The Divine Chase: Responding to a Pursuing God

By Ben Bounds

God is passionately pursuing you. There is a notion in our world that we must find God, that it is on our shoulders to search for a hidden God. If God had not or does not reveal himself, we would not even know that there is a God. He is self-revealing and on a mission to provoke a response in us. He pursues us in three fundamental ways.

First, the act of creation itself is an incredible act of pursuit by God. He is the Creator-Artist, with his masterpiece in mind, and we are part of the tapestry of creation.

Second, the act of inspiring a book, the Bible, to codify his message demonstrates God as divine author pursuing us through his written Word.

Finally, the act of the incarnation is the crowning act of pursuit. Christ, the incarnate Son of God, is on a mission to rescue the love of his heart. It is the perfect fixing the broken, the highest becoming the lowest, the resurrected lifting the dying from the very grave.

Gods pursuit of us takes place on his dance floor, his universe, his masterpiece. His pursuit unfolds throughout history on our battlefields, in our crucibles, and through our worst trials. He brings the scars of his cruciblethe crossinto our crucibles and rescues us. In responding to our pursuing God we find our greatest healing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Dec 8, 2017
• ISBN: 9781973610519

Ben Bounds

Ben Bounds, an ordained minister with the Christian and Missionary Alliance, has pastored churches across Texas for the last thirty years. Ben holds the BA degree in Pastoral Ministry and Biblical Studies from Southwestern Assemblies of God College (1988) and did graduate theological work at the BMA Theological Seminary (1989-90). Ben and his wife Linda live in East Texas. They have four adult children and six grandchildren. Ben engages in an active preaching and writing ministry. Contact Ben at [e-mail] to schedule preaching or speaking engagements. He may also be contacted by visiting his website www.benbounds.com or his facebook page at www.facebook.com/mercyroadministries.

Book preview

Prologue

THE DIVINE DANCE FLOOR

G od pursues you. It is a pursuit like no other. It is a divine pursuit. This pursuit of God is a dance. Creation is the dance floor. He built it to dance with us.

In the inconceivably distant past, our Creator worked. Our Creator has always been and will always be at work. He is the composer, the architect, the engineer, the author, and the artist. He is all of these and more. It was in the mind of God to originate, design, and create all things. Creation is God’s dance floor.

He built it to dance with us.

The elegant choreography of God’s wisdom is manifest in the unspeakable beauty of the dance floor. Galaxies yet unseen cordon the edges of the dance floor. They spiral, ebb, stretch, float, and dance against the canvas of the heavens, their eonic trek synchronized with the cadence of his voice. They are the families of creation, the stars, galaxies, planets, and all of their cousins. Among them are the angels of God. They sit in the rafters above the dance floor and move, sing, and look down upon our dance and marvel.

On the soil of this world, we dance with God. In the fields, lands, cities, streets, roads, and highways, he travels with us. He joins us on this journey. It is of his making. As he made the worlds, he made our hearts and souls in the garden of creation in Eden, where the dance began. The cadence of God rose into our hearts as we listened to the music of heaven and dined, walked, and danced. And joy reigned. There was intimacy with God. It was the divine dance of God. It was on his dance floor, the one he built to dance with us.

And it was in the garden that the dance turned.

The villain, the snake, tried to steal the dance. He entered onto the dance floor uninvited and stained it. The dark one in his insidious perversion drew us away, and we hid from the Creator in shame. We had broken our embrace with the Creator and danced with the destroyer.

But the destroyer is a fool. Even as the contagion of his poisonous, evil drool permeated the dance floor, the true and highest nature of the Creator was about to be unveiled, for he would rescue the love of his heart from this thief. The plan was already in place. It would not be easy. There would be pain, crucibles, battles, war, and death.

But there would also be joy, healing, rescue, restoration, and resurrection. And there would be redemption. It would happen in this dance and on this dance floor. For this is his dance floor, and he built it to dance with us.

I

Crucibles

1

THE MUSIC OF HEAVEN

Jesus answered her, If you had known the gift of God and who it is who said to you, ‘Give me some water to drink,’ you would have asked him, and he would have given you living water … But whoever drinks some of the water that I will give him will never be thirsty again, but the water that I will give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up to eternal life.

—John 4:10, 14

S he lay drifting in and out of blackness. Her mind struggled to move. ⁸ To think. What is this mental weight, this paralysis in her brain, holding her down? Her heart began to race. She was lying flat on her back, looking up at the ceiling. The shadows and lights raced across the walls around her. When she was a little girl, passing traffic projecting their lights and reflections on the walls had captivated her.

Why did she think of that? She couldn’t move. And why was she thinking those thoughts? More important things were at work. Her mind was clawing and digging its way upward. The lights moved away as if a gulf or barrier were there. These were not lights; they were faces. She could feel hands around her neck. She could not breathe. She could not think. She could not move. She wandered aimlessly in and out of blackness. Her life was now manifesting in this inescapable crucible, this nightmare, this living, horrific dream.

She was a woman running through the fading twilight of a garden, her breathing increasing, an inkling of fear and dread intertwined with a vague and distant hope.

But hope simply disappeared in this nebulous existence of hers, a prison of lostness, of darkness, of a life that had fallen off the world into a dark and forbidding river. She was isolated and wandering in a maze of terror. She was being broken upon the rocks.

In the in and out vagueness of consciousness, she could see the faces. Through the dismal and dread, she could see a soft, glowing, lighted redness across the room. Behind a table, these amorphous faces and figures were seated as if some kind of assembled panel were observing her. She could see silhouettes and hear an ominous chattering, but details fled from her mind and mixed with pain throughout her body. A slight sense of suffocation and anxiety rose within her, over which she had no control.

In the center was a larger figure, a fatty, bald being whose status as human was in doubt. In this clouded mental state, she could only see in her mind’s eye, for it was unclear if this were real, subliminal, or drug-induced. Or perhaps it was some unknown spiritual force or entity, or maybe it was just simply a nightmare. One thing was real, the pain accompanied by a sense of drowning in fear and angst. This central being was a faceless, reddish glob of living something.

For a fleeting moment, her mind overlaid a memory of playing in her father’s study when she was a little girl. In her daddy’s presence, there was always light, joy, happiness, warmth, and goodness. The painting of the Lord’s Supper with Christ in the center and the beloved disciples on each side was on one wall. It was a precious memory she locked away in a place that no one could touch.

Those were moments of security and happiness. She would crawl under his desk and read for hours. She remembered the wind blowing into the window as the curtains floated wistfully and surfed the unseen waves and billows of air currents. They would glide upon the beams of sunlight piercing through. It was so distant and surreal now. It was another life away and eons ago. Daddy would often scoop her up in his arms.

What force was this that was a counterfeit template of that holy supper, this overlay of evil upon goodness, darkness upon light, and despair upon joy? It had no eyes, but it looked upon her as its glare knifed through her soul. It had no face, but she felt intense emotion within it. It had no arms, but she sensed appendages reaching toward her. It was cold and dark and surrounded by slimy filthiness.

As her mind struggled, wrestled, fought, climbed, punched, and pulled, she could only retract her brain so far, and then this unrelenting dread finally caught up with her. She could feel the pressure of icy coldness, and it hurt to breathe. It hurt because of the coldness burning her lungs accompanied by the stench of vomit, sewage, and death, and the pounding in her ears. Something was drawing her downward and hitting her cranium. She could taste the nauseous gastric juices exiting through her esophagus. The vomit erupted through her throat into her mouth and merged with the mucous, blood, and vomit spewing through her nasal cavity. Her weariness, weakness, despair, and pain all merged into one seismic inner explosion. And then there was darkness. She was being swept away into a river of nothingness. A cold, rampaging, maniacal river. She had been broken on the rocks.

Somewhere in her brain, in an instant too small to be measured, her desperation had come across certain buttons that are sometimes pushed in the human mind. Who knows how these thoughts had originated and passed through the neurons of her brain along the pathways in her nervous system into the index finger of her right hand? Who is it in the pantheon of human ingenuity that can comprehend the connection of the deep and compelling currents in the unfathomable ocean of the human brain and the enigmatic expanse of the human soul? She had not believed that she would ever get to this point, and she could not in that instant calculate the full spectrum of the reasons for her impending action. This is not something she would do, but this river had destroyed her spirit, body, and mind. In the mystery of human existence, we don’t quite enfold self-destruction.

Belial⁹ had sent his demons to destroy this one. They had done their work well. She had been enslaved in this putrid crucible of spiritual darkness and physical violence. Her life was drugs, addiction, and separation. She had become an object of the feculent perversions of men, and she simply sought deliverance. In that moment, the storms cells of Belial converged and his demons danced as the signals sent to her right index finger began to animate pressure upon the trigger.

But all was not lost.

In that millionth of one second, her heart heard a voice in her memory, a voice from another time. Was it a dream or vision, or had it been real? It was a seed of hope that had been planted in her. It had lain dormant for so long. She could not reach it with her hands, but in her dreams, she could sense its nearness, this seed planted by a stranger from her past. His voice echoed into her vandalized soul.

Strength and gentleness, this voice.

Drink, he had said.

Could there be rescue in the night? Could there be light in this darkness? Could there be purity in this filthiness?

Drink.

In her descent, one lone glimpse leapt from the edge of her awareness. A blink of light of such brilliance, her soul became joy, and she saw light for as far as she could comprehend. And she felt security, warmth, and trust all at once. In that instant, she could see the whole world intersecting with eternity below her. She heard music that invaded the entirety of her being so thoroughly that it was as if she had become music. Its origin was most certainly heaven.

She danced on the dance floor in the heights of heaven. She danced the dance of joy and healing. There was a holy presence with her, accompanying her in this timelessness. Words whispered into her soul from far away came near and slipped into her heart.

Trust me, sweet daughter created in this world but not of this world, your labor is heavy, but your victory is near.

In all of her life, she had never felt this emotion, but it was so much more than mere emotion. She had sought it, longed for it, and prayed for it. It was only one word, but it was the whole of her existence.

Hope.

It was in that millionth of one second that this Hope interrupted the animated impulse in her finger, and it relaxed.

Her rescuer had heard her cry. Her rescuer had arrived. Her rescuer brought Hope.

Her rescuer is Hope.

People cannot live long without hope. They can eat, walk, breathe, see, think, and work. But they cannot truly live.

There is a lowercase hope in the world that is good. It is the hope of physical life and human circumstance that may be worked for, and it gives pleasure and temporal fulfillment in the achievements of our minds and hands. It is the intentional belief that we have a handle on the controllable factors,¹⁰ the hopes of this physical, temporal life. We trudge through the journey of life, making plans based on our hopes and dreams, and experience hope in the potential realization of those dreams.

We may dream of a certain degree conferred in the academic world, and joy manifests when we walk across the stage at graduation. We may pursue a certain person as a marriage partner, and joy comes on our wedding day. We may pursue a certain kind of home, car, or job, and hope is realized in the manifestation of joy when these things are achieved.

We take many other joys in life for granted, like freedom, kids, music, food and drink.

And breathing.

The teacher in Ecclesiastes tells us this in 2:24, There is nothing better for people than to eat and drink and to find enjoyment in their work. I also perceived that this ability to find enjoyment comes from God. He has blessed us with all of these things, but he notes our motives as well concerning these actions. It is good to enjoy, hope, and plan for things in this life, for these blessings, both those of work and reward, are from his