7 Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
8 If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, you are there...
14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.
15 My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made in the secret place.
When I was woven together in the depths of the earth,
16 your eyes saw my unformed body.
All the days ordained for me
were written in your book
before one of them came to be. Psalms139:14-16
On Friday we recognised that faith is a personal thing. Not personal as in private and not to be talked about, but personal in the sense that it is INtimate, INdividual and INteractive.
Faith is not merely an intellectual assent to a corpus of institutes. Faith is a relationship. Declaring, as the Apostles' Creed does, that "I believe" is to recognise that we are the relational quarry (object of pursuit not a place where you collect stones) of a relentlessly loving God.
David recognises this - God has made him, God pursues him, God has a purpose for him and God will transform him.
Faith is a personal thing. I cannot talk about God objectively - He is not distant, disconnected or dissociated - He is passionately personal, intensely intimate and relentlessly relational.
The late Prof Johan Heyns was my Dogmatics lecturer when I was a student. He opened every lecture with prayer. His impassioned prayer was that God would open our hearts to His majesty and love.
He used an analogy that has always stayed with me. He suggested that many theologians try to objectify God: to examine God as though He were the object and that we were the scientific subject. He said that it was like trying to put God on a microscope slide and examine Him. He argued that whenever we talk about God we should realise that we are on the microscope slide looking up into the loving eyes of God who is the ultimate Subject and that we are the beloved object.
This analogy suits Psalm 139 perfectly.
Let's go into today recognising that we are the object of God's passionate pursuit and that He knows us and longs for us to know Him.
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Theo Groeneveld theo@emmanuel.org.za
You can see past EmmDevs at http://emmdev.blogspot.com/
