Love’s Mystery

Love is a mystery and that partly because it comes, in its legitimate meanings and implications, from God.  If we did not have God we would not have love above the level of manufacture related to self-interest. Altruism in us has its origin in love although it may lose its origin, as many matters lose their relationship to their origins.  This has occurred in some tribes who, in research of long past, it was discovered that the closest one remote people could identify with biblical or human love as recited by the missionary related an acknowledgment of a tingling inside.  The tribe had no word for love, but knew there was something they wanted to understand in their experience.  They tended to spiritualize it as something pressing on them.  They admitted negotiable relationships within the tingling inside, especially with children and mates.  This may have something to do with the accent of Scripture on agape (a personal character factor, without reservation) but also referring to love appearing in relationships, especially with children and mates – phileo (reciprocity)   The ancient Greeks used other words to identify factors they interpreted as part of human experience – like eros that may have its observed evidence in physical attraction.  It has its varied emphases as do nearly all motivating factors in our lives – ranging from deeply negative to highly affirmative.  

The words both in their original etymology and what they have emerged to mean in cultures have been reviewed extensively in literature over many generations.  We must remember that love has a wide spectrum and needs to be understood within the context that the individual permits in life.  Scripture speaks of loving much (perhaps meaning unconditionally) that implies there are those who love less than much – but loving nonetheless.  Further, it appears that the ancients, as illustrated in the literature of Israel, gave more attention to the different contexts of love as in physical love (eros), brotherly love (phileo), and highest (spiritual and unconditional) love (agape).  The Greeks gave considerable attention to eros, even in their stories of the gods who, in the myths, could have intimacy with human beings.  (Note the story of Achilles.)  The literature of Israel known commonly from the Old Testament was accented in the love of God in origin, and expressed in the New Testament in the Greek language context as agape. 

Agape is essentially the development of a nature of love in an individual that has its perfection in the nature of God.  We do well to remember that Scripture is especially marked by the languages of Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic – and this implies differences found in the cultures of persons using the language native to them.  When the New Testament states that God is love, the original meaning is that the nature of God is love.  This is not to be denied, confused or contradicted in the concept that God is a person in whose nature is perfect love, truth, peace and other factors perceived as virtues that drive God to act as he does.  One factor of his nature cannot conflict with another.  So it is that God’s perfect justice cannot be fulfilled in overlooking the imperfection of human beings without satisfying God’s perfect love (agape).  The matter can only be met from God himself who by taking the penalty of justice on himself meets both the requirements of holy justice and the requirement of holy love.  Therein is the story of the redemption through Jesus Christ, who suffered unto death by one who would never die and that for those persons accepting the offering of substitution that death would not be the end of meaning for them. 

Mankind has distorted the story of love in some ways, one of which is to shy away from the call to unconditional love in human beings.  The emphasis is expanded to physical nature so to emphasize eros – physical (sexual) response, even making it wide to prostitution in thought and conduct, and the opposite of beauty of physical love between husband and wife.  News sources are taken with the stories of gossip, divorce and broken vows, with titillation that draws persons into the murky shadows of lagoons off the site of the large life of righteousness, true love, fulfillment, and the keeping of self within the boundaries and expansions of love.  Sordidness is unbelievably extensive, sometimes even silly, in acts and styles against modesty, lust factors of sexual interests that include privacy, faithfulness and righteousness.  Love lost.