Genesis shows, right from the start, that romance was to be a basic part of the human experience. One man with one woman, period. That was God’s ideal, the biblical prototype that models what romantic love was to be about.

It’s fascinating, too, how often the Bible uses imagery of love, of marriage, to depict the kind of love relationship God seeks with His people. Nothing is to be more intimate than a husband and a wife—except, perhaps, a person’s individual relationship with God.

Read Exodus 20:5. What word in there reveals God’s feelings toward His people? How are we to understand that word in the context of God?  

Many times God expresses His jealousy over His people. (See also Exod. 34:14, Deut. 4:24, Joel 2:18.) Jealousy is a feeling lovers get when they think that their beloved is not faithful to them. God is not a distant, non-feeling, impersonal benign “force.” He is a personal Being with profound affection for the human family. However hard it is for us to grasp, God does love us and, like any lover, He is pained by our unfaithfulness.

Look up the following texts. What are they saying? How do they help us understand God’s feelings toward us? Isa. 43:4, 62:5, Ezek. 16:1–15, Jer. 31:3, Rev. 21:9. 

The Bible openly teaches that God deeply loves individual human beings. This is not an easy concept to grasp, only because the concept of God, the Creator of the universe, isn’t an easy concept to grasp. After all, we can barely understand the universe as a whole; how much less, then, the One who created it? At the same time, though, God has not only declared His love for us, He has shown it to us in many powerful ways. The greatest, of course, is the Cross and what happened there. What more proof do we need of God’s love for us than what we have been given at Calvary?

Think what it would mean were God to hate us or to be indifferent to us or to merely like us. But the Bible says that God loves us. What does that mean to you, personally, and how does this amazing idea (that God loves us) influence how you live?

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