Highland Lakes Camp

God Slumming with Humanity? When the Son becomes one of us, this is not God slumming with humanity. It’s not like a human becoming a bug, or an eagle a flea. No, the incarnation is not so much God-made-small as it is humanity-made-big. The God who made man in his own image outdoes himself: He makes himself into his own image and thereby exalts us. Jesus becomes what we are—a woman’s child—that he might make us what he is—a child of the Father. That’s what Christmas is all about. One small step for God, one giant leap for mankind. He becomes no less, but we become infinitely more in him.

The Eyelid and God I worked for a farmer named Johnny when I was a teenager. Among other skills, he taught me how to weld—a necessary talent on any farm since equipment is always in need of repair. One day, having completed his weld, Johnny was chipping away at the hot slag over his bead before adding another layer to the weld. I was standing about 10 feet away, looking on, with no safety glasses on. It was an eerie moment. In a millisecond, my eye registered a tiny piece of metal slag flying through the air like a missile aimed straight at my pupil. Without the least bit of conscious thought, as soon as my eye registered its flight, my eyelid slammed the door over my pupil and that red-hot speck of metal burned into the skin of my eyelid instead of my eye. I experienced a few seconds of burning pain instead of a potentially permanent injury. In Hebrew, an expression for eyelid is eye-guard (sh‘murah [שְׁמֻרָה]), from the verb shamar (“to guard”), as in Psalm 77:4. When that fragment of hot iron came flying toward my eye, my sh‘murah knew exactly what to do. It took one for the team. It absorbed the pain to protect my eye. When we pray, “Keep [shamar ‘guard’] me as the pupil of your eye” (Ps. 17:8), what are we asking our Lord to do? We are asking for his intimate, ongoing protection from everything that would bring us harm. We are asking him to be our divine sh‘murah, our divine eyelid, which stands in front of us to shield us from the fiery arrows of the evil one. Christ, as the word made flesh, is the Father’s answer to our prayer. He stepped in front of us, took the arrows, took the sin, took the pain, took the condemnation, took death itself into his own body in order to save us. He guards us as his very own pupil, as the apple of his eye, for indeed we are.

Hosea and Flannery O’Connor פתה “Therefore, behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her” (Hos. 2:14). To explain the startling language she often employed in her writings, Flannery O’Connor once said, “To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.” Hosea and O’Connor would have been literary pals. Hosea says that Israel, like a lustful fool, had stepped out on her husband (Yahweh) to chase down her lovers (the Baals). So the Lord “will patah her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her [literally, ‘to her heart’].” Patah, usually translated “allure,” carries dicey overtones of “entice” (Judg. 14:15) or “seduce” (Exod. 22:16; Judg. 16:5), especially when men and women are concerned. Patah is a risqué word. Hosea pictures God like a husband, desperate and daring, who will try every romantic ploy to win back his cheating bride. He will entice her into the wild, speak to her heart, seduce her with his love—whatever it takes to recapture her wayward heart. This over-the-top romantic imagery is a prophetic way of depicting the lengths to which God will go to retrieve his beloved people—even if it means becoming one of them, being spit in the face, spiked to wood, and treated like a dog. For the love of us, God will push every boundary. O Lover of humanity, Christ our Lord, all praise to you for sacrificing everything to get us back. (From my book, Unveiling Mercy: 365 Daily Devotions Based on Insights from Old Testament Hebrew)