LONELY GOD

 

About twenty-one years before the writing of this essay, the writer visited Israel. It was on a tour sponsored by The American Baptist Seminary of the West, located in Berkeley, California. With one exception: a man who was a artist; every man on the tour was either a Seminary student or an ordained Baptist Minister. We saw sights, and experienced things, which the average tourist never gets to see. Among other special features was to hear four lectures by a very famous Rabbi, Pinchas Peli. He was Professor of Bible at the University of the Negev, in Beersheba, Israel.
Rabbi Peli began his first lecture by asking the question, “Why did God create the world?” Then he answered his own question by stating, “Because God planned to create Man, and wanted a place to put him.” Next came the second question, “Why did God create Man?” The answer this time was, “Because God was lonely, and wanted someone to talk to.”
A whimsical, romantic, tongue-in-cheek observation? Yes. But a profound thought, nevertheless. God has His own needs, and one of those needs may be desire for conversation, for fellowship. Who can say?

When this writer was a young man in his early twenties, he had a number of friends, all of whom were Christians, and we used to get together frequently for good times in each others’ company. Then four of them decided to try to form a singing quartet. This writer cannot sing, but in those days he could play the piano a wee bit, and so was asked to accompany the quartet. They chose as their initial song the hymn, “Near to the Heart of God.”
The song then, and ever since, has left me “cold.” I could see nothing to it. It is not especially “evangelistic,” it does not challenge us to “contend for the faith,” it does not speak of “finding God’s will for our lives,” it seems to be void of any special moral “call.” Others might like it, but for me it was a total void.
Then on a recent Sunday, almost seventy years later, the hymn was used by the writer’s church as the closing hymn to end the Sunday morning worship service. As the words were sung by the congregation, the Rabbi’s answer came to mind: “God was lonely, and wanted someone to talk to.”

When we go to church, we so often think, “What do we get out of the service? What is in it for us?” But a “worship service” implies the question, “What does God get out of it? What is in it for God?”
God had a need, and so He created Man. Man sinned, and so turned his back on God. So God sent His Son, Who paid for Man’s atonement on the Cross. Now God still waits, in a place “where sin cannot molest”: waits, and waits, and waits: for us to mitigate His loneliness.
Let us, then, think of God’s need, of His desire, as we sing:

“There is a place of quiet rest,
Near to the heart of God,
A place where sin cannot molest,
Near to the heart of God.
REFRAIN:
"O Jesus, blest Redeemer,
Sent from the heart of God,
Hold us, who wait before Thee,
Near to the heart of God.”

“There is a place of comfort sweet,
Near to the heart of God,
A place where we our Saviour meet,
Near to the heart of God.
REFRAIN.

“There is a place of full release,
Near to the heart of God,
A place where all is joy and peace,
Near to the heart of God.”
REFRAIN.

This hymn for me will now no longer be the same. God Himself wants and needs our fellowship, our conversation with Himself. For Himself, as well as for us.

--- Norman L. MacLeod Jr

July, 2004.

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