The True Image Of Love

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.

Genesis 1:27

“WHAT DOES SHE SEE IN HIM?”

I’d be surprised if you haven’t, at least once in your life, asked this question about a couple you’ve met. Maybe the genders were reversed: “What does he see in her?” but it’s likely you, too, have asked this—or, at the very least, thought it.

I believe the answer is hidden in a divine and prophetic reality. God has made us in such a way that it is natural for us to grow strongly attached to someone—on occasion, to someone many others may have passed over.

Why?

Two realities are going on. First, God has a way of revealing himself to us in surprising places—or, in this case, through surprising people. Anyone who has any history of walking with God can testify how God often seems to keep quiet during the weekend fasting retreat, but while you move the clothes from the washer to the dryer, or while you shampoo your hair in the shower, he speaks. He has made us in his own image, and he has the ability and the will to reveal that image to us as he sees fit.

Keep in mind, Jesus was really and truly the Messiah, the glory of God behind a human veil—but not everyone saw him that way, did they? Some saw him as a common man from a common town; others saw him as a threat. Still others saw him as a devil. Only a select few—indeed, the minority to whom God chose to reveal himself—saw him as God in flesh.

In the same way, God can reveal himself to you through a person who appears to have comparatively little going for him or her—but somehow, when love enters the mix, you can’t imagine how everyone isn’t breaking down the door to get at this incredible person who occupies all your thoughts and fills your heart until it seems about to burst. Just as some see God more clearly in a forest than in a cathedral, so some experience God more fully living with an introvert than an extrovert, or vice versa.

But I also think there’s a prophetic dimension to this reaction. Though our future glory as immortals remains masked, we are, in Christ, on the way to this incredible unveiling. Something about love lets us see a glimmer of this future unmasking, even when others remain blinded to it. C. S. Lewis captured this in a famous quote:

It is a serious thing to . . . remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship. . . . It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities, it is with the awe and the circumspection proper to them, that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics. There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit.^a

I think it’s safe to say that when we lose this sense of awe regarding our spouses—we’re married to future immortals we might be tempted to worship if they were fully unmasked—it’s not because God has stopped speaking or stopped revealing his nature to us through them, but because we have stopped listening to him and have stopped seeing with his eyes. The failure of married love heralds the onset of coldness toward God; it is a rejection of his presence, his insight, and his amazing dedication to love even the ungrateful and the wicked (Luke 6:35).

If our love begins to fail, it certainly isn’t God’s perspective that has changed—no, it’s ours! The same glory remains hidden behind the facade of that nagging wife or that silent husband. Our resentment or hatred or bitterness may keep us from seeing the hidden glory within, but it’s still there.

The maintenance of love requires a partnership with God—what you might even describe as an ongoing act of revelation. We learn to look at these persons as sacred beings made in the image of God and through whom God wants to reveal himself to us.

The maintenance of love requires a partnership with God.

If mere emotions rule our eyes, we can forget about consistency. I know a man who was eagerly pursued by a young woman more than two decades ago. She felt thrilled when he returned her affection. They got married, and for a while she felt delighted to be with him—but her heart grew cold and callous, and she divorced him.

Then this divorced man met a new woman. The new woman seemed just as thrilled with this man as his first wife had been twenty years before. They married, and she can’t even begin to imagine why this man’s first wife would choose to be alone instead of spending her days with him. The same man elicited three successive reactions—delight, disgust, and then delight once again. Is he truly three different men, or is he simply being viewed through three different lenses?

Love has been compared to a rose, an emotion, a policy, an organ (the heart), a season (spring), and even a physical act (sexual intimacy). But perhaps, to be more biblical, we should see love as a pair of bifocals—the lenses through which we see someone as others don’t see them or have stopped seeing them. Instead of changing spouses, maybe all we really need to do is clean our lenses and ask God to show us what he showed us before.

Jesus was the Messiah, though some saw him as the devil. I’ve talked to some who have gone to both extremes in the way they view their partners. At one point, they saw these persons as temporal saviors, the “missing piece” that gave their lives joy and meaning and purpose. Now these spouses have become the devil incarnate, making their lives miserable. In truth, these men or women were neither messiah nor devil, but merely the clouded lens through which God desires to reveal himself.

Your spouse may delight you as well as exasperate you; she may frustrate you as well as overwhelm you with her love.

“What does she see in him?” some might ask. “What does he see in her?”

The Christian’s answer is as shocking as it is true: “I see God, that’s what I see. I see God.”