Pursued by God?

 

 

A poem, The Hound of Heaven by Francis Thompson, tells of a relentless God who pursues sinners who eventually must stop running and yield to Him. While many tell of this as their personal experience, the Bible says very little about God doing the pursuing. Instead, it tells the reader to follow after Him in relentless faith and desire.

However, there are clues to His pursuit. The Hebrew word for PURSUE designates those shepherded by God in Psalm 23:6: “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.” This suggests that God’s  goodness and love pursues, overtakes, and overwhelms his people.

In nearly all other OT uses of pursuit or pursue, it describes the activity of people, except in a few cases where God sends disaster into the lives of His rebellious people. Some examples:

Leviticus 26:36–37. “And as for those of you who are left, I will send faintness into their hearts in the lands of their enemies. The sound of a driven leaf shall put them to flight, and they shall flee as one flees from the sword, and they shall fall when none pursues. They shall stumble over one another, as if to escape a sword, though none pursues. And you shall have no power to stand before your enemies.

Deuteronomy 28:22 & 45 says, “The Lord will strike you with wasting disease and with fever, inflammation and fiery heat, and with drought and with blight and with mildew. They shall pursue you until you perish . . . . All these curses shall come upon you and pursue you and overtake you till you are destroyed, because you did not obey the voice of the Lord your God, to keep his commandments and his statutes that he commanded you.”

Job felt a different kind of pursuit. He suffered greatly and knew His sovereign God was somehow allowing it, but did not know the reason. His ‘friends’ told him it was for unconfessed sin, but he knew that was not true. He said, “Have mercy on me, have mercy on me, O you my friends, for the hand of God has touched me! Why do you, like God, pursue me? Why are you not satisfied with my flesh?” (Job 19:21–22)

In general, this is how the OT saints thought about trouble; it came from God who pursued them with it because of their sin. Proverbs 13:21 says, “Disaster pursues sinners, but the righteous are rewarded with good.” Even God Himself said it:

Ezekiel 35:5–6. Because you cherished perpetual enmity and gave over the people of Israel to the power of the sword at the time of their calamity, at the time of their final punishment, therefore, as I live, declares the Lord God, I will prepare you for blood, and blood shall pursue you; because you did not hate bloodshed, therefore blood shall pursue you.

The NT speaks of God disciplining His people when we sin, but says nothing explicit about Him chasing after us so that we will become Christians. Nevertheless, when I look back on those days, I realize how God was at work in my life. My mom had an expression that described a girl going after a boy that seems to fit this: “She pursued him until He caught her.” We think we are doing the seeking but it is Jesus who “came to seek and to save the lost” otherwise we would “not seek after Him.”

GAZE INTO HIS GLORY. In the same way as Jesus pursued me in my total unworthiness, I am also to seek Him and those qualities that are from Him. The primary one is faith — rather than doing ‘good works’ without it:

Romans 9:30–32. "What shall we say, then? That Gentiles who did not pursue righteousness have attained it, that is, a righteousness that is by faith; but that Israel who pursued a law that would lead to righteousness did not succeed in reaching that law. Why? Because they did not pursue it by faith, but as if it were based on works. They have stumbled over the stumbling stone."

1 Peter 3:10–11 also says, “Whoever desires to love life and see good days, let him keep his tongue from evil and his lips from speaking deceit; let him turn away from evil and do good; let him seek peace and pursue it.”

Add to that list hospitality, mutual peace, holiness, love, doing good, and righteousness. Philippians 3:14 summarizes all this in telling me to “press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.” Yet as I pursue godliness, I must also realize an important truth from Romans 9:15–16, that my pursuit comes from the One who pursued me, the One who said, to Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion” and all that He asks me to pursue can only happen when I depend “not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy.”