WE CANNOT LOVE GOD - (at least the way He defines it)

God IS love. John said that twice in that 4th chapter of his first letter, and it sets the final reaches of human destiny. If a person truly loves, that is the evidence of his union with God. If a person truly loves his brother, the invisible God is made visible in that act. That is the last word that can be said – for time and eternity.

God is love. Love is selflessness. God is totally uninterested in what might be to His own advantage. When it speaks of Him vindicating His own righteousness, giving preeminence to His own glory, that is not because of what He gets out of it – it is because only in the sharing of His perfections can His creatures attain theirs. It is for their sakes, for the universe of His creation, that He maintains the sacredness and power of His love.

Love must sometimes appear wrathful, appear self-interested and demanding, appear to maintain its own rights and dignity. Only true love can safely do that, just because of its total detachment from self-interest.

The summit of revelation is that God has created man to be just that – containing, in union with, and guided by this true love without self-interest. And man knows it. Every religion and philosophy seeks love, often exhorting their members to love one another. Whether by this devious pathway or that, almost every philosophy and religion that has emanated from the mind of man ends up on the plateau of love. We might say that mankind has finally settled that one point – that brotherly love is the goal. Neither logic nor intuition nor revelation can offer an alternative. That could well be called “the light that lights every man that comes into the world” (John 1:9).

But pure love without self-interest? Total absorption in the needs of others? Service to others as a debt eternally owed and eternally claimed by my neighbor? The command, “Be you also perfect as your Heavenly Father is perfect”? Can that be possible in human experience in this life or the next?

NO in one way, and YES in another.

The “No” way, in which it cannot be possible, is the path of delusion trodden by frustrated millions through history, the theme of a thousand religions, the pious aspiration but never realization of moralist, philosopher, idealist – and the butt of the cynic and pessimist.

It is mankind’s subtlest self-hypnotism. We can love, we can be friendly, kind, cooperative, they say. Give us time and self-discipline and we can attain (or at least approach close enough) to perfect love. Are we not commanded in the Bible to love God and one another? Do not the churches exhort us to imitate Christ? Do they not spur us on to climb the heights of good resolutions by a mixture of prayer and self-effort? The highest philosophers, returning from their explorations of the good life, tell us we ought, therefore we can.

The roots of self-reliance are so deep in us all, so undiscovered, that only by the hard knocks of experience do we discover our vast error. This mountain of perfect love has no route to its summit! It is inaccessible and unclimbable.

Paul makes a revealing comment in Romans 5:7-8,10 which nicely exposes the eternal and impassable gulf between human and divine love: “Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous man, though for a good man someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates His own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us…when we were God’s enemies, we were reconciled to Him through the death of His Son”.

There is a limit beyond which human love cannot go – the limit of self-interest and human approval. We might even die for some one or some cause commendable enough, but it must be commendable to us. But pure unconditional love, unrelated to the deservingness of the recipient, is DIVINE.

WE CANNOT LOVE GOD WITH THIS HIGHEST LOVE THOUGH WE MAY OFTEN IMAGINE AND SAY WE DO. That is the “No” way.

Only divine love can truly love HIM. Perfect love cannot be obtained that way, despite the pathetic fact that the world through its centuries of history has tried to proclaim that it could and does. And that is true, not only of human philosophy from Plato onwards, and of all non-Christian religions; it is also tragically true of the perversions of the gospel by “the works of the law” which Paul and John and the other apostles had to combat even in New Testament days. It is seen in the mixture of self-effort and grace through the writings of many of the church leaders, returning again in a multitude of subtle forms from modern pulpits.

The “Yes” way, however, by which such perfect love can be attained is made plain in the Scriptures, and has been preserved in purity of teaching and experience by “the little flock” through the history of the church. Of course it has. God has never left Himself without a witness.
God only is love. That is the point at issue. Not a half of one percent of any mixture is possible. Human love – the love of the independent self apart from God – is the crippled growth out of a monstrous human birth. It is the use of the love-faculty for self-interested ends, instead of it being the means of the radiation of the selfless love of God. For every human birth comes with a “hook” – the nature of Satan’s self-for-self. No matter what heights of idealism or religion are attempted in our own strength, the basis would always be self-love, for creature love can never rise about its source and can never change itself into God’s uncreated love. Eros (sexual love) and Phileo (human brotherly love) is of a different quality from Agape (divine love), and never merely a variation in quantity.

God’s Love Perfected In Us

But now we see the glorious end-purposes of God. They are that we humans are purposed for a new birth in an eternal expression of the divine, by the fact that He who is love has joined Himself eternally to us and us to Him, in Christ. He IS love within and through us.

But that means that we redeemed new children of God are paddling in the middy shallows of the river when we are so constantly concerned with what benefits we receive from Him. Certainly we are thankful. But we must move on from there quickly because the very seeking something for ourselves is a form of self-effort. So how does this “Yes” way work?

It works by staying close in guidance and obedience to the indwelling Christ who IS our love, our divine love, back to the Father and out to those in the world around us. This even surpasses 1 Corinthians 13, the “love chapter”, in that a cause is more fundamental than its effects. A redeemed person must love his brethren. Why? Because being born of God he is born of love. God within is his new nature. This kind of love, reaching out to save the whole world, is the way He now loves others through us, and its manifestation is our love for each other is the only way God is seen by men.

This kind of love, - divine love – is the ONLY way God’s children can “love God with all your heart and mind and your neighbor as yourself.” The Eros and Phileo human crippled forms of love will not do. WE CANNOT TRULY LOVE GOD OR ANYONE ELSE EXCEPT BY GOD’S OWN INDWELLING DIVINE LOVE.

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