Intimate LOVE Can Be Scary!
7 min 43 sec: app reading time
March 12, 2025
Dear Friend:
I never imagined a few years ago that one day I would be writing a "Chats" with what I understand of love now.
Love has been used as a trivial term to describe feelings, emotions, and relational connections. But when adequately understood, intimate love can threaten the safety and comfort zone we adhere to as a mask to affirm our ego and cover our lack of authenticity.
We are used to "dress up" because we are wired to experience shame for nakedness. Nudity can be the most intimate encounter between two people or the most terrifying one. In the case of a baby and mother or as a sexual encounter, profound love is consolidated by nudity. What I call "nude love" can either make us feel totally embraced, affirmed, and acknowledged, or it can be terrifying.
Let me examine a passage in the Old Testament that describes a pivotal moment when God displayed "naked love" to Israel.
Exodus 19:5-7-TM outlines the conditions of a love covenant between God and Israel.
In Hebrew, the word for "covenant" is "berit" (בְּרִית), which means a "pact," a "treaty," or an "agreement," and often implies a solemn and binding commitment between two parties, including God and his people. This covenant is usually called the "old or first covenant" by Christian readers of the Bible. I have had issues with these labels for years. I will briefly explain why.
Scholars generally agree that the Book of Exodus, including this passage, was likely written in the 6th century BCE, "after" the Babylonian exile, rather than during Moses's time.
Scholars haven't settled with precision the timing of Exodus 19:5 (called the "first covenant") and Jeremiah 31:33 (called "the second covenant"), though the dating opens up some fascinating possibilities.
In my own research, I affirm that perhaps Jeremiah 31:33-34-TM (called the "second covenant") was written before the editing and redaction of Exodus 19:5, transmitted by oral-written tradition, and promoted as a national theology to redefine Israel's identity after the Babylonian exile.
There is a subtle but meaningful point in my mention of this. Jeremiah was a "live" prophet who declared what's called the "second covenant" to Israel, while Exodus (called the "first covenant") was mythology transmitted by oral tradition and written many years after the facts. In fact, it is most likely on a later date and by an anonymous author.
The so-called "first covenant" between YHWH and Israel, as described in Exodus 19:5-7-TM, appears to be a bilateral agreement: "If you "obey" my voice and hold fast to my covenant... then"
Notice the emphasis on "If" you "obey."
Scholars have long wondered if Israel understood such a covenant.
Perhaps a narrative that places Jeremiah's covenant in "live" time through the prophetic voice of Jeremiah during the exile "before" the re-narrating of Exodus makes more sense since the people of Israel were wondering where God was during this time of darkness.
They had forgotten the so-called "old covenant" or "first covenant" of obedience and had long wandered away from it all.
Generations had gone by since such time, perhaps 1,500 years or more.
The fact that Jeremiah denounced in earlier messages Israel's dependency on the "temple ceremonies" as manifestations of "behavioral repentance" or shallow religious transactional obedience while their consciousness was not aligned with God makes the covenant God established with Israel through Jeremiah credible even if the so-called "first covenant" was passed on and disregarded by Israel.
The covenant that emerged in Jeremiah’s time seems to be aligned with God's character, and it reveals a unilateral LOVE from YHWH’s side:
"This is the brand-new covenant that I will make with Israel when the time comes (After the exile). I will put my law within them—write it on their hearts!—and I'll be their God. And they will be my people. They will no longer go around setting up schools to teach each other about God. They’ll know me firsthand, the dull and the bright, the smart and the slow. I’ll wipe the slate clean for each of them. I’ll forget they ever sinned!" Jeremiah 31:33-34-TM
This is a profound statement from God telling people how they would be transformed, healed, and guided.
It would be "obedience" from within instead of "obedience" to laws.
I want to make clear that my theology of God doesn't change in a correct understanding of these two covenant versions. I believe "obedience" to the law within a covenant that had been established with Abraham was by "grace," as much as "obedience" from within is by grace! The view of two covenants is marginal to the central issue of grace and God's love!
I have no issue with the change of tone between the two covenants because I affirm God's love as relational and evolutionary, transforming it into a wholeness that is as eternal as God.
"Obedience" to God's command, as in the case of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, or "obedience" to laws in the wilderness in the case of Israel, and "obedience" to God from within one's consciousness do not invalidate grace throughout God's redemption of humanity and do not affirm a polarity between law and grace either!
Whether we study Jewish theology in the Old Testament or the New Testament, the unfortunate duality of "grace and law" created by the Protestant Reformation is erroneous. The Biblical text does not support such polarity, even though hermeneutical interpretations have made a mess of it for hundreds of years.
Jeremiah's dramatic change (which I affirm is the authentic and earlier version) is drastically different from Exodus 19 (which may have been a later nationalistic attempt to identify Israel's past history).
It surpasses the passion and intensity of God's love and how authentic inner transformation happens in response to God's love as a unilateral manifestation. God loves us first! We then respond! Instead of God "requesting" obedience as a condition for being accepted!
Was Exodus 19 a test of "obedience " like Adam and Eve early on in the Garden of Eden?
Did the test fail, and God showed up with a different strategy?
Perhaps.
This idea of a God who evolves with circumstances has attracted my attention for many years more than a static, authoritarian, absolutist God unable to change. I don't believe in an omnipotent, immutable God!
The Bible is not God's profile of divine character as much as the story of how broken, unpredictable, and erratic humanity and God interact through the cracks of human and God's choices. I like a God who makes choices as much as I do! This is what creates an authentic relationship.
This relational theology, also known as process, open theology, or panentheology, has been a focus of my reading of the biblical narrative for many years. I have called it "Relational Evolutionary Wholeness" because it helps me to embrace paradoxes, ambiguity, archaeological discoveries, ancient history, quantum science, contradictions, social science, and emerging human and cultural perspectives without having to debate anything from an unmovable construct served to me by a particular biased self-serving platform. I end up finding God's love in all dimensions of existence beyond the narrowed confines of the biblical narrative.
In Jeremiah, God forgives undeservedly, even after direct disobedience!
God's love is a love that waits, hopes, and desires, working toward reconciliation and trust, not just blind obedience. It is a love that longs for mutual relational understanding.
It's a love that gifts us a "promise" that we can fulfill because it doesn't depend on "obedience" by willpower but on "waking" from within to God's presence in our inner consciousness. The transformation happens from within, followed by natural behavior, not by adhering to rules while fearing consequences.
Only God's presence and love can fill in all the gaps. Henceforth, there is no such thing as deserving or earning anything. All is grace. Before in what's called the "first or old covenant," obedience was never meant to earn grace, but Israel misunderstood it as a transactional enterprise in the context of the other religions that transacted with their gods.
Jeremiah 31 is frankly a total changing of the guard—and what I consider today in my theology of God the only human capacity for intimate reciprocal love! Love bursts from within and drives behavior, attitudes, and mindsets to reflect love.
Most scholars and theologians agree that the notion of a God-initiated unilaterally fulfilled divine relationship is the highest peak of relational love between God and creation.
Most of us fear, deep down, that we’re unworthy of it, and God comes along to remind us we are worthy of divine love. That's radical and transformative in my "Chats" today!
Unfortunately, our interpretation of the old covenant is so enmeshed in our dualistic logic of tit for tat that most Christians remain untouched by Jeremiah’s proclamation of a spiritual revolution.
We remain content with retribution and vengeance passing for justice.
We would rather stand outside of love than receive a love of which we believe we are not worthy, have not earned, or cannot figure out.
I affirm that such a view of love is profoundly threatening to our ego and sense of independence.
We often find certitude by virtue of obedience to moral codes or religious constructs more comforting than we trust that we are loved. Thus, our behavior aligns with such a view of self. Infinite love is literally too much for most of us to comprehend.
We think we know how to love—alone, independent of relational mutuality—yet such love is obsolete and not love at all.
Jeremiah reminds Israel from God that the "mutuality" of relational love between God and human consciousness is embedded within them! I love this thought!
Relational participation and interaction rather than performance is what God values.
In his aloneness and anguish, Jeremiah saw what the majority still could not see twenty-five hundred years later. In my own Seventh-day Adventist Christian tradition, this view is still foreign to most!
Our refusal to allow ourselves to be loved undeservedly and unconditionally will forever be the anguish of every prophet and the burden of every human who chooses to have an intimate relationship with God.
Here is the most shocking part of this story.
It could be said today that churches, denominations, and religions refuse to affirm unconditional LOVE from God by obscuring it with religious constructs, doctrines, or false teachings.
The threat of God's love...
Yes, you read it right...
The threat of this love covenant by God in ancient times was so radical that Jeremiah’s scroll of writings was cut into pieces and burned by King Jehoiakim. Read Jeremiah 36:19-32-TM.
Did you get that?
How could it be that love could threaten someone so much?
That's the paradox of God's love.
What melts a person by grace is the very thing that hardens someone else.
This is how threatening God's love and grace can be to people who harden against God's inner presence in their consciousness.
When a person, world, religion, church, denomination, or government is against anything fresh from God or an evolutionary manifestation of love that accepts Jews and gentiles, men and women, LGTQIA+ as equal humans or sets in complete and determined motion actions that discriminate and marginalize others, love can be the most threatening experience ever.
Do you understand why Jesus’s love was so threatening to the Roman Empire and the Jewish religion and why "execution" was the only way to calm the tension? I have not affirmed for many years that his execution had nothing to do with my salvation! Jeremiah's message assured me that my choice of God's love is mine to make!
Do you feel threatened by God's love and unlimited grace?
With you on your journey,
Pastor Harold
