The Heart of God
“How can I give you up, O Ephraim? How can I surrender you, O Israel? How can I make you like Admah? How can I treat you like Zeboiim? My heart is turned over within Me, All My compassions are kindled.” ~Hosea 11:8
The fullness of God’s being is always and forever beyond our comprehension. A vast gulf separates us from Him. We cannot imagine our way across it, no matter how much we try to magnify the biggest and best things of this life in our minds. Infinity doesn’t work like that. If we could take the wings of the dawn and fly forever and a day out over the abyss separating the Creator from the creature, the gap would never close an inch.
Despite this, we can have true knowledge of God, but only on His terms. In various ways, God stoops to reach across the gulf in our direction. Take creation, for example. Look at the aftermath of His creative genius. Every atom proclaims a message from God and about God: “Someone very grand must have done this!”
We get an even clearer picture of God in His Word. To be sure, this Word comes packaged in the form of human words–finite words that can only say so much. God’s Word comes packed with human similes and metaphors. It is full of anthropomorphisms (phrases describing God as if He had a physical body with hands, feet, eyes, ears, and a heart), and anthropopathisms (language attributing human emotions to God). These pictures can show us only so much. But here’s the point: they do show us something.
Calvin calls such acts of verbal self-revelation “accommodations.” He likens this process to a mother prattling and cooing to her baby. The baby understands the heart behind the words even if he doesn’t understand all the words themselves. So while God’s similes do not reveal everything about God, they must still contain some truth, coming as they do from the God who cannot lie.
For example, when God describes Himself looking at errant Israel, richly deserving of wrath–in fact, only deserving of wrath– He finds a strange compassion welling up from the fathomless expanse of His goodness, a compassion that leaves Him “feeling” something akin to the turmoil of a parent torn in two mutually exclusive directions, “How can I give you up, O Ephraim? How can I surrender you, O Israel? How can I make you like Admah? How can I treat you like Zeboiim? My heart is turned over within Me, All My compassions are kindled” (Hosea 11:8). When God says that, we must not deny it or theologize it away as a mere anthropopathism. In a manner appropriate to the blessedness of His eternal being, these words communicate something worth hearing–something true for God, and not just true for us.
Most clearly of all, God reveals Himself to us in His incarnate Son, His living Word, Jesus Christ. At every stage of His earthly life, Jesus gives us a man-sized picture of God. What would God look like if He became a child? Well, the gospels say: look at Him when He was a child. How does God respond to human pride and arrogance? Watch Jesus sternly rebuke the Pharisees and chide His friends on the sea, and yet watch Him also stoop to wash His errant disciples’ feet. Isn’t He altogether lovely?
How does God “feel” when the Church thoughtlessly rejects Him? Well, again, we are completely out of our depth. But God speaks of the Spirit’s outrage (Hebrews 10:29ff), and He comes in the form of Jesus, standing outside Jerusalem with arms stretched out and tears pouring down. Surely, as Dabney suggested long ago, the divine nature of the Son is surely not less compassionate than His perfect human nature (John 14:9). Again, I am not arguing for equivalence of affections. God’s affections are not our affections, just as His thoughts are not our thoughts (Isaiah 55:8-9). God exists on a level qualitatively and quantitatively far, far above us. But this Son came to show us God’s heart, and that heart is as warm as it is big. The Father of Jesus is no inert, heartless block of theological granite.
And so, in this life, while our best thoughts are unworthy of His majesty and while even the greatest saint knows very little of His ways, we do know something of God. What is the Father like? He is just like His Son. Archbishop Ramsay was right, in the final analysis: “There is no un-Christliness in God at all.” Go in and in and in to His being forever and a day, and you will only find more and more expressions and illustrations of the heart of Jesus Christ.
In conclusion, it is certainly difficult to hold this all together and to understand how all these seemingly contradictory things can be true simultaneously. How can God be unchangeably blessed and yet grieved by the way human beings speak (Ephesians 4:29) and live (Genesis 6:5ff)? While God’s feelings are certainly not equivalent to ours, in some way appropriate to His ever-blessed nature, there has to at least be some analogy. And if I balk at using words God uses to describe Himself, I will be left with the rather unhappy prospect of having nothing left to say about God at all.