"Writing about you gives birth to a star. These stars sit inside me where there was once darkness." ― Kamand Kojouri
"Without the wetness of your love, the fragrance of your water, or the trickling sounds of your voice ― I shall always feel thirsty." ― Suzy Kassem
"Like two stars in the depths of the sky, this gravity is just irresistible We spin around each other, you and I when I fell for you, I fell into your orbit." ― Justin Wetch
"I have hunger for your mouth, for your voice, for your hair." ― Pablo Neruda
"She is the sensitivity of the dew drops. She is the innocence of the blooming Lily. She is the calm of the sylvan lake. She is the beautiful light of the candle flame. She is the wildness of the Kadupul flower. She is the magic of the full moon night!" ― Avijeet Das
Quotes from various love poetry. They're vivid, descriptive, moving. I can see two possible approaches for interpreting them.
One approach looks at the content and tries to figure out what's wrong with it. The other expects the best from the content and enjoys it for what it is. One side says, "I don't care what they're trying to express. Writing doesn't give birth to a star. Love is not wet. You can't be hungry for a mouth. Love and dew drops don't go together. It's all nonsense. We all know better. It is outdated and incoherent." The other says, "Such an expression of love. It's poetic. It's romantic. It speaks to me."
I like to think of Scripture as God's love letter to His people. Perhaps Christ's love letter to His Bride. I see the same two options for the Bible. Some will reject it because its contents seem odd, misshapen, not in line with their thinking. They see it as if something is wrong, so they'll reject it. Some will embrace it as a personal love letter, as "God speaking His heart to me." It makes sense to the loved one. It's beautiful to the one for whom it was intended.
Jesus said, "You do not believe because you are not of My sheep. My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me." (John 10:26-27)
God's Word is God's love letter to God's people. Skeptics will always try to explain it away as outlandish and unable to be understood -- outdated and incoherent. To that I'd say, "That's what you get for reading someone else's mail."
2 comments:
It's strange to me that people think that it's praiseworthy, and romantic to preserve love letters from one's spouse, and to regularly go back and re read them as a reminder of the love of that person. No one is suggesting that the one who treasures their spouse's written expressions of love, is elevating those written expressions over and above the one who wrote the letters. Yet we frequently hear the false charge of "biblioidolatry" as if treasuring the words of God somehow equates to failing to direct our worship towards the God who deserves it.
I agree. To worship God, it seems, would include veneration and reverence for His words as revealed to us in Scripture, as well as all words in Scripture that speak of Him.
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