Some imagery of the Book of Revelation — the plagues and the devastation — can be difficult to contemplate. How could God unleash such wrath over humanity?

But this devastation and separation from God was never His plan for us. The Bible opens with these words:

“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth … Then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, after our likeness;’ … so God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. And God blessed them … And God said, ‘Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed which is upon the face of the earth, and every tree with seed in its fruit; you shall have them for food … And God saw everything that He had made, and behold, it was very good.” Genesis 1: 1, 26-29, 31

We are made in God’s image, which is Love (1 John 4: 16) — we are made in Love and to love. Regardless of whether we view the creation story in Genesis as an allegory, we cannot overlook the symbolism and spiritual truths that the words of this narrative convey — most importantly, that God was with us in the beginning. He was so close to the man and woman that they knew the sound of His footsteps and voice:

“And they [the first man and woman] heard the sound of the Lord God walking in the garden in the cool of the day, and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God among the trees of the garden. But the Lord God called to the man and said to him, ‘Where are you?'” Genesis 3: 8-9

This scene occurs after The Fall, when the man and woman choose to disobey God, launching the tragic history of sin and its devastating consequences.

God is still with us today and will be with us when the world as we know it ends. Jesus tells this to His eleven disciples, after His Resurrection. (Matthew 28: 16-20)

When I read now from Revelation, I am aware more and more of God’s immense sorrow for those of us who choose to separate from Him. God never intends to separate from any of us. Nor does He desire that we suffer death or any other difficulties.

Rich Mullins, an American contemporary Christian music singer and songwriter, wrote the beautiful poem below. It’s how I think of God:

I am thinking now of old Moses: sitting on a mountaintop — sitting with God — looking across the Jordan into the Promised Land. I am thinking of the lump in his throat, that weary ache in his heart, that nearly bitter longing sweetened by the company of God…

Of God, on whose breast old Moses lays His head like John the beloved would lay his on the Christ’s. And God sits there quietly with Moses — for Moses — and lets His little man cry out his last moments of life.

And then God — the great eternal God — takes Moses’ thin-worn, threadbare little body into His hands — hands into whose hollows you could pour the oceans of the world, hands whose breadth marked off the heavens — and with these enormous and enormously gentle hands, God folds Moses’ pale, lifeless arms across his chest for burial.

I don’t know if God wept at Moses’ funeral. I don’t know if He cried when He killed the first of His creatures, to take its skins to clothe this man’s earliest ancestors. I don’t know who will bury me …

But I look back over the moments of my life and see the hands that carried Moses to his grave lifting me out of mine. In remembering, I go back to these places where God met me and I met Him again and I lay my head on His breast, and He shows me the land beyond the Jordan and I suck into my lungs the fragrance of His breath, the power of His presence.1 

God loves us so much.  

1©2017 Goodreads Inc. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/431738-i-am-thinking-now-of-old-moses-sitting-on-a