By way of reminder from other of these Pages, love as God has it for us is generated, in its maturity, in the will. Romance is dominated by the emotions, revealed in mankind by physical attraction. The attraction to anything can settle into addiction to something – physical/nature (body, beauty, sex, drugs, wealth, power, or whatever). Scripture tends toward identifying this as the world (human involvement in nature). Addiction may become all-the-world for the addict. It can be found anywhere in the appetites, even in vacuous religion. It may be in a job or an object like culture as in arts or music. It tends to demand satisfaction for the person, and may have mysterious forms of gratification. Genuine love is greatly violated in counterfeits, as in the addictions of alleged love. Virtues like love are sometimes formed in counterfeits that are destructive, sometimes in mild forms, sometimes in deadly – as in loyalty to an ill formed cause). They can give way to hatred if the beloved cause is presumed violated. This may have been the undoing of Judas with Jesus. Even the close members of the disciple group did not catch what was happening. Enamored of Jesus in the beginning, Judas faded to the point of wanting the one he called Master to be removed. Even if Jesus were not what he claimed to be, Judas revealed his own violation of love by his disloyalty. Not only did he betray Jesus, but he betrayed the meaning given of God to mankind – to love and be loved. Those who betray love betray themselves. Judas saw it in the last of his hours and chose suicide. He did not want to live out what he had become. Good point, where is my life taking me? We are solemnized learning about the victimization of those going down the Judas path.
Love as God has it, is settled by the will. That is the only eternal love. In God, love is in his nature. He can’t do other than love. God can get angry. He can’t reject persons true to his life. The secret is in the lover, not in the loved. Each person following God is called to follow the pattern, to love even when love is not returned. God loves because He is a lover and not a hater. There may be nothing in the loved to justify the love, even when the loved is well formed in maturity, beauty and character simply because these are never enough. We may love the beauty of the lives of good people, but God’s love is not dependent upon the performance of the loved. Good is to be honored, but that matter falls under another factor of truth in the holiness of God. Mercy, forgiveness, humility, grace – all relate to the status of the divine factors in our lives – emanating from God’s nature. We are told, in truth, that physical beauty is only skin deep so one would not want to base personal worth from God to be evaluated by fragile attraction. Whether a beautiful face/body or a magnificent rose/leaf – both fade to the point of physical ending. God looks for character, the product of his image in human beings, a lasting, repaired factor for Christians.
When Scripture announces that, God is love, the interpretations seem fuzzy to many persons, even ephemeral. Most persons prefer to accept love as real but make up their own definitions, which always leave something out. It is enough for them to say, God is love. They may have no definition. The phrase is an incomplete translation of the original language. God is not love. He is a person. What the word means in this context is that God’s nature is love. The vestiges of God’s love are found in us. It is sometimes likened to a child’s love, not yet understood by the child – and not dependent upon the quality of the person receiving it. It will be ineffective later unless the child incorporates love in his or her will. Human love, when it is genuine, is reflection of the nature of God, as the moon has no light of its own, but reflects the light of the sun, so a person can, when developed as God would form that person, reflect the love, the light, the Spirit of God. Am I willing to be the reflector of God’s love? Few marriages and families would break up, or exist in limbo, if the enlightened will to love were followed, a will favoring God and love’s reflection of who we really are becoming in the nurturing of Christ. The goal is to become loving persons, unwilling to be deterred by the negatives of life and relationships. The other stuff‘ of life is opened by this door. All Christian life objectives, in any area, are impacted by God’s nature. All this is too much for us if we attempt to find the truth on our own. Here Scripture serves magnificently in the discovery of how persons find or reject that love, eternal of God from the heavens. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020