11/13/2022
Place me like a seal over your heart, like a seal on your arm. For love is as strong as death, its jealousy as enduring as the grave. Love flashes like fire, the brightest kind of flame. Many waters cannot quench love, nor can rivers drown it.
Song of Songs 8:6-7
Presence and passion go together. We can discern from Scripture that God created human beings in order to share His love. And we can also discern that His love must be startlingly intense to have made the sacrifices He made to fulfill it. It therefore follows that His desire for presence is motivated by His passion—a kind of zeal we can barely begin to experience.
The love expressed in the Song of Songs is a taste of God’s passion. Yes, it’s the expression of two human beings, but God didn’t create a love—or anything, for that matter—that didn’t come out of His own heart or that He couldn’t experience. If He created the capacity for those made in His image to feel this intensity of love, it couldn’t have been foreign to Him. And because the Song is in many respects a picture of the divine romance between God and His people, it becomes a remarkable expression of the motives behind God’s relentless pursuit of us. Nothing can quench His love.
These verses express the heartbeat of the One who desires our presence, and this heartbeat is stronger than anything we can imagine. His love flashes like fire, burns fiercely, and overcomes death. If we ever thought God’s Presence was a casual matter, we were mistaken. God has an unyielding desire to be with us and to make His Presence known to those who seek Him. And those who reflect the intensity and relentlessness of this infinite heart, at least in some finite measure, will connect with their heart’s true home.
Lord, Your passion is the driving force behind the universe. I want to experience it, to connect with Your heart, and to know the strength of Your Presence.
