Jesus’ Words Get to Determine what He Meant by “Love,” You Don’t
Jesus’ love is trending in the Church today. But on closer inspection, it may not be Jesus’ after all.
I hear a lot of Christians talk about Jesus’ love, but when I read Jesus’ quoted words about his love, I get two contrasting pictures.
The trending (and trendy) Christian definition of Jesus’ love is that people should get to do whatever they want, and if you tell them to do otherwise, you are very unloving. It gives a picture of Jesus as a lovesick puppy frolicking through first century Palestine passing out daisies and giving green lights to all in his path.
This is not the picture of Jesus I see in the gospels at all.
At the end of the day, I’m just tired of people saying, “Jesus says ABC about love,” when there are direct quotes from Jesus that say exactly the opposite. If you want to say you say ABC about love, that’s fine, but don’t falsely slap Jesus’ name onto it.
I read this recently on social media:
Being Christlike often requires us to be unbiblical. Just one example – an eye for an eye is biblical. It is not Christlike.
If your focus is on following the Bible you will live one way. It will involve rules, complex interpretations of the contradictions between parts of the Bible as well as some very hard to understand ancient stories of genocide.
But the Bible points us to Jesus. He made it both simple and at the same time very hard. He left three rules for his followers based upon the premise that God is love and all other interpretations of God missed that.
1. Love God.
2. Love your neighbor as yourself.
3. Love each other as he loved…
…Jesus, not the Bible is our final authority. How do we know this? The Bible tells us so.
We have gotten to a point where it is Jesus OR the Bible, not Jesus AND the Bible. Even though Jesus himself goes out of his way to affirm the Bible (including the parts referred to here as genocide) as explicitly as possible:
“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly I tell you, until heaven and earth disappear, not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen, will by any means disappear from the Law until everything is accomplished. -Matthew 5:17-18
We are not under the old covenant of the Old Testament anymore, we are under the new covenant in Jesus. The Old and New Testaments are clear that when the Messiah comes, the law of the Old Testament won’t apply to us anymore, we will get a new law from Jesus. (Jeremiah 31:31-34; Hebrews 8:1-13). But even in the new covenant, Jesus continually affirms that the Old Testament is inspired by God (Matthew 22:43) and he quotes it over and over again as such.
Even if you wanted to make the thin argument that we should throw out the Old Testament because of the new covenant, you certainly can’t throw out everything Jesus said in the gospels! Yes, Jesus said the greatest commandments are to love God and love your neighbor as yourself (directly quoting the Old Testament, ironically), but he said a lot of other things too! These two commands do not negate all of the other things he said. Quite the contrary, if Jesus is a consistent and true teacher (which he is), then all of the rest of his commands and teachings give the specific, flesh-and-bone ways that these two greatest commandments to love will be lived out. His teachings and commands show us what his definition of love means. Let’s also not forget the Great Commission where we are specifically commanded by Jesus to “Go…teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” (italics mine, Matthew 28:18-20). Everything means everything.
If we separate Jesus from the Bible, then we can “love” however we want. Do the following teachings of Jesus sound like love to the modern ear?
Those who don’t put their faith in Jesus will definitely not be saved (John 14:6). Jesus describes hell as an eternal place of fire and torment for unbelievers (Luke 16:19-31). He even tells us to fear the one (God) who has the authority to throw us into hell. (Matthew 10:28; Luke 12:4-5)
Jesus affirms that sex and marriage are only between one man and one woman. (Matthew 19:4-6)
Getting remarried after divorce is adultery (unless the initial divorce was a result of the other spouse committing adultery). (Matthew 19:9)
If you have looked at a man or woman lustfully, you have committed adultery. (Matthew 5:28)
There’s a lot more we could include in this list. This is just a sampling of teachings today’s “Everything is permissible” Church (see 1 Corinthians 6:12-20 for that reference) doesn’t have a category for (a different list could be written for the biblically conservative Church who isn’t loving their poor, refugee, and immigrant neighbors). While we must love LGBTQ individuals and be sympathetic toward their struggle, I get very tired of the attempted Christian argument that God wouldn’t restrict who you can love (have sex with), when in Matthew 19:4-6 God does exactly that. While we don’t rejoice in people going to hell, I get very tired of the Christian argument that God is so loving that none will go to hell or that it doesn’t exist, when God says explicitly otherwise.
A friend on Facebook is always posting about how God’s love is open and affirming toward homosexual sex relationships and shame on the conservative Church for being so unloving. This same friend just divorced her husband when he was trying desperately to make the marriage work. Yet we are all about love? Love being a difficult, lifelong, one-flesh commitment or love meaning I can sleep with whoever I want. Because that sounds really tough. Not sure who would ever be drawn to that.
Maybe Jesus was so confused because he was a 1st century Jew that everything he said was primitive and wrong and bias and he just couldn’t overcome this to say something that was actually a word from God…don’t count on it. Or if that’s your Jesus, good luck!
2 Timothy 4:1-5 is so true:
In the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who will judge the living and the dead, and in view of his appearing and his kingdom, I give you this charge:2 Preach the word; be prepared in season and out of season; correct, rebuke and encourage—with great patience and careful instruction. 3 For the time will come when people will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. 4 They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths. 5 But you, keep your head in all situations, endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist, discharge all the duties of your ministry.
What’s crazy is to see such huge swaths of the Church no longer preaching the word, no longer correcting, no longer rebuking or encouraging toward right living. But instead becoming the people who don’t put up with sound doctrine. The people who want to suit their own desires and become the teachers who will say what their own itching ears want to hear.
Why does God restrict us as a way of loving us? It’s the same reason loving parents restrict their children. Thanks to her older sisters, my almost two-year-old has discovered what candy is. We have a candy bucket in our house from various holidays and school parties. My one year old has observed her older sisters eating their allotted one piece of candy per day. So of course she scales the kitchen counter, grabbing two fistfuls of suckers, Jolly Ranchers, and the like from the bucket. I let her have one sucker and take the rest away. She throws a fit! The trendy Christian today would tell me if I loved my child, I would give her back both fistfuls and let her enjoy. This isn’t love. I understand the context of candy in relation to a one-year-old and out of love, withhold, making sure she eats a balanced diet instead. This is what God is doing to us when he gives us his commands on love. He is the creator of all things. He is the authority. And no, it’s not fair. (Thank goodness his mercy and grace aren’t fair!) The parent gets to determine what love looks like, not the child. The child can rebel against the parent, but needs to stop going around saying, “My dad said…” when the dad never said. Especially when this Dad, our Father in Heaven, is the author, creator, and embodiment of love itself.
The post Jesus’ Words Get to Determine what He Meant by “Love,” You Don’t appeared first on by Noah Filipiak.
