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“Is it unloving to confront somebody about his sin?”
As in so many situations Christians encounter in this life, motive is more important to the Lord than the actions it produces. Some people just can’t get their heads around that. We generally call these people legalists. They value actions and outcomes more than the heart and mindset that produces them.
The Lord just … doesn’t.
I am reliably informed that in the days of my youth, when I was apparently even more attractive, a sweet young thing from church had a serious crush on me.
The day I got married, or so I hear, she mourned in tears — at the loss of ‘what might have been’, I suppose.
I am supposing because I don’t know. To the best of my recollection, over a period of almost two years, the girl had never said more than ten words to me, nor I to her.
Do you find that odd? I sure do.
The first Waw [ו] in the Torah (pronounced vav) begins its sixth Hebrew word, thus joining the words for “heaven” and “earth”. This is also the twenty-second letter of the Hebrew Bible (our Genesis 1:1), so scholars believe it represents all twenty-two individual powers of creation and all the letters of the alphabet together. (The Hebrew alphabet, as mentioned several times in this series, has only twenty-two letters.)
Literally, ו means “hook” or “peg”. Hebrew sages say the letterform portrays Jacob’s ladder, reaching down from heaven to earth. It’s a nice thought, but personally I think those sages may have waxed a little fanciful.
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“Who is the ‘friend who sticks closer than a brother’?”
The line comes from a section of Proverbs attributed to King Solomon. Many Hebrew proverbs state a truism twice in slightly different words. Other times, the two statements contrast. Either way, the first line usually provides a clue to the interpretation of the second, or vice versa. In interpreting proverbs or poetry, I try to let whichever part is easiest to understand guide me through the bit that’s a little tougher.
In this case … hoo boy, good luck.
“Go to my brothers and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’ ”
In church circles, my father was well-known. He lived a life of selfless service, teaching and counseling among the Lord’s people, was a help to many, and was consequently famous — in a modest sort of way.
Because of this, my brothers and I could go to no new town without running into Christians who knew him. We became used to the phrase, “Ah, so you’re HIS son.” We had an instant welcome and unearned favor wherever we happened to go. We used to joke that just dropping Dad’s name was good in any town for three free meals and the hand in marriage of a girl from the local church.
Dad’s name was “coin of the realm”, as they used to say.
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“How should a Christian respond to being in a loveless marriage?”
People have different personalities and experiences, as well as different levels of character development and maturity, so it should not come as a surprise that we enter married life looking for different things. In general, men are looking for respect from their wives, and women are looking for love from their husbands.
I am getting that from a couple of places.
I have a friend in a bad family situation.
Actually, I have a large number of these. Most of you probably do too. No physical abuse, only a little occasional verbal nastiness, but the relationship is not a Christian marriage and the children are not growing up immersed in or even exposed to the training and instruction of the Lord. The biblical authority structure is not there and, at least from the outside, all the love appears to be flowing in one direction only.
My friend proposes to fix the situation by loving the family unconditionally, perhaps because so often we hear that is the way that God loves us.
Does he really? Maybe we need to explore that idea a little.
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“Does God love everyone or just Christians?”
Love is not just something God does, it’s who he is, the overarching quality that characterizes him and the “glue” that binds together all his glorious attributes. Scripture is clear that he expresses his loving nature freely in the world, sending rain on the just and unjust alike. This expression of love is often referred to as “providence” or “common grace”, made manifest in indiscriminate kindness, delay of judgment and so on. Such generalized goodwill on God’s part toward mankind despite our fallen condition makes sense: it would be odd for Christ to command his followers to love our enemies if God did not act lovingly toward them too.
And he did. “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” We were loved before we were ever saved.
In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
For those who have never heard of Aleister Crowley, a short bio culled from information available at Infogalactic.
Crowley was born into a wealthy Plymouth Brethren family in Warwickshire, England in 1875, and rejected Christianity to become an occultist, poet, painter and novelist. A practicing bisexual, he founded the religion of Thelema, promoted a form of Satanism, traveled the world, climbed mountains, experimented with hallucinogens and claimed to be a prophet of the Egyptian god Horus. In his day, he was referred to as “the wickedest man in the world”. In 2002, the BBC ranked him as the 73rd greatest Briton of all time.
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“Is it possible to love a person you don’t like?”
Thankfully, yes. “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” We may wink at certain kinds of misbehavior, especially when we find them clever or funny, but God knows there is nothing to like about sin. Yet he displayed his love toward us when we were thoroughly detestable and utterly unfit for his presence.
But I suppose the real question is whether it is possible for human beings to love unlikable people. That’s a little tougher.
“Blest be the tie that binds
Our hearts in Christian love:
The fellowship of kindred minds
Is like to that above.”
So sang the congregation.
And they sang it every Sunday.
They sang it whenever it was announced that they had a visitor or new congregant come among them.
A nice gesture, wasn’t it?
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A man and a woman are going to bed. It’s been a long day — work has been vexing, the children have been demanding, calls and emails have piled up, and best efforts at getting it all done have failed. Irritations have built up; and at times, the couple has actually been a bit snappish.
The husband is middle-aged, and somewhat dumpy and slightly graying. His earlier grumpy mood has subsided only into a plodding weariness as he gets ready to turn in. He’s left his slippers askew in the corner again, and hung his trousers over the chair instead of putting them in the closet.
The wife turns to her husband and says, “I love you.”
When I go shopping with somebody I love, I pay careful attention to all the purchases they don’t make, especially when they look at an item with great interest, then put it back on the shelf with a sigh because they can’t afford it right now or have other financial priorities. Why? So I can come back later, pick it up and stick it in the closet for the next Christmas, Valentine’s Day or birthday celebration.
Mostly this is a favor to myself: I hate the pressure of having to run out at look for a gift at last minute. But it also means I don’t waste much money on presents people don’t really want or won’t use.
Let me suggest we treat the Law of Moses that way.
Being transformed into the image of the Son of God does not depend on me.
Thank the Lord for that.
There are things about Christian service that can be learned. Skill sets can be developed. Techniques can be applied. Practice sometimes makes perfect. I could, for instance, wholly apart from the Spirit of God, acquire a greater understanding of Hebrew and Greek through diligent study and as a consequence become a more accurate Bible teacher.
Whether much of eternal value would come from that apart from the Spirit of God is a separate question, but it can certainly be done.
“Let each one of you love his wife as himself, and let the wife see that she respects her husband.”
Phil and Katie are a Christian couple in their fourth decade of married life. They have three grown children. Both are close to normal retirement age. As a director of a small company, Katie makes slightly more than Phil does in his role as middle manager for a larger one. She is also brimming with confidence that comes from long-term day-to-day success on the job.
Well, do you? It’s a hugely important question. It merits serious thought.
Love for God is fundamental. Jesus taught that the first and greatest commandment in the Law of Moses was to “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind”. So then, God claims the right to rule my thoughts, to control how I define and express my self, and to direct my understanding. Allowing him to exercise his rightful domain unimpeded is the first and greatest expression of love toward God.
This truth was fundamental to a right understanding of the Law, and it is fundamental to Christianity. All true goodness follows from it.
“One who loves another has fulfilled the law.” So wrote the apostle Paul in Romans. Again, in Galatians he reminds his readers that “the whole law is fulfilled in one word: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ ”
His point is that Christians behaving lovingly don’t need to worry about whether they are acting in the will of God or conforming in every detail to God’s law, because they are doing what God wants without even thinking about it. Their conformity to godliness has become as automatic and unconscious as breathing.
But love is only higher than law when it’s actually love.
When God disciplines his people under either Old or New Covenants, it is not simply an expression of righteous anger. It is not merely a case of giving people what they deserve. Reproof and discipline in this life are acts of love designed to produce repentance, not an early preview of the torments of hell — though that is what certainly awaits the unregenerate if God’s warnings are ignored. But we have a God who declares he is not willing that any should perish, and he behaves consistently with that statement.
I like to think that if more people understood this we might see more repentance.
“If anyone has no love for the Lord, let him be accursed.”
That’s a very strong statement. Catholics would say, “Let him be anathema”, which simply means “devoted to destruction”. Paul leaves us no fence to straddle: it’s love or destruction. Choose one or the other.
That word translated from Greek to English as “love” refers to affection or approval. It’s also a word that means “to kiss”. In the ancient East, when you saw someone you knew and liked on the street, you would greet them with a kiss. It was a way of publicly identifying yourself with that person; of saying to everyone around, “This is my guy, right here.”
Or you could just turn your head away and walk on by. But what an insult that would be.
“Love … believes all things.”
“Love your enemies.”
“Do not believe them, though they speak friendly words to you.”
The three verses quoted above create a syllogism that isn’t.
First, we have Paul’s statement that love manifests in “believing all things”, whatever that might mean. Secondly, we have the Lord’s command to love one’s enemies, and it follows that if one is to love them, one must “believe all things” while doing so, because that is what Paul says love does. Finally, we have God’s instructions to Jeremiah, emotionally drained by the disloyalty and dishonesty of his own family members, whom he was surely obligated to love even under the Old Covenant … but in this case, Jeremiah’s love was not to manifest in belief. In fact, he was to exercise discernment and see through the lies of his siblings.
Something is wrong with the logic here, and we know it’s not that God has contradicted himself, since that never happens.