God is love. (1 John 4:16)
A tour player’s equipment means the world to him. It’s a crisis of personal and professional proportions when his clubs go missing after a flight from one city to the next. This summer, major champion Graeme McDowell was forced to withdraw from the Open Championship after his bag never made it across the Channel on a flight from France.
“Forced to withdraw” may seem like too strong a phrase—too, shall we say, “victimy.” “Why couldn’t he just get another set?” you’d be keen to ask. Indeed, these players generally get their equipment for free. But that off-the-shelf equipment is only the beginning. Each club is precisely modified to fit the player’s tendencies and liking. In this way, they are perfectly matched, the player and his clubs.
Major champion Jimmy Walker may understand the value of good equipment doubly more than most. Not only are his clubs critical to his livelihood, but Walker’s hobby demands similarly precise equipment.
He would not pretend that any one of his images captures the whole of the universe.On the side, you may know, Walker is an astrophotographer, and to produce a gallery of glory-revealing images, he needs excellent telescopes and cameras, as well as filters, stands, releases, and other accessories. With these, he captures distant galaxies as though they were across the street. (You can see them here.)
But here’s a mistake Walker would never make: He would not pretend that any one of his images captures the whole of the universe. If he did, we would call him foolish. Not because any one of those images is wrong, but because by itself it is incomplete.
If there is a vast universe in the character of God, it is his love. “God is love,” the apostle John wrote in utter simplicity. And for 2,000 years, teachers and pastors and theologians have been unpacking that universe. They’re still not finished. Not close. But sometimes they want you to think they are. Theologians of all kinds—though especially those who in their thinking about God try to think him away (atheists)—point to one aspect of God’s love and say that is all there is. In this way, their God would never display protection or discipline, because these don’t line up with their sentimental view of love. Never mind that they line up with everything we call good parenting.
The apostle Paul wrote to the Ephesians that he was praying they would come “to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge” (Ephesians 3:18-19, NIV). It’s a beautiful paradox: that we might come to know a love that surpasses knowledge.
The love of God, I am convinced, is not so hard to comprehend. Not for God, that is. But we are finite people, and perhaps the best we can hope for is to find one new star a day. Yet how glorious is each star, and how glorious is each insight we gain into the love of our Savior!
“The love of God,” the old hymn proclaims, “is greater far than pen or tongue can ever tell.” So we humbly surrender our hope of discovering all there is to know about the love of God in this lifetime; we will need eternity for that. But we do not surrender looking into the sky of his deity each day and whispering, singing, shouting declarations of praise.
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Jeff Hopper
November 27, 2018
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The Links Daily Devotional appears Monday-Friday at www.linksplayers.com.