How Far?

How far will a person travel for love? What is a person willing to do for love? These types of questions are asked and displayed in movies, songs, and TV programs. I could spend 90,000 words tracing themes of love in songs, movies, books, etc. And frankly, humanity is obsessed with understanding and obtaining love. 

I mean, we have an entire day – Valentine’s Day – built around the idea of love. I think humanity has continuously pursued love, even with the proliferation of information in our internet age. Everyone is looking around for love and to be loved, but people often look in the wrong places. 

One of my concerns with Christians when discussing love is that culture has polluted the mind. Culture has created radical and unrealistic expectations of love. The culture has inoculated the Christian mind to define love as something it is not. There needs to be a course correction in the church, when it comes to understanding love, and Advent seems like a good time to provide a biblical perspective.

Don’t Reduce Love

The profundity of love has been reduced in multiple ways. I love my dog, Winston. He’s been a faithful dog, and when I am traveling, he becomes the man of the house, trolling and protecting the property like a good guard dog. When he dies, I’ll cry like a baby. I love my wife. My love for her is unlike anything I have experienced with any other person. My love for her is different than my love for my dog. These examples of love are familiar and perhaps healthy. But there are examples of love that are degrading and quite the opposite of the covenantal love we read in the Bible. 

A ten-minute stroll through a social media feed or going up and down the television dial shows us that love has been sexualized. I am not talking about the intimacy between a husband and wife. I am talking about the soft-core porn that attempts to invade every home through technology. Here is the bottom line. Humanity has taken something good and ruined it through sinful and selfish desires. 

So what is the way back to understanding and embracing love the way God designed it? And what does love have to do with the incarnation of Jesus Christ? Let me take you back to a time that was not time – before the creation of the world. 

Love and Creation

I think it’s fair to say the love offered by the culture is wildly confusing, and a definition of love changes with the wind. But what if we could know a love that is consistent, true, and pure? I think Holy Scripture provides a way for us to think about love that edifies and endures. 

Before the Creation of the World

The profundity of love is found with Godhead before the creation of the universe. The Father, Son, and Holy Spirit have loved each other with perfect purity and goodness. 1 John 4:7-8 tells us about the connection between love and God. We read, 

Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.– 1 John 4:7–8

If you have never memorized a passage in the Bible, begin with God is love. David Jakeman hits the proverbial nail on the head. He says, 

John is not identifying a quality which God possesses; he is making a statement about the essence of God’s being. It is not simply that God loves, but that he is love. We are helped to understand this when we remember that God is revealed in Scripture as the holy Trinity, three persons in one God. We shall never be able to comprehend the full meaning of this with our finite minds, but at least we can grasp that at the