Key Words of the Christian Faith by Reinder Bruinsma

Chapter 1
Love

“‘God is love’ is written upon every opening bud, upon every spire of springing grass. The lovely birds making the air vocal with their happy songs, the delicately tinted flowers in their perfection perfuming the air, the lofty trees of the forest with their rich foliage of living green--all testify to the tender, fatherly care of our God and to His desire to make His children happy.”
                     —Ellen G. White, Steps to Christ, p. 10.

      “All you need is love.” More than 40 years have gone by since the four young men from the British city of Liverpool first sang this famous line. Even today’s postmodern generation knows the words, and whenever something reminds people of the Beatles, this lyric pops up. It has been played, sung, hummed, downloaded, and listened to on the radio by hundreds of millions of young and not-so-young men and women around the world. But how many have stopped to give some careful thought to the words? Are they actually true? Can love indeed take care of all our needs? Will we be able to meet whatever challenges might come our way as long as we have love in our lives? Is love the only essential element for a happy and satisfying existence?
     If the frequency of its use determined its place on the ladder of meaning, the word “love” would have a good chance of coming out on top. Or maybe not quite. Possibly the word “sex” and related terms would score even higher. That would certainly apply if we were to include our unspoken thoughts with the words that actually pass our lips. Researchers suggest that the average male in our Western world thinks about sex in one form or another once every 52 seconds. Women apparently are not quite as sex-obsessed as men, but their minds also frequently turn to the subject of sex (on the average, in their fertile period, at least a few times a day). Maybe we cannot fully substantiate such claims, but for many the words “love” and “sex” are almost interchangeable, and when they repeat the words credited to John Lennon and Paul McCartney (“All you need is love”) they really mean “All you need (and want) is sex.”
     An immense amount of confusion surrounds the topic of love and much of what has the love label so casually attached to it does not deserve that name. Often, what many call love is, indeed, no more than lust and an unrestrained craving for sex in endless variety. Often it has nothing, or very little, to do with genuine feeling and true attachment, and everything to do with the self-centered gratification of urges constantly reinforced by the media and popular culture. In many cases, love is just about me—my power, my possessions, my drives, my goals and ambitions—and about nothing else.

Love in the divine scheme of things
     I do not know how much the Beatles knew of the Bible or about religion when they sang “All You Need Is Love” and whether they realized that their words voiced a religious truth of crucial importance. For these few words oddly echo what one of the great founders of Christendom, the apostle Paul, wrote to the believers in the Greek city of Corinth. He short-listed the basic ingredients of true Christian life: faith, hope, and love. In many of his writings he emphasizes the importance of having faith. Faith in Christ Jesus is a condition for being saved (Rom. 1:17). He also wants there to be no misunderstanding about the vital role of hope in the experience of the Christian (2 Tim. 1:12). But when all is said and done, there is nothing more important than love (1 Cor. 13:13). Yes, Paul says, “All you need is love.” Everything else is, in fact, wrapped up in the package of true Christian love.
     Even though Paul speaks about love in the famous thirteenth chapter of his First Epistle to the Corinthians in words that have inspired millions of Christ’s disciples through the centuries, the substance of what he wrote was not something totally new. His Lord stated the same principle when He told His followers: “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, and all your strength” (Mark 12:30). And even Christ was not totally original in what He said. He was, in fact, simply quoting some ancient wording from the Old Testament (Deut. 6:5).
     Many people who have very little knowledge of the Bible, are nonetheless able to quote the famous love text from the third chapter of the Gospel of John. It is probably the best known and most cited Bible verse: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that every one who believes in him will not perish but have eternal life” (verse 16). And many will also remember the final words of another oft-quoted Bible text: “God is love” (1 John 4:8). Nothing rates higher on the divine scale of values than love.

God’s love comes first
     Without any doubt love is the absolute key word in the Christian’s vocabulary. But let’s be sure to get things in the correct order. Scripture tells us that to be a true follower of Christ, we must love God with all our heart, soul and intellect (Mark 12:30). In other words: We must love with our entire being. How do we do that? Is this something that comes naturally to the Christian? Or can we learn how to love God? Do we somehow “catch” it by going to church, by watching religious broadcasts or listening to religious music as we drive our car to work? Or can the children who sing “Oh, how I love Jesus!” teach us a thing or two about this love?
      From the outset we must keep one thing in mind: it is not the way in which humans love each other that informs us about what our love for God might be like. It is precisely the other way around. The way in which God loves us informs us about the manner in which we may respond to God’s love. It gives all our human love a dimension it would not have if we were ignorant of divine love. Whatever love we may be able to generate, it is ultimately “a result of his first loving us” (1 John 4:19).
     God’s love differs from our love in that He loves infinitely, indiscriminately, unconditionally, and unselfishly. The Lord does not begin to love on the premise that there must be a response if He is going to continue loving. He does not operate on the basis that He will love some of His creatures more than others, simply because some happen to be more lovable. Neither is His love subject to any sudden mood changes. “Long ago the Lord said to Israel: ‘I have loved you, my people, with an everlasting love. With unfailing love I have drawn you to myself’” (Jer. 31:3). That’s pretty strong language. And reassuring!
     God loves in ways that we find impossible to understand. It is not a negotiated love. God does not say, “Listen, if you are nice to Me, I will love you.” God loved us already when we were not yet around, but were present only in His unlimited divine database as creatures He knew that He would one day give the breath of life. He now loves us while we live our short life on earth, whether we seek Him or reject Him. And He continues loving us when we sleep the slumber of death and are safe in His memory. It is the kind of love reflected in Jesus’ love for His disciples. Christ showed His disciples “the full extent of his love” (John 13:1). That included also the one that He knew would soon betray Him. Jesus continued to love Judas. I wonder whether we might say that, in a way, God continues to love even the devil!
     God’s love is pure gift love. He gave His only son. His “unfailing love … came through Jesus Christ” (John 1:17). He so loved us that He gave ... His gifts keep coming, unlimited and unrestricted. The Lord loves the universe and all those worlds that we know nothing about. He loves our world, Planet Earth. And even though He will eventually judge the world and will have to say “Sorry” to those who have said their final no to Him, His love does not stop. Even His judgment is not detached from His love, nor is it a reversal of it. And if, at times, He needs to be tough with us, it is only because He does not give up on us. For “the Lord disciplines those he loves” (Heb. 12:6). All his actions are wrapped in eternal love.

Human love with a divine edge
     Whatever true love we are able to give, it “comes from God” (1 John 4:7). Thank God (literally) that we can love. God is love, and He made us in His image. God has designed and constructed us with the capacity to love as He does. This does not mean that our love can ever equal that of God. But it means that we can love in a way that resembles divine love. Our love is and remains finite, partial, temporal, imperfect. It cannot be compared with God’s love. We should not even say that God’s love is much greater than our love, because there is absolutely no comparison whatsoever between finite human beings and the love they are capable of and the one almighty, omniscient, omnipresent, holy, perfect God and His love. Nonetheless, our love, however imperfect, can acquire a divine edge.
     We love in different ways. The original language of the New Testament (Greek) uses four different words to express human love. Agapē is the highest kind of love. Scripture employs it for God’s supreme love for us, and also uses it to express unselfish (or as unselfish as is humanly possible) human love toward God and toward a higher ideal. Other words express the love for our spouse—including sexual love—and our love for parents and children, for a friend, and for things. That in itself already indicates that we love in different ways and at different levels. But whatever love we are able to give, it must be touched by God’s love if it is to be the kind of love that befits a follower of Christ. Let’s look in a little more detail at the various forms of human love.
      1. Loving your spouse. Of all relationships, the bond between (one) husband and (one) wife is the most wonderful. It originated in Paradise. The Creator embedded it in the fundamental social pattern that He imprinted on His creation. And it remains so precious that Scripture uses the relationship as a metaphor for the relation between Christ and His church. That in itself should warn us against the contemporary fashion in today’s Western world of debunking marriage, or of regarding heterosexual marriage as just one option among a number of just-as-acceptable social models.
     Finding a love partner for life—falling in love and staying in love “till death do us part”—is, apparently, far from easy. For the percentage of relationships that fail miserably and/or end in divorce is abysmally high. In the United States at least one third of all marriages end in divorce and Europe is rapidly catching up. Even inside the church, divorce rates are nowadays not very much lower.
     Why do so many marriages fail? One reason is that many enter marriage unprepared. Lots of people who tie the knot simply are not ready to assume the responsibilities that are part and parcel of marriage. Often they have not really asked themselves—or each other—the fundamental question of whether they are sufficiently compatible to live happily ever after. Tying the knot when you have very little in common is courting failure from the very beginning.
     One of the most common reasons so many of our marriages do not last is that we base them on false expectations. We want our spouse to be near-perfect. The media bombard us with images of what the perfect partner should physically look like. And it is important that they do not just conform to the standards of what nowadays is considered beautiful or sexy on the wedding day. We also expect our spouse to remain attractive for many years to come—with or without Botox, face-lifts, and other surgical interventions. Our spouses should have prestigious, well-paying jobs, but also should be efficient in the work that needs to be done in and around the home. They must be innovative and untiring sexual partners. And, of course, our spouses need to be our friends and buddies, and, when the time has come to have children, perfect parents.
     Not all of this is bad. Who would want to go back to the times that marriages were mostly business deals and people primarily sought and found romance in extramarital relationships? And what Western person wants to shift to a culture in which heads of the family still arrange marriages, or in which one may express the value of a prospective bride in a quantity of goats or cows? And in which the inability to produce offspring reduces the chances of marital success to virtually zilch.
     By now do you see a pattern? People around us may refer to their relationships as love relationships, but what kind of love is it? In many cases it is not gift love but take love or get love. For many, their own needs come first. A failure to meet those needs leads to frustration and a lack of fulfilment. What is the use of continuing with a relationship, many will say, when you remain unfulfilled and your expectations do not get met? Why plod on, when the thought Is this all there is to it? keeps milling around in your head? Better quit and try again, before your chances are over!
     Do you also see, that in this type of relationship the divine edge is sadly missing? Unless the love for the spouse is primarily gift love, and unless both partners are intent on the happiness and fulfilment of the other, look for the true values that are more than skin-deep, and do not depend on what happens to be trendy, the chances that the relationship will survive is slim. The odds dramatically improve, however, when the love that God bestows upon us is reflected in the mutual love that we have discovered in our partner and in ourselves. Love with a divine edge is the ever-deepening love between me and the one person I intend to make happy, and who will, in turn, do everything to make me happy.
     That kind of love will not be as everlasting as God’s love, but it stands a good chance of enduring—especially when we are no longer in the prime of our life and we no longer emanate quite the same energy as we did on our wedding day. Whether or not Paul had any experience with married life, his words in Ephesians 5 still provide excellent counsel. “You wives will submit to your husbands as you do to the Lord” (verse 22). Read superficially, this hardly sounds like a directive one would like to repeat in the twenty-first century. But, notice, that we are not just talking about blind submission, as if we were still living two or three generations ago. Notice the way in which Paul qualifies such submission. We are discussing a relationship that is modeled after the relationship we enjoy with Christ. That is also expressed in the next piece of advice: “And you husbands must love your wives with the same love Christ showed the church” (verse 25). Both statements are basically saying the same thing: Bring God into your relationship (and keep Him in it). Faithfulness, forgiveness, and patience then become key factors in staying happy and overcoming the inevitable obstacles. You immediately and dramatically improve the chances that your relationship will be happy and enduring, as your love has taken on a divine edge.
      2. Loving your children and family/parents. The state of the family in the Western world is not what it used to be. That is true even when we take into account the widespread tendency to believe that in the past most things, almost by definition, were better than they are today. During the twentieth century the average family became smaller and gradually changed from a more extended family to a nuclear family of two generations—parents and their children. More recently our society has seen drastic changes. In many Western countries children now tend to live at home for a longer time than in the past. But that is not the most significant transformation. A huge percentage of families are one-parent families. Lots of children constantly shuttle back and forth between mother and father. Studies have estimated that divorces in some way affect roughly 60 percent of all children. The size of our social services continues to increase, as child abuse and spousal abuse demand record levels of attention.
     It is no exaggeration to say that the family is in trouble. For many children, respecting their parents is a tough obligation. True enough, many parents hardly deserve the honor of their children. Likewise, many parents feel there are limits to the love they can give to their children, especially when, in their teens and during their adolescence, they dabble in things that God, and their parents, forbade. The sad reality is that so many families fall apart—resulting in children being estranged from their parents and vice versa, and brothers and sisters who have not even talked on the phone to each other for years. All too often funerals are the only occasions at which relatives and even family members briefly meet.
     That is not to say that all familial happiness has ceased to exist. Fortunately, lots of children still adore their moms and dads, and are adamant that they have the best mommies and daddies in the world. Numerous adults continue to love their parents and care for them beyond the call of “normal” filial duty. Millions of thoroughly happy families do tons of things together and radiate the kind of solidarity and intimacy that are the envy of the neighbourhood. And loads of brothers and sisters remain close throughout their entire life. So not all is lost, and there is still a lot of love going around.
     What makes the difference? Again, it is the divine edge to this love. Love for parents, children, and relatives must model itself after the love of the Great Parent for His children and after the love of the Great Brother, who became love personified when He walked among us. It is primarily this gift love that makes the difference—the love that gives and forgives; the love that first looks after the interests of the other; the love that knows of true sacrifice. To the extent that these Christian values are incorporated into our family life, to that extent happiness comes within our reach. Many non-Christians, wittingly or unwittingly, operate by “Christian” rules and hugely benefit from it. Many Christians do so as well. Quite a few Christians, on the other hand, would be a lot more successful in the management of their family relationships if they would truly practice the principles of Christian love and ensure that their love has a divine edge to it.
     Respect your parents! Love your children! Treat your relatives as you would like them to treat you. It can be something that becomes almost natural. On the other hand, particular circumstances can make it a tall order. But if we let God’s love inform our love and ask Him to help us to love in a similar unselfish fashion as He does, it will work wonders.
      3. Loving your friends. Often it is easier to love friends than family. After all, you can select your friends, but you usually have very little influence, if any at all, about those who are or become your parents, brothers, or sisters. There exists, however, quite a bit of difference between so-called friends and true friends. When people boast “I have lots of friends” most often they simply tell you that they have a few acquaintances whose last names they may, or may not, know. Genuine friendship requires a major investment of oneself. To many, friendship is no more than networking. One needs “friends,” especially in the right (high) places. But they are not the kind that one may love more than a brother (Prov. 18:24).
     It is important to have friends. We live in all kinds of social networks that are mostly functional. Usually we have superiors, and many of us deal with people who report to us. Hopefully, we get on well with most of them, but they are not necessarily our friends. Friends provide an immensely valuable dimension to life. Friends talk. Friends listen. Friends give support. They have time for us, and if they do not have time, they will make it. They laugh with us. Or they cry with us. They encourage us or tell us we goofed terribly. Christian friends also pray for us and with us. They sometimes disappoint us. But true friendship can survive this.
     God’s love for us has a sublime friendship quality. On behalf of His Father, Christ said to His followers: “Now you are my friends” (John 15:15). Such friendship implies infinitely more than sharing our e-mail address or cell phone number. It involves identification of interests and aspirations. True friendship with the divine edge is gift love in optima forma.
      4. Love for animals. All animals, great and small, “bright and beautiful,” have one thing in common: “the Lord God made them all.” So James Herriot told us. He was spot-on. Animals are more than commodities to be exploited at our convenience and for our pleasure. As custodians of God’s creation we have a special duty with respect to animal care and welfare. People around the world have domesticated different species of animals for work and for pleasure. That is fine, as long as we treat such animals humanely. Many people not only have animals, but love animals. There is nothing wrong with this, provided they do not treat them on a par with human beings. “Love” for a cat, a dog, or some other pet can lead to emotional attachments that are unhealthy. Before we judge too harshly, we must, however, realize that it is a sad comment on our society that some people have no other contact with living beings than with their pet, and are so lonely that they love their pet simply because they have no other human being around that appreciates their love.
     Does God’s love for us have anything to do with our respect and care for animals? Only in a certain sense. Love is relational, and there cannot be a relationship between a human being and a pet that compares with that between God and us. Yet even our “love” for animals can have a divine edge. When we realize that we are custodians and stewards of God’s creation, it will give a new dimension to our loving care for animals. This extends beyond animal life to other things “bright and beautiful” in nature to (in the words of Ellen White) “every spire of springing grass” that has the words “God is love” written upon it.
      5. Love for things. Even our “love” for things can be shaped by God’s love for us. Love for things—material as well as immaterial—can easily deteriorate into greed and selfishness. Things (objects or projects) can easily become idols. Even great ideals can be pressed into the service of our own inflated egos. Love for money remains the greatest threat to our spiritual well-being. It is, according to the apostle Paul, “at the root of all kinds of evil” (1 Tim. 6:10). Love for our car, our house, our garden, our hobby, and our membership in the local Lions Club are not wrong per se. In fact, all such things can enhance our happiness. But only as long as there remains a divine edge even to this kind of “love,” and as long as we do not relentlessly focus on getting (let alone taking), but always make giving part of the equation.
      6. Love for the church. We will touch upon our love for the church in a later chapter. If ever there should be a divine edge to our love, it is with respect to our relationship to God’s community of believers. Gift love, rather than get love, defines the privileges and responsibilities of church membership.

Love with everything we are and have
      “All you need is love.” It sounds easy. In a way it is easy, for what could be a more natural response to our rich blessings than spontaneous love. But there is more to it. To love can be hard work. It can be intense, involving everything that we are and have: our heart (our emotions), our mind (our intellect), and our soul (or being). Loving requires our willingness to press all our talents and skills into the service of Christ. And we can be sure that at some point it will demand sacrifice.
     Deepening our Christian experience is not a matter of learning to work harder, or of becoming smarter when we argue about biblical topics, but rather of learning to love more fully. It is a matter of replacing take love and get love with “gift love,” and thus exhibiting the kind of love that “comes from God” (1 John 4:7). Paul prayed for the Christians in Thessalonica: “May the Lord bring you into an ever deeper understanding of the love of God” (2 Thess. 3:5). That is also what we constantly must be praying for: an ever deeper-understanding of God’s marvelous “gift love.”