Musings on "Love"

What if love is like faith? This is the question I posed to a small group of fellow volunteers with my local youth group. I was explaining to them how ridiculous I thought it was that people felt constrained by social norms in relationships (see past entry--"Oppressed by Social Norms"). How can one trust conventional social wisdom when it speaks through a hundred competing voices and ultimately doesn't affect the likelihood of divorce? Christians share the same statistical averages with secularists of various stripes.

"So what do you guys think of countries like mine that still have arranged marriages?" asked Don, a Japanese-American father of 7. I was astonished that the three younger people (myself included) were not totally averse to the idea in theory. It reminded me of the words of an Prof. Scipione, former professor in Biblical Counseling at Westminster California, who used to tell students to "just find someone and get married." Both Don and Scip were alluding to something more profound than simple, shocking comments: Love may be very different than most every way our society has construed it, even amongst Christians. These allusions provoked my thought at the outset of this posting:

What if love is like faith? According to Hebrews 11:1, "Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see." In the original Greek, "being sure" is drawn from a term that also has an objective sense of the "reality/substance" of what we hope for. In addition, "certain" has the more objective sense of "evidence" of what we do not see. It was by this objective faith, with subjective effects, that the Old Testament saints "received testimony" of Christ (better understanding of "received commendation" in v.2). All of this to show that faith is not simply a subjective sense of trust, but an objective link attaching the Christian to the saving work of Christ by the Holy Spirit. This is why we know that it is impossible to lose faith or salvation--it is not really ours to lose.

In the same way, could love also be understood in this sense? In Genesis, God made Adam and Eve "one flesh," which presupposes the most intimate of bonds. This bond was created prior to the Fall, which means that within that coming together, love should be assumed as well. Throughout the book of Song of Songs, the most beautiful picture of romantic love, there is a continual presentation of the power of love over the heart, but at the climax of the book, there is something much deeper presented:

8:6 Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm, for love is strong as death, jealousy is fierce as the grave. Its flashes are flashes of fire, the very flame of the LORD. 7 Many waters cannot quench love, neither can floods drown it. If a man offered for love all the wealth of his house, he would be utterly despised.

The Holy Spirit is described as the seal of our salvation, because He gives us the assurance that our salvation is real and fixed. In the same way, the female in Song of Songs wants her love to be pictured as a seal, because it is real and fixed. As death is inescapable, so is love. It is a flame of the Lord, and can never be overwhelmed or extinguished. Love is not a transitory possession, and is thus worth more than all of one's accumulated wealth.

In the book of Hosea, God tells Hosea to continue to pursue his wife, though she prostitutes herself. Why? Because it symbolizes God's unconditional love for His people. This love finds its ultimate expression in the cross, where the God-man offered His righteousness to God on our behalf and took our sin upon himself. That saving work by the Lord then becomes the ground for the commands in Ephesians 5 for wives to submit to their husbands as the Church submits herself to the Lord and for husbands to love their wives as Christ loved the Church.

Just as faith is a saving bond created by the Lord and is unable to be severed, so love is a bond grounded in the love of the Lord and cannot be relinquished. Forget about all of this talk about "falling in love" by sentimental dreamers and "falling out of love" by jaded divorcees. Love is much greater than such notions. Its purposes are several-fold: To offer to man and wife the most profound and godly bond this side of heaven; to point man and wife and the watching world to the great love of Almighty God for His people; to match the sin of a spouse with the overflowing effects of love in Hosea-like fashion.

So as people spend years sorting out whether or not they are "in" love through all sorts of erroneous rubrics, they fall deeper and deeper into self-deception. Taking it with a grain of salt, here is my conclusion: Love is objectively the bond between man and wife and subjectively the realization and commitment to that bond. This by no means destroys the romance or excitement of love, for this definition gives rise to the aforementioned purposes of love, which in turn can change the world.