LOVE

                                                                               Love

Love is one of those things that everyone and their dog has an opinion on. But what is love? A feeling? For, as if on a deep-space mission to the nether reaches, innumerable songs and poems, some as beautiful as the sparkling stars, have tried to explore and artfully express the meaning of love. Have any succeeded in bringing love back to earth from the highest heavens? Is love an abstract noun, like the sound of a plane soaring above the clouds? Is love an adjective, a honeybee searching for a rose? Is love a verb, fluttering, flapping, and flitting from flower to flower? Is love from above?

Is love an attraction? Like a walk along a lonely beach on a moonlit night? Is love the moon in June? Does love ebb and flow like the sea-tinkle on shingle, or the jingle of windchimes on a summer’s breeze? Is love like breathing, something spiritual? Does it come and go, and you don’t know you have until it’s lost? “If you love something, let it go. If it comes back, it’s yours. If it doesn’t, it never was.” I first heard this at high school when young couples were trying out relationships. Is love, then, something that must be free, like leaving a singing canary’s cage door open? Well, it seems clear that love is something that needs an object on which to alight itself.

The Bible says that God is love (1 John 4:8). God is Father and Son and Holy Spirit (Matt. 28:19). Therefore, love is eternal as each Person in the Godhead loves the Others in a, without beginning or end, triquetra. God is all-powerful yet paradoxically is as gentle as a dove. ‘And John bore witness, saying, “I saw the Spirit descending from heaven like a dove, and He remained upon Him”’ John 1:32. Love, then, is not some abstract hard-to-explain thing. Love begins and ends with God. Like the human spirit, like every breath you take, God gives it, and God takes it away. After your very last breath leaves you, Scripture says, ‘Then the dust will return to the earth as it was, and the spirit will return to God who gave it’ Ecclesiastes 12:7.

It’s not Cupid’s arrow to the heart that brings us love. Rather it was when our Creator poked His tender finger into our heart and wrote His law of love upon it when He made us. We are to love God and our neighbour as ourselves. Love, therefore, is a heart-thing, gently put there by God.

The place where we express this love for God and neighbour best is in God’s institution of marriage. Marriage, like God, is triune: the man, his bride, and God as witness. Different versions of the following piece of Scripture are often read out at weddings: ‘Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends’ 1 Corinthians 13:4-8b. Again, love is a heart-thing. That’s why God says, ‘Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it’ Proverbs 4:23. How many marriages take their eyes off God only to get dashed on the rocky shores of the self-seekers? Love therefore is honouring God in all things, including and especially marriage. For marriage is a picture of God’s love. It is a picture of Jesus seeking and finding His bride. Like the Spirit, the Son came down from heaven to seek and to save the lost (Luke 19:10). Who sent Him? His Father: ‘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. Now that’s what love is! And how could anyone not love God’s Son?