Kendrick Lamar supposes “what God feel like” on the song “GOD.” from the album Damn., one of the biggest albums of 2017. When the album was released back in April (on good Friday no less), this was one of the songs I listened to again and again and again. (I couldn’t find a clean version so if you listen to the song note, it is not a Christian, there is profanity.) I tried my best to match Kendrick’s lyrics with what I felt God feels like based on the Bible, and the person of Christ (because this has to be our gauge). I tried, but I couldn’t reconcile the two. I felt like K-dot had it wrong, but I had nothing significant to add to the conversation of one of the most deconstructed musicians of our day.
And then Lamar released Damn. Collector’s Edition two weeks ago. The collector’s edition is the original album with the tracklist reversed. The song “GOD.” is second to last in the original version, so it is the second track on the CE. When I started listening to the CE, I had my mind primed to try and pull something of significance from the song, and it came like an epiphany. I got really excited. Kendrick Lamar, on the album called Damn., an album that warns about the punishing aspects of a God that we should fear, had actually touched on the incredible, abundant, loving heart of God. We just have to shine a little light of Christ on it and it glows like a star at midnight.
I want to focus primarily on the chorus from “GOD.” because the verses pull a little too far from the focus:
This what God feel like, yeah
Laughing to the bank like aha, yeah
Flex on swole like aha, yeah
You feel some type of way then, aha, yeah
When I first heard this song in April, the braggadocious nature of it bothered me. It felt like Kendrick was equating Godliness or God likeness with riches and prestige. It did not seem to align with the representation of God that we see in and through the person of Jesus Christ. Christ is the rubric through which we must understand God. The Bible tells us as much:
John 1:18-No one has ever seen God, but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known.
Hebrews 1:4 The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. After he had provided purification for sins, he sat down at the right hand of the Majesty in heaven.
John 10:30-I and the Father are one.
So I had in my mind the servant God, who came as a baby, born to a teenage girl from a backwater town, from a marginalized, lower class people. I couldn’t picture Jesus flossing the way Kendrick supposed. But, between April and now, another album came out that breathed something beautiful into my theology.
2017 has been a year full of intensity and unrest, social outcry, and civil conflict in the United States. White supremacists marched the streets of the country spewing hate. Violence erupted in Charlottesville, injury and death visited those who stood against the white supremacists there. Systemic racism has been exposed in our criminal justice system, and our economics. Misogyny and the culture of sexual predation by men in power has been threatened like never before, and men have been held accountable. Many Christians have spoken up about the issues of today from their pulpits, their blogs, and their microphones. 2017 saw Lecrae’s All Things Work Together, KB’s Today We Rebel, Propaganda’s Crooked, Corey Paul’s Trill Young King (please, please, please listen to Black Heart), Reconcile’s Streets Don’t Love You, and more. These works all express the reality of the brokenness of our time in poignant and beautiful ways. One of my favorites of the group is KB’s Today We Rebel (which I wrote about in the last post). On the very same day that Today We Rebel was released (October 20, 2017), Beautiful Eulogy dropped the most perfect counterweight in Worthy.
Worthy touches on the issues of the day and of our daily lives, but ultimately it focuses on the worthiness of God above all things. The day these two albums were released I listened to Today We Rebel with Worthy queued to play right after it. They seem to be made for each other. Today We Rebel ends with “Rebel 88,” ends with a song of protest and demonstration, against policies of the state that dehumanize, or minimize the humanity in others. It points to Christ’s love as motivation to engage in social mercy and rebel against the priorities of this world. But the album ultimately ends with fight music, a call to action. But Worthy perspectives everything in a different way. God is above all. God is worthy above all. We do not ignore the issues of the day, but they should, for the aspiring Christ-like, pale in comparison to the radiance and glory of our redeemer and king. And Worthy ends in worship, not a call to work. (Both work and worship are signs of and are vital to Christian vitality, and Today We Rebel doesn’t ignore this, it just ends on a work note.)
Especially as Christmas approaches the track “Immanuel” (the second to last on Worthy) moves us into a right and righteous focus.
The song talks about the glorious processional of God coming to earth, the reality shattering condescension of the uncreated one taking on flesh to reconcile us to Himself, which puts all things into perspective. And so this album is so appreciated. It is possibly (imho) the most important album of the year. Beautiful Eulogy supposes the sighs and gasps of the angels and the cosmos as the King bows His knee, and begins the process of washing our sin stained, blood stained, [expletive] stained feet, through the advent of Jesus the Christ. The song exemplifies Hebrews 12:2:
Fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith. For the joy set before him he endured the cross, scorning its shame, and sat down at the right hand of the throne of God.
And here is where it all comes together.
This [is] what God feel[s] like,
[He’s] laughing to the bank –to make the withdrawal of his perfect blood, through his abundant grace… to buy us back from sin and Satan and death…
Having canceled the charge of our legal indebtedness, which stood against us and condemned us; he has taken it away, nailing it to the cross. (Colossians 2:14)
In Him we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace. (Ephesians 1:7)
–like aha hah!
Laughing in the face of death, and hatred and loneliness and pain and identity amnesia, with extravagant, long, strutting strides
–Flex on swole like aha hah!–
In such a braggadocious way,
Behold! I am making all things new! (Revelation 21:5)
and
Behold I am doing a new thing! (Isaiah 43:19)
And everyone else, sin, Satan, death, insecurity, hatred, you can’t stop it
–You feel some kind of way [about it] then?
Tough!
–aha hah! Aha ha, ha ha.
The Christmas season marks His coming to buy us back, and it is hilarious…. He has made a mockery of the powers, a public spectacle of death
And having disarmed the powers and authorities, he made a public spectacle of them, triumphing over them by the cross. (Colossians 2:15)
He has dunked in the face of his foes, is running around the stadium, arms wide, tongue out, like aha!
This is what God feels like… stuntin’ on our haters, stuntin’ on His rivals, strutting around town with us on His arm arrayed in robes of righteousness (Isaiah 61:10). Our God is braggadocious, on two things the most: On us, his beloved children, and on our big brother, The Firstborn Son, whom came to get us.
He also rejoices in the very joy of his children when they live in their purpose. I think of Lecrae’s words in Sidelines on Church Clothes 3
Back when promoters wouldn’t let me back in
‘Less I pay ’em on a back end, that ain’t happenin’
We just pray to God that somehow He would let us crack in
Tore that door off of them hinges
Told us, get it crackin’
And Derek Minor’s words from “This Morning” from High Above,
Woke up, told God I was tryna change the world
He said, “Boy, whatchu need? Whatchu thinkin’? (I got it)”
I said, “I need the juice”
He said, “Check your email”
I had a beat there from JuiceBangers
That’ll work for some inspiration
808s all like a hockey player
He said, “Go ahead, it’s time to shine now”
I’m in your corner like timeout
Let the haters go and sleep sound
They gon’ smell the Folgers when you grind out
God is excited for us to be His children and to delight in Him, and our fellowship with our spiritual siblings, and to live lives changed by the joy that he gives to us. The sentiment is so sound and so scriptural (Matthew 25:23, John 15:11 & 17:13, Luke 15:10, Zephaniah 3:17, Psalm 147:11, and more and more). I even gotta shout out Chris Tomlin for “God’s Great Dance Floor,” and Family Force 5 (“Dance Like Nobody’s Watching” and more, check out their vids on Youtube, these children of God love to dance!).
It goes back to the garden, when Adam and Eve had a call and a purpose, before the Fall, before sin, and God saw that that was good. But when sin came, things changed. And God had to deal with sin to get the point of joyful love and celebration. And so for a moment I want to focus on another aspect of God’s feel, from another unexpected corner…
The very irreverent comedian Sarah Silverman opened her show I Love You, America with a very personal and painful monologue on November 16th, 2017.
(profanity is bleeped out, but still, this has mature content)
Silverman addressed the sexual misconduct allegations made against fellow colleague in comedy and friend Louis CK in the wake of the #Metoo movement. (CK confessed that the allegations against him were true.)
Here Silverman almost perfectly lays out the incredible complexity of our God as displayed in the Bible.
There is the reality of brokenness. Admission of wrong. Sin has been committed and has caused separation. Silverman says that she would prefer to not have to have this conversation, because, while CK is a sinner, is guilty, he is also her friend, and she loves him. Silverman asks the most Godly question: can we love someone we know has done bad things? When sin entered humanity, God, who loved man and made man to be loved by him, had to ask the same question. Can we still love them? The asking of the question though, denotes the longing, which shows some evidence of love. The question is asked, because the answer is yes, we can still love them, and in fact, we do still love them. So the more important and specific question is “can we find a way to continue in fellowship with them, can we still abide with them?”
Glossing over the sin is not possible. She wishes she could overlook it. But people have been hurt, violated, and he has done evil. This is costly and that cost, had to be paid, justice has to be served.
God was angry, is angry, when we sin, because of the divide it creates in relationship. But God is also sad, because He loves us and longs for relationship with us. And then… hope… Silverman says that she hopes we can get past it, that with atonement can come reconciliation. Because that is God’s hope, or as my pastor puts it, God’s dream for us (per 2 Corinthians 5:11-21). God had hope of restoration, of reconciliation, of the defeat of sin. And that hope took on action and form in Christ.
God feels angered and saddened by sin, but driven by love, to a point of intercession for sinners, for the hope of reconciliation. And he secured that on the cross, by paying for sin with His perfect life, and through His resurrection from the grave! He basically went to the bank of sin and death and broke its power, and laughed. And now, what abides for us is that everlasting work of Christ and his blood, no matter what we think or do. For what can separate us?
We may feel some sort of way about ourselves when we mess up or sin, think that we are no longer loved, that our wrong doing can undo his work, and I don’t think that God laughs at us in a condescending, mean-hearted way when he hears that, but there may be a little chuckle like “Child you trippin’, if you think that that mistake you made is more powerful than my love for you? Don’t you know who I am? Don’t you know who you are?”
At the church I attend (The Light Church in Baltimore), we intentionally make time to honor one another and call out God’s identity over each other. This is so vital because it guides everything. We are often attacked at our insecurities (like Prop says on “Complicated” “We are often our own demise”), so it is of the utmost importance to know what God feels like, about us.
It seems that Kendrick Lamar now rocks a Hebrew Israelite philosophy more than a Christian one, per the song “YAH.” He has said in a number of interviews that his desire is to warn people that God is not just a God of blessings and mercy, but of real consequence. But thank God for Jesus, who sheds a glorious light on what God feels like, like the light shining over Bethlehem’s fields a long time ago.
He is not standing by waiting to damn us. He is instead hilariously, abundantly good.
Merry Christmas!
Festival of Booths 