10/07/2006
Theologians and Bible teachers have told many of us that God is “impassable,” that he does not experience emotion as we humans do. Is that what you find when you read Isaiah or Jeremiah or Hosea? A. W. Tozer pleads in The Pursuit of God: “We have almost forgotten that God is a person . . . and in the deep of his mighty nature he thinks, wills, enjoys, feels, loves, desires and suffers as any other person may.”
In Disappointment with God, Phil Yancey tells of going to a cabin in the mountains in Colorado to face his doubts about God and to read the Bible for himself. What he discovered changed his life:
Simply reading the Bible, I encountered not a misty vapor but an actual Person. A Person as unique and distinctive and colorful as any person I know. God has deep emotions; he feels delight and frustration and anger . . . As I read through the Bible in my winter aerie, I marveled at how much God lets human beings affect him. I was unprepared for the joy and anguish— in short, the passion—of the God of the Universe. By studying “about” God, by taming him and reducing him to words and concepts that could be filed away in alphabetical order, I had lost the force of the passionate relationship God seeks above all else. The people who related to God best—Abraham, Moses, David, Isaiah, Jeremiah—treated him with startling familiarity. They talked to God as if he were sitting in a chair beside them, as one might talk to a counselor, a boss, a parent, or a lover. They treated him like a person.
(The Sacred Romance Workbook & Journal , 95–96)
From The Ransomed Heart, by John Eldredge, reading 280
Ransomed Heart Ministries www.ransomedheart.com
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