A nod to the month: Knowing Love

For Americans, February is the month of love.  However, in a culture where love seems so quickly labeled and disposed of, I want to dig through the pile of candied hearts and remember what God intended love to be.

1 John 3:16a(NIV) states, "This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us.”

If we want to find out what real love is, we need to look at who Christ is and how He loved.  We need to not only look at His death, which is overwhelming for anyone to think about, but before that, before even His birth as a man.  To begin to understand His love, we need to understand our beginnings, when with mere words, God brought life rushing forth from nothingness.  In this time of humanity’s dawn, it was through Jesus that all things were made (John 1:3).  Imagine that power, that authority, to send whole galaxies spiraling out of the darkness, to light the cradles of stars in the expanse, to send the waters of the earth rushing forth in their millions of gallons, to rear mountains up from the plains with a crack and roar… to weave together the form of man from particles of dust, and with a breath give life through his nostrils. 

Now imagine what it was for him to become a human being.  Imagine lying aside the power to shape the universe and then coming screaming into the world in the cold of the night, into the care of two flawed human beings who did not even have the authority to protect their children from the sword of their government.  Imagine going from the object of worship, to the object of scorn: the questionably conceived child of a teenager from a region of the world that caused others to wonder, “Can anything good come from there?”(John 1:46a)  He would later be called a lunatic, a blasphemer, and even Satan, himself.  Eventually, the very people to whom He had been for centuries promised… would turn Him over to the government they hated to be brutally beaten and hung on a tree to die… a significant act, as in Jewish society a man killed this way was “cursed by God” (Deuteronomy 21:23).

And yet, as Jesus hung dying on the cross, carrying the sins of all mankind personally, alienated from God and tortured physically, Luke records Jesus saying in chapter 23, verse 34, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.”

Love, then… is more than a feeling of passion.  It is treating others better than they deserve.  It is acting lovingly, even when it is not felt.

Not like nature....

The last time I typed a blog entry on the beattitudes, I discussed the concept that those who "hunger and thirst for righteousness...will be filled" by Christ, in whom dwells all the characteristics of God.  Those who "hunger and thirst for righteousness" will be satisfied by the life of Christ in them, who gives Christians the very righteous nature of God, separate from whether they deserve it or not.

It is from the filling with the righteousness of Christ that we are able to understand the next beatitude:

"Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy." - Matthew 5:7(NIV)

I don't know about you, but when I was child, I hated and loved the nature shows.  I loved them because I loved animals!  I loved learning about them, seeing them going about their lives in the wild, interacting with nature and one another.  But it was in that very interaction of animals that I found what I hated about nature shows: watching animals brutalize and kill each other.  I remember watching a show where a stallion killed a foal in his herd because it was dying and the mare wouldn't leave it, slowing down the whole herd.  I remember vividly watching a show about orcas and witnessing a pack of orcas terrorize a grey whale and her calf for six hours, before the calf was so exhausted that the orcas were finally able to cut it off from its mother and drown it.  The worst part was after killing this calf, they only ate the jaw meat and left the rest of the body to float in the middle of the ocean.

As an adult, to a certain extent, I can look at and understand these things.  It's the "circle of life."  This side of the Garden of Eden, animals survive by killing other animals.  By feeding themselves, they feed their own offspring and ensure the continuation of their species.  By killing other animals, they participate in an unintentional "population control," as well as eliminate from the gene pool all but the very best of what a species has to offer, ensuring that the next generation of a species will be stronger than the one that proceeded it.

Yet... animals represent, in this way, the bare minimum of existence.  Kill or be killed.  Look out for number one because number one is all you have.  Stick to your own.  Kill your enemy before they kill you.  Yet, Isaiah 11:6-9(NIV) prophesies that life after Jesus' coming will look much different:

"The wolf will live with the lamb,

    the leopard will lie down with the goat,

the calf and the lion and the yearling together;

    and a little child will lead them.

 

The cow will feed with the bear,

    their young will lie down together,

    and the lion will eat straw like the ox.

 

The infant will play near the hole of the cobra,

    and the young child put his hand into the viper’s nest.

 

They will neither harm nor destroy

    on all my holy mountain,

for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord

    as the waters cover the sea."

Just because it works, doesn't mean it is the highest good God has to offer us.  And it is in that thought that I understand the beatitude of Mark 5:7.  Colossians 1:21-22(NLT) reads:

"This includes you who were once far away from God. You were his enemies, separated from him by your evil thoughts and actions.  Yet now he has reconciled you to himself through the death of Christ in his physical body. As a result, he has brought you into his own presence, and you are holy and blameless as you stand before him without a single fault."

In other words, Jesus acted AGAINST the law of nature by SAVING human beings, who in their very nature were opposed to all the goodness of God and had no desire to know Him.  He showed us mercy, not killing us (as He easily could have), but showing us love, to the point of His own death.

Because of that mercy He showed us... we are able to show mercy to others.  We, as human beings, are empowered by Christ's actions to act against the laws of nature, which tell us to only be nice to people who are nice to us, which tell us to only do things we want or like to do, which tell us to leave behind anyone who gets in our way or slows us down.  Instead, we understand life like this:

"This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.  Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another." 

-1 John 4:10-11(NIV) 

Job 10-13...

The verse that stuck out to me in today's study is one that has always jumped out at me when reading this portion of Job.  Job has just received a lot of advice from his friends, who came to see him after all the horrible things that had happened to him.  Their advice essentially said that he had somehow brought this judgement on himself, and he needed to repent of whatever wrongdoing he was in so that God would once again bring him into His good favor.  This reflected a common viewpoint of the time that earthly blessings were a sign of God's good favor for a righteous person, so therefore you must have sinned somehow to deserve bad things that had happened to you.  (This view was prevalent in Jewish culture, as well, and is why the disciples asked Jesus "who sinned" about a man who was blind from birth in John 9.  To this, Jesus responded in John 9:3(ESV) "Neither this man nor his parents sinned...but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him.")

But to get back to Job, he rebuked his friends for their statements, going on to say in Job 13:15(ESV), "Though He slay me, I will hope in Him."  This response to his friends, as well as the rebuke of his wife to "curse God and die" in Job 2, absolutely floors me.  Imagine yourself in Job's position.  Imagine yourself one of the most renowned people in all the world.  You have more money than you know what to do with; you have the million dollar house with tons of property in the nicest place you could imagine to live; you have every kind of car you've ever wanted; you're married with children who are nearly as successful as you and are very close to one another; you have tons of friends who care deeply for you.  Then, in one day, you lose all of it.  Your children all die at once in a tragic accident, your cars are all stolen or destroyed, your spouse tells you you might as well die, your friends tell you that you are cursed by God for doing something awful when you know you've done nothing wrong.  Then, you become chronically ill.  

But to all this, do you blame God?  Do you lose faith?  Not if you're Job.  Job contends God could go even a step further and kill him, but he would still "hope in Him."  Wow.  I don't know about you, but I have gotten angry at God for not being able to find my car keys when I'm late for work or when petty things don't go my way.  Reading the story of Job really puts things into perspective for me.  Let me type it again:

"Though He slay me, I will hope in Him."

But how do we maintain this faithfulness in a broken world, where it seems like every day the world conspires to destroy our faith?  I remind myself of the promise of God in 1 Corinthians 10:12b(ESV) "No temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your ability, but with the temptation he will also provide the way of escape, that you may be able to endure it."

No temptation, even the temptation to blame God and lose faith, is uncommon.  What is more, as I look at this verse, what stands out is this: 

1. God always limits what bad things can be done to you.
2. God provides the means for you to endure evil.

You do not face the darkness in this world alone, but He that created all the universe goes before you into the darkness to show the way, walks beside as you face it, and follows behind you to bring you through it.  No matter what you face... remember that.  The voices of doubt may say that God has abandoned you, that you are alone... but those voices are lying.  You are never alone.