[Living Word] Love of God - Part 2

"Love is only a feeling
(Drifting away)
When I'm in your arms I start believing
(It's here to stay)
But love is only a feeling "

– Love is only a feeling by The Darkness

It is a strange world to be ‘in love’ now – there is such a wide buffet of interpretations of love available for your palate. Tune in to Class 95 FM and you will hear but a few opinions on what love is: “love is about giving your heart away”, “love is about being blind to the other person’s faults”, “love is…” etc.

Similarly, our comprehension of God’s love has also been corrupted by the plethora of deviant ideas of love, kudos again to pluralism, which has stealthily also infected Christians to believe that all opinions are equally worthy and should be embraced, and that no one opinion is more true than any other – that is essentially pluralism. Here we examine 5 common distortions of God’s love.

1. God is only an absolutely loving figure. In fact, people who hold this view believes that God loves them so much He will be on their side regardless of circumstance, showering them with luxury and prosperity beyond imagination. It puzzles me. If He is really so loving, why doesn’t He give everyone overflowing bank accounts (and a Beemer or Porsche to top it off)? Or consider a situation where a German Christian soldier and a Britain Christian soldier meet on a battlefield during WWII? Whose side would God be on then? We should all bear in mind that while God is Love, He is not only Love. God is also the Just; and Justice and Love are not mutually exclusive. In fact, they are threads of the same fabric.

2. God has become sentimentalized. People today only ‘feel’ God through their emotions: heart warming love, cold guilt, furious wrath etc. For those of us who have less sensitive lachrymal (tear) glands, are we deprived of God’s presence then? In a survey done in the US during the mid 1980s, ¾ of respondents saw God as friend rather than king. Hillsong sings that “Jesus is my best friend”. I do not wish to comment on the theological accuracy of that statement, but it is evident that most people have conveniently forgotten that Jesus is first and foremost Lord; of course, the sweeter sounding response is that Jesus is our best friend.

3. Religious Pluralism. All roads lead up the same mountain – many today think that because our God is so loving He must be so merciful and all encompassing; a person who is worshiping Vishnu is actually really worshipping God - merely a misconceived or alternative manifestation of God. Such an idea is even more poignant and relevant in relation to believers in the other Abrahamic faiths, considering all three religions share the same ‘roots’. Read paragraphs 839 – 848 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church and you’ll be surprised (http://www.vatican.va/archive/catechism/p123a9p3.htm). Religious pluralism has become so commonplace that anything else is considered bigotry; what then can be held true at all anymore?

4. God’s love mutually incompatible with His sovereignty. People overlook or ignore the hard cold reality because it is the safer thing to do. How does one reconcile God’s love with that of disasters, mass genocides and world wars? Has God lost control in such events that He is unable to do anything about it, or is it that He actually does not love His creation enough to warrant intervention in all these things?

5. God’s love is simple. This is probably the strangest distortion of God’s love to mention. In fact the statement, “God loves you” or “Jesus loves me”, has been so pervasive that the statement has become a logical absolute, an axiom-premise in itself, from which everything else follows. Yet, I have already posed to you the rather disheartening questions in Part 1 which begs the larger question: if God’s love is simple, why can’t I answer those questions, in light of my simple understanding of His love?

These are but a few common distortions of God’s love and sufficient to say, most of us are guilty of one or more of such deviant views. Having been exposed to this, it is better now to open our hearts and minds to God, let the Spirit guide us as we scour the Word for the correct understanding of God’s love, and forgo our prior preconceived notions, for we are told in Proverbs 3:5 to “trust in the Lord with all your heart, and lean not on your own understanding”.

For now, we can at least safely conclude that… no, love is definitely not only a feeling.