Wisdom and the Love of God
Taking the easy way Many Christians today hold a view of God’s love that is distorted by sentimentality. “Sentimentality” means that one’s perspective on God’s love is defined by shallow, uncomplicated emotions.
This superficial perspective is illustrated by an incident that occurred in a local church. A volunteer mother was in a Sunday School class for first graders with her daughter when the teacher of the class told the boys and girls to put up their toys because it was the time to listen to a Bible story. The volunteer mother’s little girl threw a fit, insisting upon continuing to play with her toy. The mother said to her daughter, “That’s O.K., honey, you just keep playing. After all, God wants you to be happy.”
Leon Morris, in Testaments of Love: A Study of Love in the Bible, states this about sentimentality and the love of God: “An easy sentimentality will decline to take action when the beloved does what is wrong. But this leaves the beloved secure in his wrongdoing, unfairly confirming the very action that makes him less a person. Because sentimentality refuses to do what is distasteful, it ignores the long-term benefits of reproving the beloved because it sees that it will dislike the immediate unpleasantness. Sentimentality thus takes the easy way out.”
Tender and stern It makes no difference whether one professes to be theologically liberal or theologically conservative, sentimentality prevails in today’s Church across the full range of theological belief. The American Church today has tried to make God an appealing commodity that the Church can sell in the religious marketplace. In order to accomplish this dubious salesmanship, the Church ignores the stern nature that God’s love can take when it is necessary to reform and cleanse His people—and nations, for that matter. The supernatural love that God has for His people and His creation can assume either a stern or a tender expression, depending upon His wise knowledge of the circumstances and the people to which His love is to be shown. As the writer of Hebrews points out, the Lord at times disciplines the one He loves (Hebrews 12:3-11).
The wise Christian relies on the Holy Spirit in order to evaluate the circumstances in which he must express the love of God and wisely apply that love in either a tough or a tender fashion. The wise Christian will avoid being an enabler to someone’s destructive behavior, whether that person is a believer or a non-believer.
The wise Christian is a realist, not a sentimentalist.
Loves and love As mentioned in earlier articles, C. S. Lewis, in The Four Loves, identifies three types of love and then discusses four Greek words used for love. The three types of love that Lewis describes are: (1) Need-love, exemplified in the love of the nursling for its mother; (2) Gift-love, exemplified by the nursing mother; (3) Appreciative-love, a love of gratitude and thanksgiving. The first two types of love should lead to the third love.
The four Greek words that Lewis discusses are: (1) storgē, the word for “affection”; (2) phileo, the word for “friendship”; (3) eros, the word for “falling in love”; (4) agapē, the word that best encapsulates the love of God. Although agapē was not entirely new to the Greeks at the time of Jesus’ Incarnation, it became Christianized, and its noun assumed a newness of meaning. Agapē is best illustrated by the love of Christ as revealed on the cross—it is, in its essence, sacrificial and selfless. It is centered on what is best for the beloved.
Spiros Zodhiates, in The Complete Word Study Dictionary: New Testament, presents these insights intoagapē: “With reference to God’s love, it is God’s willful direction toward man. It involves God doing what He knows is best for man and not necessarily what man desires. For example, John 3:16 states, ‘For God so loved [ēgápēsen] the world, that he gave.’ What did He give? Not what man wanted, but what God knew man needed, i.e., His Son to bring forgiveness to man.”
All of the natural loves – affection, friendship, falling in love – can become god-like and demand worship. But only the agapē of God can lead us into worshipping the One who gives his love freely as a gift, the Gift-love as Lewis calls it; and when we receive this love, understanding that it is a gift, our only proper response is what Lewis calls Appreciative-love.
Agapē, therefore, is not natural love, but supernatural love. This type of love brings forth caring despite the circumstances, whereas circumstances often alter the natural loves. As Lewis states, “The natural loves are not sufficient.” Agapē subordinates all of the natural loves by putting them under the control of agapē and rendering them of lesser importance. As Lewis puts it, “Even for their own sakes the loves must submit to be second things if they are to remain the things they want to be. In this yoke lies their true freedom; ‘they are taller when they bow.’”
Agapē thus enables all of the other loves to be put in their proper place and not to become idols, but makes them bow their knees before the God who is above all gods; it enables the natural loves to be pure, unadulterated and humbled because they are now under the compelling power of the agapēof Christ (2 Corinthians 5:14-15).
True charity Unlike the Greeks, we do not have separate words to distinguish the various types of love that exist. Perhaps the best English word to use for agapē is “charity”, the word which the King James translators used, although if we do, we would have to carefully define charity. This is because we have lost the meaning that “charity” had for the English people of the 17th Century. Charity does contain within it the ideas of “benevolent goodwill” and “generosity,” but it also contains within it the idea of “the reciprocal love between God and man.” The King James translators never used the word “charity,” especially in their rendering of 1 Corinthians 13, in the sense of “almsgiving” as it is used today, but used it instead to render agapē in the sense of God’s overwhelming love as expressed in Christ’s Jesus’ sacrifice on behalf of humankind.
If only we had an English word that could appropriate the full meaning of agapē!
C. S. Lewis compares the natural loves with a garden and agapē as the gardener. Lewis states: “It is no disparagement to a garden to say that it will not fence and weed itself, nor prune its own fruit tree, nor roll and cut its own lawns. A garden is a good thing but that is not the sort of goodness it has. It will remain a garden, as distinct from a wilderness, only if someone does all these things to it. Its real glory is of quite a different kind. The very fact that it needs constant weeding and pruning bears witness to that glory.”
The wise Christian understands this fundamental fact: agapē will not shield us from suffering. This is supremely evident in the life of Christ. As Lewis points out, “To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness.”
Christ came and suffered not so we could cultivate or shield our happiness, but that we could learn to love the Triune God and one another. God’s love, agapē, is gift-love. He has no needs. He has no hunger that needs to be fulfilled. God’s gift-love comes from His grace which, according to Lewis, “bestows two other gifts, a supernatural Need-love of Himself and a supernatural Need-love of one another.” When God’s Gift-love is in us, we can learn to love the unlovable as He has loved us.
The wise person must carefully choose what he or she loves. The Prophet Hosea in 9:10 imparts this warning:
Like grapes in the wilderness,
I found Israel. Like the first fruit on the fig tree in its first season, I saw your fathers. But they came to Baal-peor and consecrated themselves to the thing of shame, and became detestable like the thing they loved.
If we truly love the Triune God as revealed fully to us in Christ Jesus, we will become like Him.
In Luke 6:37–38, Jesus tells us:
“Judge not, and you will not be judged; condemn not, and you will not be condemned; forgive, and you will be forgiven; 38 give, and it will be given to you. Good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over, will be put into your lap. For with the measure you use it will be measured back to you.”
The image that Jesus employs is someone in the field during harvest taking up his or her outer garment and making it into a basket to hold the harvest grain. The grain would be pressed down in this cloth pocket, shaken down and more grain would be put in it until it ran over and the pocket could not hold anymore.
The principle that Jesus is teaching in this image is this: Only by giving, can we receive. If we want to be loved, we must first give love. What we give we will receive in abundance. The essence of supernatural love is this: As Christ has given to us, we, in turn, are expected to give in return. |
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