Love (God and Neighbor!)

What should we do?

Love God and love our neighbors. That is today’s agenda, because it is always the agenda for a Christian. If God is good, if God is love, then returning that love should be easy, but this is also the same God who is perfectly just. We are not so much perfectly just.

Too often we find loving God easy, because the God we love is real, but we try to ignore aspects of the Divine Nature that are inconvenient to us. God wishes us to love our enemies, but perhaps God has never met our enemies? Instead, our God is on our team.

I once pointed this out, only to have an online atheist give a less literate version of: “You can change God’s nature in our mind so easily, because God does not exist!” I wish this were true, but given marriage, I know this is false. Hope, the lady wife, is real, but I do not always love the Hope that is, but instead the Hope I wish was. Hope reminds me, as God reminds me, but I am perfectly capable of ignoring the data.

I can keep loving the fictive Hope over the real Hope, but doing so has led to marriage problems.

I can love the sort-of-God over the real God, but that leads to cosmic problems.

Or I can accept reality and love the real Hope and the reality of the good God. Love, when we feel love, is of something, but we misunderstand the nature of the Beloved. This is hard, but it must be hard.

God is great, glorious, good and so must obscure His glory to allow us room for consent. We could be so easily overwhelmed, as in the End anyone seeing Him will be by the utter perfection of God. So we are given enough, now or at the hour of our death, to choose, but not so much that we must choose God.

We can deny Him if we will. His request is simple: love. He is worthy of love, cannot be given anything He did not first give us, but this good God does not horde love for Self, but bids us love everyone. This is a glorious truth!  We can know that the Beloved God came, became a person, and told us what to do:

25And behold, a certain lawyer stood up and tempted him, saying, Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life? 26And he said unto him, What is written in the law? how readest thou? 27And he answering said, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy strength, and with all thy mind; and thy neighbour as thyself. 28And he said unto him, Thou hast answered right: this do, and thou shalt live.

Jesus was often tested by rhetoricians hoping to make him say something foolish or entrap him in a contradiction. These are not the good questions or the foundation of an education, but mere puzzles. Love wants the truth, intellectual cowardice hides favored opinions from close inquiry. The question, however, gave Jesus a chance to clarify what God wishes.

Love God, love our neighbor. Love them with reality, not with falsity or false appearances.

God help us all!