God illustrates how He feels about us in terms of marriage, the covenant relationship between husband and wife, holy lovers. When we’re away from Him it’s like we’re committing adultery, grieving Him and angering Him like a bride who’s sleeping around with other men. (Ja 4:4)
This tells us that God’s not in favor of us being separated from Him, not even a little bit; He wants us close to Him, at home with Him, in intimate fellowship with Himself, and He wants this all the time. To tolerate any distance at all between ourselves and God, to be OK with it, to tolerate it for even a moment, or to seek comfort, acceptance and pleasure outside of God, is a betrayal of this divine marriage relationship.
In other words, God is a jealous God (Ex 20:5); He loves each and every one of us passionately and He finds our lack of love for Him, our tendency to wander away from Him and cast our eyes and hearts upon other lovers, entirely unacceptable. It’s whoredom, prostitution, and God will destroy all who live this way, who make a life pattern of whoring from Him. (Ps 72:27)
God isn’t being selfish in loving us all like this; He is absolutely the only One Who can fully and completely satisfy us and fulfill our deepest needs; He has designed us to be satisfied in Him and no other relationship can take His place. It’s a mystery that so few are seeking Him, looking elsewhere for love.
As a bit of perspective, this Jesus Christ Who loves us (Re 1:5) is the most beautiful and perfect Being in existence (Ps 45:2); His magnificence is so powerful we have nothing to compare with it just yet. The beauty of God, of Jesus Christ, will take our breath away; it will overcome us and overwhelm us. If we aren’t prepared for it, if He should come upon us suddenly, His beauty, majesty and power would paralyze us to the point of fear and dread. (Re 1:17) We’ll actually need new bodies to fully enjoy Him as He is. (1Jn 3:2)
To gaze eternally on His beauty and perfection, feeding on the majesty and continually delighting in Him, this is what we were all made for. (Ps 27:4) We can never tire of Him, never get used to Him. Anything less than God will ultimately disappoint and ruin us, and God is not OK with that.
The take-away from this is that any tendency to think otherwise, to feel that God is disinterested in us, to sense that He’s irrationally angry with us or displeased with us, to conclude that He is boring or unappealing in any way, or that He isn’t perfectly faithful and good, loving and just … anything at all that would tempt us and draw us away from Him, it’s all lies and we should have none of it, not for a moment. (Ps 119:29)