What has God Prepared?
Photograph by Chuck Horn
This was a quick laptop demo for a song that I wrote for our Christmas Eve service this past year.
1 Corinthians 2:9 says, “What no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, and what no human mind has conceived”— the things God has prepared for those who love him". I used this verse in order to expand on the idea of how unthinkable it was (and is) that God would become a human being in order to save those who hated him. I wanted to explain the idea of how much higher our Father's thoughts are above ours but not just to say, "we are so dumb and God is so wise", but instead to say, "God is thinking and blessing on such a higher plane than anything we could dream up."
I also wanted to hint at an argument style that is common in the new Testament by folks like Paul and Jesus, when they said things like:
- If you, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more...
- If God clothes the grass of the field, which is alive in the field today and tomorrow is thrown in the oven, how much more...
- If God did not spare his own Son but freely gave him, how much more...
In this way I wanted the refrain to first ask the question, what does this appalling incarnation mean? But then I hoped that as the song went along and the refrain repeated that it would transform into a incredulous question of wonder and awe and excitement. If our Father thinks so crazy-different from us to conceive of this, if our Father loves us so intensely like this, if this is the extent to which our Father will go to ransom his enemies and to illustrate our place in his heart then....what next!?
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What has God Prepared?
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No eye had seen,
The Spirit o’er the waters,
The Light no one could enter,
The all consuming fire.
No ear had heard,
The breath of every being,
The Word from the beginning,
Until the birth of Christ.
What has God prepared for those who love him?
Who understood,
The judge would be our savior,
Our King dressed like a beggar,
The humbled Great I Am?
Who could conceive,
That Love would join creation,
The Holy incarnation,
The final Paschal Lamb?
What has God prepared for those who love him?
No one had known,
So hopeless our infection,
So ruined our condition,
That we must be reborn.
No one foresaw,
The righteous being rejected,
The wicked being forgiven,
The children given a sword.
What has God prepared for those who love him?
Nathan Partain, 2015