Idol

“Thou shalt have no other gods before me” -Exodus 20:3

This is something God is very serious about. It's one of the Ten Commandments. Most of the Commandments are one-liners, but the idea of this one is actually spread across the first two of the ten and has some additional verses of explanation:

“Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God...”

I wrote some time ago about an idol in my life. It was huge. God did some business with me over a period of time to help me deal with it and put it in it's place. I think it could now be allowed back into my life without being an idol, but it seems God has not seen fit to let that happen.

Lately I have been impressed that there is another idol in my life that has been there even longer than the other one. And I believe God has been dealing with me for a long time to address it. The dealing has become more and more severe and I think I am waking up to what has been going on.

My idol has been woman. Or more specifically, the love of a woman. For as long as I can remember, it has been the one thing I really wanted. I was smitten by females in the earliest grade-school years when my buddies were all saying how icky girls were. No matter what other interests entered my life as I grew up, and there were many, the underlying deepest desire was always to have someone to love and be loved by.

I grew up in a loving home and knew the love of father and mother and sister and grandparents. Other relatives and friends have expressed love to me at various times and that is a wonderful thing, but of course all of that is different than the love of a woman. I never cared about money nearly enough to get rich. I've been passionate about various noble and selfish endeavors, but way down deep under everything else, if you asked me at any point in my life, I would have said that the one thing I really wanted the most in life was the love of a woman. To be known to the bottom of my soul and loved as a man. That's it. My dating experiences involved a lot of hope and not much fulfillment. I longed to have a girlfriend all my single years. It did happen a couple of times for short periods. But there never was calm assurance. There was always trepidation. When I was young and single, I thought the ache would be dealt with and gone when I could get married. To an extent, that was the case. But as all of us who have lived long enough know, it's so very much more complicated than that.

I have tasted what I'm talking about. Twenty six years of marriage ran a huge gamut of feelings. There were years when it was wonderful. And others when it was not. The reality matched the feelings at times I am quite sure, and I know that at other times the two were far out of sync. For long stretches I thought everything was fine when it in fact was not. And for other dangerous stretches my fear level was so high and my trust level so low that my imagination ran my feelings amok. In any case, my desire and expectations of a lifetime were so high as to be unrealistic and unattainable. I had set myself up for disappointment. No human being could fulfill what it was I wanted and felt I needed. And even if that were possible, I was never worthy of such. It seems that I have always been a terribly difficult person to love. And so there was trouble.

Romance. The whole package. I am one of those hopeless romantics. And I'm a guy. There are more of us than popular culture might have one think. But even for a romantic, I have to admit when I'm brutally honest with myself, as much as I want a woman to be the object of my love and affection, even more I want a woman because I want to be loved. The desire to be loved is the most primal human condition. We all share it. But I do believe that some of us guys have a stronger need than others to have the love of a woman. For me this desire has always been the preeminent thing. I have thought all my life that it was completely normal. It has been so deep and basic and foundational that I think I have not understood until now that it has and always has had higher importance in my life than even God. It has been an idol and I didn't know it.

I now find myself in a situation where all has been stripped away. I am further away from the love of a woman than ever. It is possible that I am still loved in that way, but the presence is gone and far away. There is no way for me to know it or feel it. And it may in reality not be there at all. My life is now so tangled and tied in knots that I will probably be isolated for a very long time. Reconciliation, moving on, or other possible scenarios all seem so difficult or impossible to achieve that I just see a vast stretch of time ahead of me with no solution. It's possible that I may never be able to know the love of a woman again. That would be more than I could bear but for the thing I am in the midst of learning something about now.

There is an even greater Romance. I have read some books in the last year that have opened my eyes and heart to things I really hadn't been able to connect to before. It is a truth that is the reason for the first two Commandments that at first glance seem so harsh. God cannot bear for us to love someone or something more than himself because he is so passionately in love with us. He is so completely, overwhelmingly in love with me and wants me to know and experience that. He wants that love relationship to be unhindered and for nothing to get in the way of it. The first couple of Commandments are the plea of a lover to forget about things that are meaningless and pale in comparison to the love he has for me. The Law was just an inefficient guide, like the white cane of a blind man, compared to the open arms and tight embrace of a lover expressed by God through the passion play of all that he has done through his son, Jesus Christ. My understanding of the history and workings of the gospel, that I have been taught my whole life from a young age, has somehow until recently failed to impact me with the reality that God loves me with the intensity of a lover. Of course I have heard my whole life that God is love, that he loves me, love, love, love... But somehow, God's love was always in my mind like the love of my parents. It was deep, profound, tremendously important and valuable, but it wasn't the love I had been looking for in a woman. It wasn't love that could meet my deepest need and desire. I now know that some people have actually figured this out. Some have tried to help me see it. And some have written books about it. It's taken me most of a lifetime, but I think I'm starting to see it too.

This jealous God we have, whether we give him recognition or not, is not a tyrant demanding blind loyalty and subservience as acquiescence to his power. He is jealous because he is a lover. He is The Lover. He is jealous because he knows how wonderful the relationship between us can be if I will know and accept and feel his love for me. This is the very most important thing to him. It is far more important than the failures and darkness and sin in my soul. Those are things he has already dealt with by the cross of Christ. It is so important that out of love he will strip away anything and everything that stands in the way of my “getting it.” As important and sacred as the Bible tells us is the human marriage bond, even that he will sweep aside in order for me to meet him at the point of his love for me. This sounds crazy, but I believe that is exactly what is happening in my life. In a very practical way that is in my face every day, God has wiped away most of what formerly occupied my life. He has gotten me alone, injected many hours and days of solitude, and has all but grabbed me by the shoulders, looked me in the eye and said, “I love you and you are going to know it no matter what it takes.”

Okay, that brings me up to date to the present. Where will it go from here? Will I go beyond just having some sort of vision of what this is about to actually embracing it completely and feeling the depth of the emotion of it? Will this Great Romance fill my soul and satisfy my deepest longings? I'm told it will. I do believe it can. Will I be able to process and access it? Will I be able to experience it? I don't know. I do very much hope so. I hope I can learn the lesson and pass this class. I hope I can move on to a deeper relationship with God and on to deeper things. I hope that my life will go on to mean something valuable to God. Much more than has been possible with my hands clinging to idols. And how will this play out as far as my ever being able to be married again and feel the sweet love of a human helpmate, which does permeate my soul as the new vision does not yet do? I don't know. I have spent many, many hundreds of hours of intense thought about that in the last year or so, but maybe it really doesn't matter.