Like a bride
You are altogether beautiful, my love;
There is no flaw in you. Song of Solomon 4:7
Read Isaiah 49:14—21
If I survey my life, end to end, as long as I have lived to date, I will surely find some times when I have been forlorn. When I have felt forgotten. Bereft. There are few worse feelings. And Israel, chosen by God, if they surveyed their nation’s story end to end, could find plenty of the same. So if I want to know and to remember what it’s like to be bereft and to feel totally forgotten, my Bible can hardly be improved upon. There’s the book of Lamentations. There are the Psalms of lament. ‘O my God, I cry by day, but you do not answer; and by night, but find no rest.’[1] Surely if I rely on my day-to-day experience for my consolation I will be God-forsaken one day and euphoric the next. So Israel could only survive her experience of this by trusting something beyond her day-to-day experience. Israel had to trust God’s promise and live for the outcome. I love the promise: God will bless his people, dress them as a cherished bride. It’s a lavish future. And God has stepped into my place to make this same promise to me. It happened when Jesus hung upon the cross and took my God-forsakenness into himself. When he said, ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’[2] I am no longer the forsaken one.
No, Lord, I am no longer the forsaken one. I am not forsaken by God. You have seen to that. I am the cherished one. The Lord, I believe, is actually excited at what I shall be, as excited as a groom waiting to see his bride, dressed and adorned. It is hard for me to believe and to accept and to live in the truth of it, but I seem to have to hear the language of a lover if I am to hear your word to me. Far from forsaken by you, I have been wooed by you until I have been overcome. Oh, dear Lord.
[1] Psalm 22:2
[2] Mark 15:34