Tag: Valentine’s day

14Feb

God’s Valentine to the World

In 2018 fate has put Ash Wednesday on the same day as Valentine’s Day. Men nervously scour the pink laden aisles of Target and Kroger for last minute gifts for their wives or girlfriends, thereby observing Valentine’s Day as the national holiday of romantic love. Simultaneously, this year Christians will begin Lent, that solemn journey of penitence and remembrance that culminates at the Cross of Jesus. A smudge of ash on the forehead is an odd juxtaposition with the arrows of Cupid.

Yet the Bible more than once waxes nearly erotic in describing God’s longing for a
relationship with his wayward people. The Presbyterian theologian and preacher Francis Shaeffer once remarked, “This is the biblical picture, one that we would not dare use if God himself did not use it.” More on this in a moment.

In the Old Testament, one need look no further than the “Song of Solomon”, a poetic book full of sexual imagery, which is generally interpreted as a metaphor for God’s love for us. The book opens with the maiden (God’s people) waxing rhapsodic about her lover (God):

Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth—
    for your love is more delightful than wine.
Pleasing is the fragrance of your perfumes;
    your name is like perfume poured out.
    
Elsewhere in the Old Testament we see numerous passages likening God to the husband of Israel. God’s relationship, his covenant, is essentially that of marriage. Isaiah 54 states “For your husband is the One who made you.” Hosea 2:15 states “And I will betroth you to me forever. I will betroth you to me in righteousness and in justice, in steadfast love and in mercy.”

In the New Testament, Christ also compared himself to a bridegroom. For example, when the Pharisees criticized Jesus for not fasting, he replied: “Can the friends of the bridegroom fast, as long as the bridegroom is with them? but the days will come, when the bridegroom shall be taken from them, and then shall they fast.” (Mark 2)

In Ephesians 5, we have a clear statement of this metaphor:
Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ also loved the church, and gave himself for it; that he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water by the word, that he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish. So ought men to love their wives as their own bodies. He that loveth his wife loveth himself. For no man ever yet hated his own flesh; but nourisheth and cherisheth it, even as the Lord the church: for we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones. For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh. This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church. Nevertheless let every one of you in particular so love his wife even as himself; and the wife see that she reverence her husband (Ephesians 5:25-33).

Here is a more expansive version of that earlier quote from Francis Schaeffer:

The picture here is overwhelming. As the bride puts herself in the bridegroom’s arms on the wedding day and then daily, and as therefore children are born, so the individual Christian is to put himself or herself in the Bridegroom’s arms, not only once for all in justification, but existentially, moment by moment. Then the Christian will bear Christ’s fruit out into the fallen, revolted, external world. In this relationship, we are all female. This is the biblical picture, one that we would not dare use if God himself did not use it. (From The Church Before The Watching World, 1971; text available here).

Unfortunately, in this relationship we humans have long been the unfaithful party. As Jeremiah stated (in his eponymous book, chapter 3):

Then the LORD said to me in the days of Josiah the king, “Have you seen what faithless Israel did? She went up on every high hill and under every green tree, and she was a harlot there. … Go and proclaim these words toward the north and say, ‘Return, faithless Israel,’ declares the LORD; ‘I will not look upon you in anger For I am gracious,’ declares the LORD; ‘I will not be angry forever.

This topic would not be complete without a mention of the strange case of Hosea the prophet. As the book of Hosea opens, the prophet is asked by God to marry an actual prostitute, as an object lesson of the relationship between God and Israel:
When the Lord began to speak through Hosea, the Lord said to him, “Go, marry a promiscuous woman and have children with her, for like an adulterous wife this land is guilty of unfaithfulness to the Lord.”

At the outset of the covenant, God knew that we would blow it. From the beginning, therefore, He planned a drastic measure to try to get us back. The Cross of Jesus is the end of that journey. It is God’s ultimate valentine to the world.

As Francis Schaeffer stated in his meditation on those opening verses of the Song of Solomon:

  We will remember the love which suggested the sacrifice of yourself; the love which, until the fullness of time, mused over that sacrifice, and longed for the hour of which, in the volume of the Book it was written of you, “Lo, I come.” We will remember your love, O Jesus, as it was manifested to us in your holy life, from the manger of Bethlehem to the garden of Gethsemane! We will track you from the cradle to the grave, for every word and every deed of yours was love. You, wherever you did walk, did scatter loving kindnesses with both your hands. As it is said of your Father, “God is love,” so, surely, you are love, O Jesus! The fullness of the Godhead dwells in you; the essence of love, nothing else but love, is your incarnate person.
  And specially, O Jesus, will we remember your love to us upon the cross! We will view you as you come from the garden of your agony, and from the hall of your flagellation. We will gaze upon you with your hands and your feet nailed to the accursed tree. We will watch you when you could, if you had willed it, have saved yourself; but when you did, nevertheless, give up your strength, and bow yourself downward to the grave that you might lift us up to heaven. We will remember your love which you did manifest through your poor, bleeding hands, and feet, and side.
  We will remember this love of yours until it invigorates and cheers us “more than wine,”-the love, of which we have heard, which you have exercised since your death, the love of your resurrection, the love which prompts you continually to intercede before your Father’s throne, that burning lamp of love which will never let you hold your peace until your chosen ones are all safely housed, and Zion is glorified, and the spiritual Jerusalem is settled on her everlasting foundations of light and love in heaven. We will remember all your love, from its beginning in the eternal past to the eternity that is to come; no, we will try to project our thoughts and imagination, and so to remember that, long as eternity shall continue, even forever and for evermore, so long shall your love exist in all its glory, undiminished in its luster or its force. “We will remember your love more than wine.”

(Schaeffer’s sermons on the Song of Solomon are available at GraceGems).

15Feb

Love and Hell

Valentine’s Day brings the annual punctuation of Winter’s cold by the arrows of Cupid. We are put in mind of romance and love, as we wander the rows of pink and red cards, and navigate the bewildering assortments of chocolate and flowers. We may find ourselves reading delightful poems by Donne or Byron, or perhaps thinking of tragic love stories from ages past.

Since we are observing the holiday this year on a Sunday, this is a good time to recall the deepest and oldest, and perhaps most tragic love story of all time. This story eats Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” for breakfast. It is more intriguing than the pathos conjured by Tolkien’s “Lay of Beren and Luthien”. The story in view here, of course, is the tragic tale of God’s deep love for humanity, for his created beings whom he made in his image, and endowed with the gift of life. He has loved us despite our rebellion and waywardness. God has endeavored to woo us back. The shocking finale is that God wrote himself into our story, taking our humanity and all its joys and sorrows upon himself.

As in the words of an old Lutheran hymn (Adapted from Thomas A Kempis)

“Oh, love, how deep, how broad, how high,
Beyond all thought and fantasy,
That God, the son of God, should take
Our mortal form for mortal’s sake!”

Sadly, that love often has gone unrequited. In the end, a soul that says, “leave me alone” gets its wish. In the title above, I invoked the idea of Hell, which I won’t try to fully define here. An important aspect of the definition is that the ultimate curse is the precise opposite of the ultimate blessing, as expressed in the famous “Aaronic benediction”. Instead of God’s presence, there is absence. Instead the light of God’s countenance shining upon his beloved, there is only darkness and loneliness.

Some might ask us how we square the idea of a loving God with a concept like Hell. I was recently listening to an old message by Tim Keller, of New York’s Redeemer Presbyterian Church, and was struck by a statement, that we will never really understand the depth of God’s love for us without believing in Hell. What did it cost God to love us? Was it nothing? What did Jesus actually endure on our behalf?

It turns out that what really makes Jesus the “man of sorrows” arises from much more than the mere physical tortures inflicted upon him. It wasn’t just the weight of the cross that bore him down. Christian theology teaches that Jesus had to endure abandonment and forsakenness, the sudden disintegration of his relationship with the Heavenly Father. In other words, Hell.

I recall wasting a couple hours in 1997 watching “Event Horizon,” a science fiction horror film that is almost exactly like “2010” crossed with “Friday the 13th”. It begins creepily enough with a ghost spaceship returned after disappearing into a black hole, and a team of astronauts and scientists travel to investigate. From this promising start, the movie degenerates quickly into a fairly brainless gore fest. The spacecraft is orbiting what turns out to be a portal to Hell, and one of the characters gets possessed by a demonic entity. But there is an interesting point: At the end of the movie, one of the remaining crew members willingly enters the portal to Hell, in order to save the others.

That’s exactly what Jesus did. He took on Hell so that we might escape it. That’s a love that is astounding and unfathomable. However, if we try our best to understand it and embrace it–to take it into our hearts–it will be life transforming.

So, reflect on that, and happy Valentine’s Day.

16Feb

Poisonous Love

What do Valentines Day, Wuthering Heights, Vine the poison dragon from the game “Dragonvale”, and the beloved author CS Lewis have in common? Not much, at first glance, but let me push on a bit.

Vine is a dragon that loves people, but is toxic to them: “The poison dragon loves people. Not for breakfast, it just thinks they’re great company. Unfortunately, people don’t often react well to their deadly neurotoxin.” (From the DragonvaleWiki).

Our love can similarly hurt people, if it is selfish and possessive. I recently watched two movie versions of Wuthering Heights, in which the brooding and passionate Heathcliff loves Cathy deeply, but his love is poisonous and selfish. It rips apart two families and destroys many lives. Hell on earth is the result.

Love can and should echo heaven. In fact, scripture tells us that “God is love.” But this is a deeper kind of love than mere affection, or than the Romantic love of Cupid and Valentines Day, or than the Eros and passion of Heathcliff and numerous late night movies. Jesus says that “Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends.”

The love of God, that we are called to emulate in all our relationships is a selfless, sacrificial love, that is called “agape” in Greek, the language of the New Testament. Agape isn’t merely about self sacrifice, though. In its fullness of meaning it is “other elevating”. C. S. Lewis put it like this: “Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person’s ultimate good as far as it can be obtained”.

C.S. Lewis wrote eloquently of Iove, delineating four types of love, and analyzing them as potential reflections of God. He also discusses how each of these loves can be twisted and warped by humans if we are not careful. For more on this I commend his book, The Four Loves, as well as the parable Til We Have Faces.

My slightly belated Valentine’s wish for you is that your earthly loves do not poison, but rather exalt. And may you feel yourself lucky enough to be the recipient of such exaltation. It is a glimpse of heaven.