To Know Him is to Love HIm

This song from my teenage days popped into my head this morning.

“To know, know, know him is to love, love, love him.

Just to see him smile makes my life worthwhile

To know, know, know him is to love, love, love him.  And I do.”

Now this song has a new meaning for me.  Now it is a hymn to the God I know and love; the God that smiles down on me and makes my life truly worth while. The sad truth that everyone in the world doesn’t know Him or love Him continually baffles me.  I honestly don’t get it.

God has done nothing but good in this world.  First, He created a beautiful world then He created people to care for it and keep it beautiful, and then He let them live amidst all that beauty.  Then, they messed up.  But God has continually worked at fixing up what human beings continually mess up throughout history.  He has never failed in His faithful and steadfast love even though we have again and again.

God’s faithfulness shows His compassion, love, and mercy.  People see Him only as the Lawgiver who ruins their fun.  But God’s faithfulness in His compassion, love, and mercy began long before He established His Laws that in reality were established only for our good and our flourishing as humans.

God witnessed His benevolence in all He is and in all He does in the very things He created, all things in nature and all people.  God didn’t fail; nature didn’t fail, so that points the finger at us.  As a human species we are marring and destroying God’s witness in nature at an alarming rate.  Human beings are marring and destroying God’s image in their witness of Him at an alarming rate.  Without these two witnesses God is vanishing from the very world He created.

What kind of a witness to God are we when we rape and pillage the land He gifted to us?  What kind of witness to God are we when we neglect to show His compassion, love, and mercy and yet demand, in an often ugly way, that God’s Laws are to be obeyed?  God is not a malicious dictator who powers it over His people.  He is a lover who desires an intimate relationship with Him.  When people come to know that relationship obedience will be the fruit that grows out of that root of love.

Let us consider what we are to be a witness of God to others and let us consider restoring the beauty of the earth that reveals a loving and creative God who wants life to flourish.  To know Him is to love Him and to love Him is to love all that He loves and take good care of them.