True Love
Many years ago my true love bought me a
guitar. The first finger-picking song I learned was Scarborough Fair made
popular in 60s by Simon & Garfunkel. Are
you going to Scarborough Fair?/Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme/Remember me
to one who lives there/For she once was a true love of mine. Then he makes
a list of impossibilities for her to complete before he will accept her again
as his true love. For example, she’s to make him a shirt without a seam or fine
needlework. Apparently some of the lyrics were inspired by an earlier Scottish
ballad called Elfin Knight which contains the following line: ‘For thou must shape a sark to me/Without
any cut or heme,’ quoth he. Regardless of the song’s origin, true love is
ordinarily displayed when someone does something seemingly impossible for
someone else. We might say then that the true love in the Scarborough Fair song
is a conditional love.
Much has been made of the Bible’s usage of
the Koine Greek words for love, such as phileo
and agape. Some maintain that agape always means unconditional love.
However, D.A. Carson in his book Exegetical Fallacies begs to differ. Is God’s
love for us a true love, i.e., a
conditional love or is it always unconditional? Bear with me here: The Bible
has always taught that the way of salvation is through perfectly keeping His
Commandments. Impossible? The Pharisees when Jesus walked the earth didn’t
think so. They thought they were doing a fine job of keeping the Decalogue,
that was until Jesus came along and exposed their sin by saying things like,
‘You have heard that it was said, You
shall not commit adultery. But I tell you, that anyone who looks at a woman
lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart’ Matthew
5:27-28. In other words, to get right with God includes our hidden thoughts as
well as our words and deeds. So, if getting right with God and getting into
Heaven is based on perfect obedience then it’s impossible for us to satisfy
God’s conditional requirements. Enter Jesus! God’s true love for His people is
demonstrated in Jesus doing the impossible. He perfectly kept the impossible
conditions for all who believe in Him. ‘For God so loved the world that He gave
His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have
everlasting life’ John 3:16.
Unlike the Pharisees, and unlike people who
are living today who think all you need to get saved is to try to be good or at
least less bad than axe-murderers or Adolf Hitler, God has not made it easier
to be saved. It is still impossible – unless you have Jesus Christ and His
perfect Commandment keeping as you the believer’s Representative. So, Jesus did
what neither you or I can do. He kept God’s Ten Commandments perfectly for all
who believe in Him. And what was He doing dying on a cross? He was paying what
we owed to God’s justice for our breaking of God’s Ten Commandments – in thought
and word and deed! True love then is God forgiving our sins for the sake of
Jesus Christ. God gave His Son our sins and poured out His wrath on Him in our
stead while giving us His Son’s righteousness, i.e., His Commandment keeping.
A seamless shirt? Too easy! ‘Then the
soldiers, when they had crucified Jesus, took His garments and made four parts,
to each soldier a part, and also the tunic. Now the tunic was without seam,
woven from the top in one piece’ John 19:23. Only God’s love is true love.
