“What Love Looks Like”

I was reading yesterday in Micah and started to think about how often God sacrifices on our behalf in order to rescue us. Like most prophetic books in the Old Testament (“visionary” literature), Micah talks about how the Israelites had started down some bad paths that would lead them to bad ends. But then! Always the “but” in the prophets … but if you return to the wise path, the safe path, God’s path, he will deliver you from all your bad choices. He will rescue you and honor you and provide for your children. He will work in your bad circumstances so that things turn out better than you could have hoped. And all you have to do is turn your heart toward him.

(Does this seem controlling to you? Do it my way or you’ll suffer? Consider this: God’s way is the right way. The best way. The honest way. The good way. Which necessarily means, if you subscribe to Western thought, that the other way is not honest, not good, not right. It stands to reason that if you do what’s good, good things happen to you. If you do what’s bad, bad things happen to you. In my opinion, that’s a good system. And, by the way, God is going beyond that by offering to rescue these people who have already gone the wrong way and done bad things and have hurt others. He’s offering to rescue them from their own bad choices.)

So all this rescue and redemption got me thinking about how God always takes the initiative in making peace with us. In rescuing us from our own bad choices. I got to thinking about the Garden of Eden, the first big story in the Bible, when Adam and Eve eat the apple … the first bad choice … and they understand that they have sinned. They willfully chose to go their own way instead of going the way God directed them.

So what does God do? He takes one of the creatures he’s loving sculpted with his own hands, a living, breathing expression of his love and delight, and sacrifices it to cover his people. He takes the skin of an animal and makes clothes to cover Adam & Eve’s nakedness. The first time God sacrifices to cover us. Even in the very beginning, we can’t escape it … God is giving up of himself to reach out to us and protect us … just one example of what love looks like.