Less Wild 3

If God’s experience of being “married” to us, who are His Beloved, is sometimes that of being tied to a legalistic controller in the ways I’ve described in the paragraphs on anesthetizing our heart, at other times it is more like that of being married to a harlot whose heart is seduced from Him by every scent on the evening breeze. In our psychological age, we have come to call our affairs “addictions,” but God calls them “adultery.” Listen again to his words to the Israelites through Jeremiah: “You are a swift she-camel running here and there, a wild donkey accustomed to the desert, sniffing the wind in her craving—in [your] heat [how can I] restrain [you]? Any males that pursue [you] need not tire themselves; at mating time they will find [you]. Do not run until your feet are bare and your throat is dry” (Jer. 2:23-25). God is saying, “I love you and yet you betray me at the drop of a hat. I feel so much pain. Can’t you see we’re made for each other? I want you to come back to Me.” And Israel’s answer, like that of any addict or adulterer is: “It’s no use! I love foreign gods, and I must go after them” (Jer. 2:25).

Perhaps we can empathize with the ache God experienced as Israel’s “husband” (and ours when we are living indulgently). Having raised Israel from childhood to a woman of grace and beauty, he astonishingly cannot win her heart from her adulterous lovers. The living God of the universe cannot win the only one He loves, not due to nay lack on His part, but because her heart is captured by her addictions, which is to say, her adulterous lovers. Many of us have had the experience of not being able to bridge the distance between ourselves and others. Whether the distance is caused by unhealed wounds or willful sin in our lover’s heart or our own—we experience their rejection as our not “being enough” to win them. Unlike God, we begin to think of ourselves as having a problem with self-esteem. Whereas God became even more wild in his love for us by sending Jesus to die for our freedom, most of us choose to both become and take on lovers that are less wild. We give up desiring to be in a relationship of heroic proportions, where we risk rejection, and settle for being heroes and heroines in the smaller stories where we have learned we can “turn someone on” through our usefulness, cleverness or beauty (or at least turn ourselves on with a momentary taste of transcendence).