This reflection is Part 2 of a 3-part blog series written by Taylor Field. In his new book, Relentless, Taylor looks at familiar Bible characters and their stories. As we read their experiences with God, not only do we find ourselves within their stories, we begin to understand “The Crux of the Matter;” we find ourselves knowing the heart of God.
God comes to us not as the strong leader of a free world, but as the butler in the background. He doesn’t point to a mighty oak, but to a tiny little mustard seed. The grandest lover of the universe becomes the totally forsaken and the completely betrayed. The one who should be sought becomes the seeker, running toward his resistant, broken child.
He is the inverted God, the Saviour in reverse, the upside-down Lord, the one who finds the place in our lives by becoming smaller than small, least of the least, unduly humiliated before his own unthinking offspring.
Instead of blaming, he takes the blame. Instead of punishing, he takes the punishment. It is in some way through his kindness that he bends our wandering affections toward repentance.
Blind as we are, it was the cross and not the crown that won our love. It didn’t have to be that way. But love found a way, through smallness, through humiliation, a canal dug by God from the ocean of his love to our own little pond of pettiness in the hopes of changing things.
The hope of changing things. God came to us not through a palace, but through a barn. When universal truths had failed, he came to us in startling specificity. He touched the whole world, through one person, in one place, in one family, in one culture, in one race, in one time, in one political situation. He scandalized the philosophers by his excruciating particularity. He touched every time and heart in every age and every continent by being so shockingly... exclusive.
He showed expansive love by a unique kind of jealousy. He showed an unexpected broadness of generosity by a severe determination to exclude all self-destructive evil.