He Will Exult Over You With Loud Singing
by Smuts vanRooyen
During the London Olympics, Bert Le Clos stole the hearts of the staid Brits when his son Chad beat the legendary swimming super star Michael Phelps by five-hundredths of a second and won the gold medal. Overjoyed and emotional Bert began to gesticulate wildly in the spectator stands. Six times he shouted the word “Unbelievable!” then added, “Look at him, he’s beautiful. I love you, I love you!”
When he was interviewed by the BBC’s Clare Balding he exulted, “I have never been so happy in my life. It’s like I’ve died and gone to heaven. Whatever happens in my life from now on is just plain sailing.” Then he promised that there would be a huge party at the Le Clos home in South Africa when they got back.
Scores of moved people immediately responded to this father’s enthusiasm for his son on Twitter. One twitter (or is it tweet?) read, “Bert Le Clos you have just made my night.” Another asked, “Is there an olympic event for proud dads? Give the gold to Bert Le Clos.” And still another, “You are a legend. Your love and pride of your son is heart warming.”
Here is a dad who not only recognizes his son’s accomplishments as significant, but sees him as intrinsically beautiful, and subsequently loves him for both. There is a light in his eyes for his son. What a father! Now what I need to know is whether God would ever respond to me in such an over-the-top fashion. Even a more subdued reaction on his part would be just fine. This need of mine to understand where I sit on God’s continuum of worth is not prompted by idle curiosity, or sheer impertinence, but by my
experience of abuse as a child.
My father drummed a sense of existential uselessness and repulsiveness in to my head by beating me about the face with his hard, flat hand. Consequently, it was natural for me to view myself as devoid of any intrinsic value. After my father sent me packing from home I attended a boarding school. There I met a group of boys who suffered from a touch of Adventist Academy Oppositional Disorder. One of their innovative but insightful pranks was to request that we sing “Alas and Did My Savior Bleed” when favorite hymns were solicited. But they had no intention of singing the whole song. Instead they held back in silence until we reached the line that asked, “Did he devote that sacred head for such a worm as I?” This wormy phrase they bellowed out with obvious delight and then fell instantly silent again. The effect was profound and made a deep impression on me. I had many a heated argument with them, not because I was offended by their sacrilege, but because they would not concede that we all are worms. How could they be so blind? But it was a providential beginning of a journey for me.
Prominent Protestants besides Isaac Watts, the author of the fine hymn just referenced have, in my view, failed to see the distinction between being unworthy of grace (which is true) and being worthless persons (which is not true). I am unworthy of my wife’s love but I am not a worthless person. I can never be worthy of the death of Jesus but I hold my head high as his creation. When the Psalmist looks at the heavens and is intimidated by their splendor, he asks the question of God, “What is man that you are mindful of him?” The answer is not what one might expect. It’s not, “An insignificant speck, a mere nothing, a meaningless absurdity.” Instead, David declares that we are fantastic, excellent beings made only a little lower than the angels, and crowned with glory and honor.
John Calvin asserted that God does not love us for who we are but for Christs’ sake alone. God, he said, finds the reason to love us totally within himself and never within us. This thinking undergirds his doctrine of predestination, which has a high view of God but a low view of humanity which is totally depraved. The greater God is the more insignificant humanity becomes. Calvin’s noble intention, with which I agree, is to
protect salvation from the pollution of human effort but he nullifies our humanity in the process.
This, in my view, is an overstatement of righteousness by faith without works. It goes beyond the thrust of the Scriptures. We do in faith choose to accept salvation. God would not save us if we did not want him to. He values and activates our inherent power of choice, he also makes our choices viable by presenting us with an option of salvation which we could not generate ourselves. So we cannot take the credit for choosing to receive what we could not accomplish. Nevertheless deep inside every human is a wonderful capacity to consent to what God has done for us in Christ. We are unworthy but not worthless.
Now I grasp that humans in the presence of God deprecate themselves. C.S. Lewis argued that “The real test of being in the presence of God is that you forget about yourself altogether or see yourself as a small dirty object.” (Mere Christianity p. 124.) True, but of course the question is whether God concurs with such an estimate of ourselves. Certainly in the story of Job this is not the case. Although Job does declare, “I am unworthy - how can I reply to you? I put my hand over my mouth...” God’s response is to challenge him to be the man that he really is, “Brace yourself like a man; I will question you and you shall answer me.” God wants Job to stand and not to wilt before him. It was Elihu, Job’s misguided friend, who argued that God regarded even the best of humanity including Job as worthless. “Is he not the One who says to kings, ‘You are worthless.’” (Job 34:17) But neither Job nor God would accept that label as true. We must not forget
that the story begins with God asking Satan, “Have you considered my servant Job?” This is nothing less than an assertion of pride in Job, God clearly is impressed with the man and wonders whether the Devil has noticed Job’s excellence.
As long as any part of the image of God remains in us we are valuable and loveable. A human is a fallen chandelier shattered in to a thousand inconsistencies on the the marble floor. But when the wind moves the lace curtains late in the day, and the long light of the sun shines on our brokenness, a rainbow radiates from our crystal, we are still incredibly beautiful. Stand in amazement before the mother who carries her
emaciated child a hundred miles to the refugee camp. Gasp at the accomplishment of the young man who frees his arm from the rock by cutting it off at the elbow with his pocket knife. Smile with pleasure at the
child who shares her ice cream with her little sister on a hot summer day. There is just cause to wonder at the magnificence within us.
But back to God and Bert. Would God ever cheer for me with Bert’s unbridled joy? Well not if he’s waiting for me to beat Michael Phelps. I’m part of that group that cannot dog paddle well, that belly-flops off the low dive, that pretends the snaps on soda cans are gold medals. But we’ve heard God jubilating wildly in the grandstands over our modest successes and we love it. The prophet Zephaniah shows God’s ecstatic reaction to us by proclaiming:
The Lord, your God, is in your midst,
a warrior who gives victory;
he will rejoice over you with gladness;
he will be quiet in his love;
he will exult over you with loud singing!
Loud singing! Quite something, don’t you think?