Perhaps we may self define love like the old 60’s cartoon as stating “Love is”. Love for some may be an infatuation with objects, things or perhaps reduced to an expression of human sexuality. Others may see love as a warm fuzzy feeling or some temporal emotional high. Some trying to be more spiritual in scope may explain it in a mystical pantheistic way of stating that love is god and to act accordingly is to be enlightened as connecting to the divine. Yet others may see real and significant expressions of love through the beauty of human relationships, and even at that, love is still negligent to fully embrace the richness and purity as can only be expressed through an omnibenevolent being namely God. Thus love is a key component or quintessential element as identifying God’s very character, 1 John 4:8.
God’s love is perfect and it is that type of love that humanity longs for; especially as we have all experienced the disappointments and failures of human love through broken relationships making some skeptical that love is even obtainable as based on the evidence of human tragedy as downgrading it to a more crass form of expression as seeing it as merely being conditioned on reciprocation, temporal, inadequate, shallow, subjective, and unreliable. Even false religions are not able to adequately adept to handle this dilemma of a love shortage and can only philosophize this shortcoming by avoiding it’s pitfall as denying the self of desire or by dealing with it as a fantasy which is only illusional while others may not even emphasize it at all but rather focus more on the goal of world domination which may necessitate its antithetical enemy of violence.
Many look for naturalistic ways to either band-aid the situation or to seek the counseling and therapy of human healers to deal with this disease of a love loss as spending billions of dollars to treat this societal pandemic malady and though the bible likewise diagnoses the human condition as being seriously flawed in its self-absorption the good news is that there is a remedy towards healing the broken-hearted in finding the kind of love which the human soul yearns for:
2 timothy 3: 2-4 “Lovers of Self ”
2 For people will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, 3 heartless, unappeasable, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not loving good, 4 treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God
Luke 4:18-19 “Jesus is Love Personified”
18 “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to the captives
and recovering of sight to the blind,
to set at liberty those who are oppressed,
19 to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.”
God’s love for mankind has a fuller, in-depth quality to this vocabulary and sets the standard as being unlimited in scope and application apart from the deterministic values of human nature.
In essence, love in God’s terms is not a flippant word which is conditionally trivial with the superficiality of being diminished within a single event or moment in time such as with the old adage of ‘falling out of love’, but rather it is steadfast, enduring and everlasting as it carries such weight and authority especially as He strives to lovingly reconcile us to Himself as His beloved creatures.
Romans 8:35-39
35 Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? 36 As it is written,“For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.” 37 No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. 38 For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, 39 nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Colossians 1:20-22
20 and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross. 21 And you, who once were alienated and hostile in mind, doing evil deeds, 22 he has now reconciled in his body of flesh by his death, in order to present you holy and blameless and above reproach before him,
One of the highest forms of human love that we can possibly fathom is often maternal/ paternal and yet as good as that can be, it is still the Heavenly Father’s love which allows for this intimacy between human creatures to begin with and yet even at that; it can only go so far in comparison to God’s love.
Mt 7:11
11 If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!
God’s love carries the action of a verb to such a level that it is sacrificial in nature and we see this explicitly incarnational in the person and work of Jesus.
John 3:16
16 “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.
God’s love is so tenacious as even pursuing and reaching out towards others who by nature are hostile to Him as an enemy.
Romans 5:8
8 but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
Romans 5:10
10 For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life.
1 John 4:10
10 In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
In closing perhaps you have written off love as some fictional fairy tale and have instead settled for using artificial fillers as stuffing yourself with alternative junk food as an attempt to satiate your emptiness and void in your heart but they too will fail to truly satisfy as leaving you unhealthy and anemic as you hunger and crave for real sustenance which is elemental and basic to the health of your soul apart from this temporal curbing of your appetite.
Thus it is God’s love which you may be missing and as such is defined with a greatness or fullness that surpasses your very knowledge and experience.
1 Corinthians 13:4-7
4 Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Galatians 5:22-23
22 But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, 23 gentleness, self-control; against such things there is no law.
Finally, as I have previously mentioned human love is only finite especially as people are only here for a very short time and though human interaction is essential and necessary it does not equate to being the ultimate reality or fulfillment as God can only truly meet that expectation.
Maybe you have compromised God with a counterfeit by looking for love in all the wrong places and yet He cares for you as the ‘Lover of your Soul’; whose love never fails. My friend I would like to encourage you to experience His love today and forevermore. Here is how to know and receive His gift of love.
Lastly here are some real stories of people who had life changing experiences with the love of God. Will you be next ?
jesusandjews.com/wordpress/my-personal-testimony-with-jesus/
www.cbn.com/700club/features/Amazing/
Atheist and Agnostic Resources
English Articles on Atheism and Agnosticism
The Holy Bible, English Standard Version® (ESV®) Copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. All rights reserved. ESV Text Edition: 2007