חָפֵץ chaphets
What It Means
חָפֵץ is not the language of duty but of desire. It means to take pleasure in, to delight, to bend toward a thing because one wants it — the verb for a father watching a child he loves, or a bridegroom his bride. Scripture spends it on God far more than on us. He does not merely tolerate his people or process them through a system; he chaphets — he delights. In Psalm 18:19 David, hunted and finally rescued, cannot trace his deliverance to his own worth; he can only say, "he rescued me, because he delighted in me." The ground of the rescue lies not in the rescued but in the heart of the Rescuer. And the same word will fall, startlingly, on the suffering servant — the good pleasure of the LORD driving the whole work of our salvation.
A Story
In 1983 Henri Nouwen, worn thin by a long lecturing tour and a loneliness he called devastating, came upon a poster of Rembrandt's The Return of the Prodigal Son tacked to a colleague's door, and something in it stopped him. His heart, he later wrote, leaped. Three years afterward he traveled to the Hermitage in what was then Leningrad and sat for hours before the original, returning to it again and again.[^1] What held him was not the ragged son but the father — bent low over the kneeling boy, hands resting on his back, tender and unhurried, delighting in a child who had come home with nothing to offer but his need.
For Your Journey
We are strangely reluctant to believe that God delights in us. We will grant that he is patient with us, that he puts up with us for Christ’s sake — but delight sounds like more than we have earned, and that instinct is itself the clue: delight cannot be earned, only given. As long as we imagine God merely tolerating us, we keep our distance, working to improve our standing, and miss the very thing offered. Psalm 37:4 says, “Delight yourself in the LORD, and he will give you the desires of your heart” — yet we learn to delight in him only downstream of discovering that he first delighted in us. Let us stop laboring to earn a love that was never for sale, and let ourselves be enjoyed.
In Christ
How could a holy God delight in sinners without ceasing to be holy? The most sobering use of our word answers. In Isaiah 53:10 the same verb that named God's delight in David falls on the servant: "it was the will" — the chaphets, the good pleasure — "of the LORD to crush him." It did not please God to watch his Son suffer; it pleased him to save us. The delight that rescued David cost the crushing of the one who did no wrong — the silent [Lamb](https://devotions.inkling-s.com/bible-language.html#amnos) of that same chapter. At the Jordan the exchange became audible: "with you I am well pleased" (Mark 1:11) — the Son's delight now opened to all who are hidden in him. That delight rests on his steadfast [love](https://devotions.inkling-s.com/bible-language.html#hesed), not our record; and so we are received exactly as Nouwen saw us in that Rembrandt canvas — kneeling with nothing to offer but our need, while the Father bends low and rests his hands on our back, tender and unhurried, delighting in a child who has come home.
[^1]: Henri J. M. Nouwen, *The Return of the Prodigal Son: A Story of Homecoming* (Doubleday, 1992), 3-5.
“God's steadfast love is better than life itself.”
“We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.”