Daily Word of Grace # 57 (June 3, 2020)
In what is believed to be Shakespeare’s first published work, his narrative poem Venus and Adonis (1593) he incisively describes the troubled nature of human love. After Venus discovers the dead body of her beloved Adonis, she pronounces her curse on human love: “Since thou art dead, lo! here I prophesy, sorrow on love hereafter shall attend: it shall be waited on with jealousy, find sweet beginning, but unsavory end; ne’er settled equally, but high or low, that all love’s pleasure shall not match his woe. It shall be fickle, false, and full of fraud.” The Old Testament prophet Jeremiah similarly describes the human heart, “The hear is devious above all else; it is perverse—who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9).—and Jesus follows suit but turns the heat up even further, “Out of the heart come evil intentions, murder, adultery, fornication, theft, false witness, slander” (Matthew 15:19). No wonder scripture urges us to pray, “Create in me a clean heart, O God” (Psalm 51:10). While each of us have been burned at one time or another by human hearts “fickle, false, and full of fraud” (even if that describes our own heart) God’s love remains unchanging, true, genuine, and unending. At the Last Supper Jesus said, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13) and did exactly that for you the very next day. And in spite of the troubled nature of human love, as we read repeatedly (twenty-six times in fact) in Psalm 136, God’s “steadfast love endures forever.”
Love and Prayers,
Dave