“Your goodness can’t win God’s love. Nor can your badness lose it. But you can resist it. Having been Plutoed so often, we fear God may Pluto us as well. Rejections have left us skittish and jumpy.”- Max Lucado
“Yet the LORD set his heart in love on your fathers and chose their offspring after them.”- Deuteronomy 10:15 (ESV)
In Chapter 4 (“When You Get Booted Out”) of 3:16 – The Numbers of Hope, Max Lucado bemoans the fate of Pluto. Pluto, the outpost planet, failed to meet solar system standards. Therefore, a committee of scientists meeting in Prague downgraded Pluto to an asteroid.
And some of us, Max observes, understand that all too well. Because we know what it’s like to be voted out. Wrong size, crowd, address. So, to the demoted and demeaned, the Plutoed, Jesus directs His leadoff verb. “For God so loved the world.”
Most significantly, Max notes, Scripture employs an artillery of terms for love. Hence, take a look at the one Moses used with the Israelites – Deuteronomy 10:15. As we read the passage, it warms our hearts. But, Pastor Lucado states, it rocked the Hebrew world. Because they heard this: ” The Lord binds [hasaq] himself to his people.”
Hasaq refers to a tethered love. Thus, here God chains Himself to Israel. Not because the children of Israel were lovable. Rather, God loves Israel as well as the rest of us because He chooses to.
In conclusion, Max relates how Rev. George Matheson (1842-1906) learned to depend on God’s agape love. During his teen years, doctors told Matheson he faced blindness. Yet, he pursued his studies, graduating at nineteen from the University of Glasgow. And when he finished graduate seminary studies, he was totally blind.
Furthermore, his fiancé rejected him due to his blindness. Later, in response to painful memories that flared after his sister’s marriage, he wrote this hymn:
“O love that will not let me go, I rest my weary soul in thee; I give thee back the life I owe, that in thine ocean depths its flow may richer, fuller be.”
Today’s question: What Scriptures uplift you when you find yourself Plutoed? Please share.
Tomorrow’s blog: “The embroidery of humankind”
