Insane Love

The love of God is greater far than tongue or pen can ever tell

It goes beyond the highest star and reaches to the lowest hell

The guilty pair bowed down with care God gave his Son to win

His erring child He reconciled and pardoned from his sin.

Could we with ink the ocean fill and were the sky of parchment made

Were every stalk on earth a quill and every man a scribe by trade

To write the love of God above would drain the ocean dry

Nor could the scroll contain the whole though stretched from sky to sky.

Oh love of God how rich and pure how measureless and strong

It shall forever more endure, the saints and angels song.

- Frederick M Lehman

The lyr­ics are based on the Jew­ish poem Had­da­mut, writ­ten in Ara­ma­ic in 1050 by Meir Ben Isaac Ne­hor­ai, a can­tor in Worms, Ger­ma­ny. It is said that the second stanza of this song was found written on the wall of an inmate in an insane asylum, after he had been carried to his grave.

Before I opened my eyes this morning the words of this song were flowing through my head. I lay there and repeated them to myself several times with a smile.

How has the western Christian world wandered so far from this amazing reality? Last night I was reading Evolving in Monkeytown by Rachel Held Evans, and as I read her musings about John’s vision on the lone island, I was moved to tears—even as I sit here now, my eyes fill up and I could very quickly melt again.

I’m not sure what the copyright rules are, but I have to share this, with credit to Rachel Held Evans:

…I wondered what exactly John saw and heard to convince him that the kingdom of God includes people from every nation, tribe, people, and language, people from the north and the south and the east and the west. I imagined that he must have seen women wearing glorious red, green and gold saris beneath their white robes. He must have seen voluminous African headdresses of every shape and color. He must have seen the turquoise jewelry of the Navajo, the rich wool of the Peruvians, the prayers shawls of the Jews. He must have seen faces of every shade and eyes of every shape. He must have seen orange freckles and coal-colored hair and moonlike complexions and the lovely flash of brilliant white teeth against black skin. He must have heard instruments of all kinds—bagpipes and lutes and dulcimers and banjos and gongs. He must have heard languages of every sound and cadence, melodies of every strain and rhythms of every tempo. He must have heard shouts of praise to Elohim, Allah, and Papa God, shouts in Farsi and Hindi, Tagalog and Cantonese, Gaelic and Swahili, and in tongues long forgotten by history. And he must have seen the tears of every sadness—hunger and loneliness, sickness and loss, injustice and fear, tsunami and drought, rape and war—acknowledged and cherished and wiped away. In one loud and colorful moment, he must have witnessed all that makes us different and all that makes us the same.

Last evening I read this aloud to my youngest daughter. It’s what I want her to know about God. This is the Good News of the Gospel that changed my life. That compels me to keep on and to resist the forces around me that would try to turn me against the different and keep me in a small confining box. This is the truth I want her to take in her heart to her college campus. This is what I want her to remember when she encounters the superficial and the counterfeit. God’s love is measureless and strong. It’s extravagant and lavish. And it’s present along side all the hurt and pain and injustice and evil, and it wins. Not just in the end, but now. It wins our hearts. It makes us compassionate and kindhearted. It gives us the strength and courage to fight injustice and bigotry, and to be peacemakers. And it’s the only truth that will forevermore endure.

The love of God is greater far…