of this world before their marriage, Hosea still pursues Gomer, ultimately redeeming her. This story is supposed to be a vision of the way that Christ loves us, and captures the true story of redemption that is the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Pretty cool, right? It's the love story that we all want, where the man forgives every sin and fault, and pursues the woman in spite of it all, then they live happily ever after. It's so popular that there's even a modern adaption called Redeeming Love.

Here's my only hang up with that story: there's a whole lot more that goes into it. Yes, we all get the surface level message that we are separated from God's love and that He forgave us through Jesus, but it can be deeper than that if we allow it.

The whole Bible is a big love letter from God, and the portion I want to focus on is marriage, which starts in Exodus. After the Israelites are freed from Egypt, they participate in a marriage covenant with God. The covenant is composed of four parts: offer, acceptance, blood ratification, and a covenant confirming meal. For God and His people, this meant Moses speaking with the Lord on the mountain, the creation of the Law, Moses sprinkling the sacrificial blood on the people, and the elders of the group sharing a meal. This all changed when they started worshiping the statue of the golden calf. Even though they were doing it in an act of worship to God, they were breaking His laws and making a idol of it- they became prostitutes to the ways of this world, in the same way that Gomer did. The punishment for this was divorce, but instead of completely eliminating his people, God promised to remarry them and restore their marriage. Here's the best part though: God's law, the Torah, said that you cannot remarry your spouse after you've been divorced, which means someone has to die. Israel should have been unforgivable because they were defiled by the nations and their idols, but instead God sent His Son (the physical form of himself) to die, so that we could be brought back to our husband who waited passionately, with a lasting love for us.

So why bring that up now? Because I think that even though our sins are covered by the blood, we are still in a marriage, and we often forget that. We keep allowing idols in our lives that draw us away from our true love, just like the Israelites did all those years ago, trying to satisfy a longing in our hearts with things from this world. In reality, the only thing that will ever satisfy is the Lord. We can't keep returning to things and people that leave us empty, when there's someone that fills us entirely.

For me, wanting a relationship has a tendency to become a idol: it's something I want, it's something I think on a lot, and it's something I look for in daily life, and while we are designed to want a partner to spur us on, we can't forget that the Bible tells us to love the Lord your God with all your body, soul, mind, and strength, AND THEN others as ourselves (Matthew 23: 37-39). I can't make a person or a relationship an idol because I know that no matter how good it is, it will never truly satisfy me in the way that the Lord can; we can never be enough for the wrong person, just like the world will never be enough for us. But the God of the universe thinks we are enough, and that should count for something.

I think that's worth being passionate about.

Wishing you all the love...

-Emma

"Be fearless in pursuit of what sets your soul on fire."