God Sings

“The Lord your God is with you, he is mighty to save.
He will take great delight in you,
he will quiet you with his love,
he will rejoice over you with singing.”
Zephaniah 3:17, NIV

This little segment of ancient poetry is dense with mystical imagery. The first sentence states God’s nearness, potency, and liberation. The second sentence is a three-dimensional portrait of a shockingly good God.

Delight: There is an unshakable assurance of all-is-well in the notion that my Creator is happy with me. It forms a supremely livable world.

Quiet: I am a noisy-souled man and I live in a world of noise. Love brings peace and sorts the cacophony into intelligibility.

Music: Divine delight manifests in spontaneous melodic improvisation. Aesthetic order emerges in the sounds of everyday life. A key puzzle piece of my theology is that God sings.


Copyright Scott Burnett 2006

Choices, part 2 [Joshua ch.2]

The inaugural post of this blog included the word “Choices” in the title, and yet I never actually referred to choices directly. The idea is there, peeping through from between the lines, but perhaps it’s only fair to make the notion slightly more visible.

A life of faith presupposes choices. A person is asked to choose to believe God enough to be willing to make an unfolding sequence of secondary choices; for instance, choosing courage over fear, choosing to prepare for divine interruptions that seem highly unlikely, and choosing to step into a flow of events that will require God’s miraculous touch to turn out right.

“The Lord your God is God in heaven above and here on earth.” Joshua 2:11b

The God of the Bible is forever dissolving our distinctions between the eternal and the temporal, between spirit and dirt. The choice to believe God’s nearness constellates all other choices.