What is Love? (Baby, Don't Hurt Me)
This month we’ve been taking a look at “love” in our YBF classes. Our first week, we talked about the central command in scripture to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength and with all your mind” – involving a total orientation of ourselves to God in our emotions, our will, our skills and resources, and even our reason and imagination. This is the scripture’s starting point for all our talk about love. But we find a very different picture in the world don’t we?
Our culture is not diametrically opposed to love and devotion toward God, but I would venture to say it is not the first item to top the list of our culture’s talk about “love.” Instead we find a deep reservoir of love songs, sonnets, and stories of longing and desire. When we think of love, we think of finding “the One.” We search to find that right person who will fit us just right and fill that gap that’s been lingering in our hearts so that we can live happily ever after.
There’s something compelling about falling madly in love and pursuing that desire with our whole hearts, right? And yet we see a huge disconnect between our ideas about love and the realities of the relationships around us. We long to discover lasting and intimate relationships and yet we have few, if any, good examples of how to fight for love well. Unfortunately, the book that should be our perfect resource has been so twisted by our culture and by bad theology that distorts references to love into rules for purity and modesty. Are these are only two choices: chase elusive fulfillment to our desires or simply bottle them up because they are evil?
I think not. Scripture actually has something much different to say about love and romance: (1) Love is not about you and the fulfillment of your desire, and (2) romance and sexuality are good gifts that blossom out of real love.
1. Love is not about you.
Our first dramatic error in talking about love in scripture comes from a misread of Genesis 2:18 - “The LORD God said, “It is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.” That verse is often read accompanied by humorous stories of men’s woeful experiences as bachelors. If only we had girlfriends and wives – then we wouldn’t have to make grill cheese on our ironing boards! But that reading is problematic when held in tension with the seeming preference toward celibate life in the New Testament (Mt 19:10-12; 1 Cor. 25-40).
So then what did God mean when he said, “It is not good for the man to be alone”? I would argue that God creates a helper for Adam for the same reason that God creates everything in the first place: God’s loving character always results in generosity, goodness, and creativity.
2. Sexuality is good when it blossoms out of real love.
Love and marriage throughout the Bible is not about fulfilling your desires but sharing out of the abundance of love that has been given us. God gives us two ways to do this – the agape love of the Christian community and sexuality given as a physical expression of love through marriage. There is a huge difference between being unmarried and being alone. Being unmarried means denying a gift that has been given for our enjoyment. Being alone means lacking the ability to love and create with others. We are deficient when we lack the ability to be vulnerable, caring, and charitable with one another. We are not deficient when we lack the ability to express that vulnerability, care, and charity in physical sexuality and marriage relationship.
The world tells us that sex is first and all the other stuff comes second. Scripture tells us that sex is a wonderful gift of intimacy that comes in addition to the compassion, interdependence, patience, kindness, creativity and humility that real love brings into our lives.
So what is love?
God is love (1 Jn 4:8). We understand true love and romance more fully when we see it through the lens of God's love for us. We learn how to offer ourselves in holistic vulnerability and intimacy once we learn to accept and respond to God's relentless love as made tangible in Jesus. God empties Himself for the sake of His beloved. We ought to love in the same way. Doing so in romance calls us into a deep level of commitment and sacrifice. No wonder Song of Songs admonishes us, "Do not arouse or awaken love until it so desires" (2:7; 8:4)!
This Valentine's Day, may you look to God as the source of true romance. Let's celebrate love not as the fulfillment of our desire but as the gift of participating in God's very character.
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