Is God just looking for enough evidence to shame me into fearful allegiance?
“Hey Brian, you better come home. The police are here.” I dropped the phone and ran to my car.
Someone had been in our house—someone who didn’t belong. He’d forced open the 1970s-era louvre windows and opened the door into the kitchen from the carport. The contents of my desk drawers covered the floor of my bedroom, and my checkbook was missing. The computer was gone, along with most everything of value in our little home. He took everything except my guitar and the engagement ring my roommate’s ex-fiance returned to him a few months prior.
“I guess nobody wants this thing!” he quipped.
We were both youth pastors, barely making a living wage, so neither of us had much to steal. But, it would take us months to save enough to replace what we lost. Getting robbed is nothing like it happens on cop shows and movies. The detectives don’t find trace DNA evidence, run it through a supercomputer, and identify the “perp” in minutes. They didn’t even dust for fingerprints. Instead, they told us our best bet would be if the robber tried to sell any of our stuff at a pawnshop, and the possibility of getting anything back was remote. We never did.
Worse was the feeling that someone had been in our house. Someone searched through our stuff. He dug through drawers and discarded things of personal importance to me as worthless. He threw letters, pictures, cards, and mementos on the floor, where they crumpled and tore underneath his feet when he left the room. I felt violated, sick, and scared.
“O Lord, you have searched me and known me.” — Psalm 139:1
These psalmist's words could feel just as violating as that break-in.
If God is anything less than love, then this searching and knowing is a trespass in the worst way, like God is digging around in my private stuff with no care or sensitivity. If God is anything less than love, then I suspect God’s motives are anything but pure.
Is God looking so close to condemn and exclude me? Is God looking for enough evidence to shame me into fearful allegiance?
The searching the psalmist describes isn’t a casual look-see. He uses a word that means “Examine thoroughly.” As much as I think I’ve got nothing to hide, I’ve got 53 years of crud built up that God will surely uncover upon thorough examination. Or maybe the Psalmist chose that word because it worked with the rhyme and meter of the poem in Hebrew. But then he chose a version of the word “known” that is an intimate and even carnal knowing. No, I’m pretty sure the psalmist is saying God left nothing hidden in God’s searching. If it is part of me, God knows about it intimately.
But God IS love. And love doesn’t trespass where it doesn’t belong. Love doesn’t violate. Love isn’t forceful. So, if God searches and knows me, it isn’t to condemn or convict me; it is to set me free. Guilt and shame are the weapons of the enemy. They are not in love’s arsenal.
God, because you are LOVE, I echo the words of the psalmist saying,
Search me, O God, and know my heart; test me and know my thoughts.
See if there is any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting. — Psalm 139:23-24
I want to be free of everything shame has stolen from me.