Love Invisible

Love is the number one desire in all human cultures.  In love’s many layers and boundaries we find out who we are, our best motivations, and ongoing energy for survival, hope, care, sacrifice and life to death.  Those living in love have a significantly different life than those who diminish its meaning for both the good life and the balanced person he or she ought to become in the biblical pattern ordered of God.  The accent of the Apostle John, both in the Gospel and a letter bearing his name, carries the meaning of love and relate love, even human love, in the context of God’s love.  It is through love that the Apostle makes the case for the place of God in human life and performance.  It is the highest ideal that leads to the best conduct of mankind.  Love in its conscious meaning is a significant part of the image of God in mankind. To fail in love is to fail God and ourselves.  Scripture suggests that when we have wounded or even slain love, God is prepared to heal or give love back again in the context of life.  Everything God touches has something of his love in it.  Love is prevailing, spiritual in origin.  Even animals have love, and can grieve when the objects of their love are absent from them.  Their love differs from God’s love in humankind in that they just love without understanding the experience.  Since love is invisible they do not know in their limited existence what it is they are doing (loving) and they know when the objects of their love are threatened so to protect those objects, perhaps lash out against enemies, resisting to their own deaths.  One of the most moving photographs I ever saw was taken in Africa where seven or eight mature elephants surrounded a newborn elephant so the predator lions lurking yonder could not get to the baby.  A lion no matter how hungry and determined, had no chance opportunity of reaching that newborn. 

The factors of life we hold most valuable are invisible – like God and love.  They become visible, or fall invisible, in what we become.  Love is invisible, so is peace, so is joy.  They are discovered and made real in what we do with them, and they in us.  Their enemies are also, in the negative denominators also invisible.  Invisible anger triggers visible anger in us.  The only justified anger in us is anger against anger.  We can’t measure the meaning of it all.  God makes it relatively simple for us by making anything that does not emanate from his nature to be sin, and anything emanating from his holiness to be righteous.  In this generalized specificity we separate sin and righteousness, and ask his aid to maintain righteousness.  That leads to a basketful of virtues known in Scripture as the Fruit of the Holy Spirit.  A few representatives of that tree of life are mentioned in Galatians 5:22.  You may have guessed it – the first one listed is love.  The verses of the passage speak of transcendent life: The fruit of the Holy Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, temperance.  To this the Apostle adds the statement: Against such there is no law.  That is to say they represent so fully the nature of God that there is no limitation on their gain to the individual and that individual’s contribution to the meaning of mankind – to honor God by bearing the fruit of the Holy Spirit.  As the list can be lengthened for the negatives noted in verse 21 (and such like) the extension of the fruit from the tree of life could also be extended in the factors of righteousness.  The affirmation factors are for the winning side: the negative for the losing.

Scripture notes that God is invisible.  The earth and inhabitants are visible.  We have become accustomed to measuring everything in the few senses we have.  Helen Keller went beyond most persons having been denied several of her senses.  She wanted to see, wanted to hear, but could not.  Beethoven was near despair when he became stone deaf, and looked for one gift in heaven to hear speech and music.  Heaven needs no eyes, needs no ears, but will be tuned to sight and sound that will, like God’s, be a part of our nature in an expansive context that we can barely imagine.  The invisible vision, the invisible acuity, the perfection of all things will not require the tuning of earth.  There are strong hints of the above asserted by the Apostle Paul in a remarkable passage beginning in 2 Corinthians 12 and embracing glory, visions and revelations.  The Apostle was limited in his story. We in nature cannot fully manage God’s transcendence. For persons bound only to nature’s context, the biblical story of God and mankind seems fanciful.