LOVE LOVE LOVE!!!
A stroll through today’s so called “evangelicalism” will have you bombarded with this word. It is not possible to go 2 minutes in professing Christian spaces online without blogs, social media posts and memes proclaiming to us all things love.

At first glance this would appear to be a good thing. After all, the love of God is a primary biblical declaration from Genesis to Revelation and most especially in the incarnation, sinless life, atoning death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus Christ.

The trouble with this is that what passes for biblical “love” today is far more often than not a reflection of the emotional preferences of the person preaching it. It is simply assumed that whatever speech or behavior is repugnant to the general consensus of the sinful human conscience MUST be unloving.

In other words, rather than taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ and allowing God’s Word to define all things, including love, it is instinctively taken as fact that if something makes people feel bad, or rubs them the wrong way, it is self evidently suspect at best, and most likely unloving, if not outright hateful.

If the one true and living God has declared Himself to BE love, then we better have His definition of love or we may find ourselves worshiping and serving the wrong god.

So what is “love” according to the bible?

One might immediately, and rightly, think of 1st Corinthians 13. The famous love chapter where we find the most comprehensive single exposition of what true godly love looks like in practice in all the Bible. However, that is not the focus of this short piece. What we’re after here is the foundation and wellspring of all the glorious truth we find there.

Let’s start with God’s holy love for Himself.

Contrary to another and closely related popular belief today, God loves Himself above all else. He can do it and we can’t.

We find countless passages of scripture wherein righteous human love, directly reflecting God’s love, is epitomized by it’s being focused externally to oneself. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your mind and all your soul” (Deuteronomy 10:12, Matthew 22:37, Luke 10:27) The greatest commandment. The second greatest is to love your neighbor as yourself. From the same gospel passages.

It is not wrong for us to love ourselves, but we must love God first and our neighbor the same as we love ourselves. In fact, nobody can love themselves or their neighbor rightly without loving God first, and nobody can do that without becoming a new creature in Christ, but that’s another article. The point is, man’s primary command to love is directed outside himself toward God.

God has no command to love because He Himself IS love and also THE commander of all things. He is the standard and authority for everyONE and everyTHING. That is right and therefore loving, which conforms to His being, nature, will and Word. That is wrong, and therefore not loving, which in any way does not. There is no standard outside of and above Himself. God is not love because there is a definition of love ontologically objective to Himself that He conforms to thereby making Himself love and loving. No, God IS love and IS loving because He IS God.

We see God’s love for Himself in His creation of all things for Himself and His own glory and his refusal to share that glory. (Romans 11:33-39, Isaiah 42:8)

The entire Bible is positively festooned with almighty God’s proclamations of and demand for His own glory. Any talk of the glory of man refers either to man’s sinful glorifying of himself ( i.e. Nebuchadnezzar) or the righteous derivative display of God’s glory through man. (2 Thessalonians 1:12) He jealously defends His own name and His own glory, meting out horrific judgments when those who are called by that name bring dishonor to it.

Biblical love, that is, God’s love, is commanded of us. Thou SHALT love the Lord… Thou SHALT love thy neighbor, husbands LOVE your wives (imperative mood), for example.

This means that the only love God cares about is a volition of the will. It is the intentional setting of the rational affections upon an object, with purpose. Hear this dear readers. It is not an emotional response, a feeling, that is induced by some external stimuli. It also is not percolating hormones. Neither emotions nor hormones are in themselves sinful, but they must be governed by the will which must be governed by the rightly divided Word of God which is not possible without the grace of God.

We see in the screenshot at the top of this article a prime example of what it looks like when somebody draws their definition of love from their own emotional preferences in place of the Word of God. For the whole span of the entire church age, ALL Christians have been agreed on the egregious sinfulness of homosexuality.

It has been held throughout Christian history that there is no personal sin that is beyond the reach of the Holy Spirit or the cleansing power of the blood of Christ, but it has also been held that any form of same sex romantic proclivity IS sin and anyone with a credible claim upon new life in Christ would forsake it and wage war upon it in Jesus name through the power and promises of God.

Every faithful church body calls such sinners to repentance and promises to walk with them through the war. Assuming they do in fact agree with the Lord about the sinfulness of their sin and are willing to fight that war.

Just as God’s command to Adam and Eve was simple and clear, this set of principles is equally as simple and clear.

Here comes the serpent:

“Did God really say that? You know that God must be far too loving to condemn somebody for THEIR love. The oppressive, mean spirited church has had it wrong for thousands of years. The godly, Christlike, loving thing to do would be to accept these people as God has made them. You KNOW this must be true, because that’s what YOU want and look at how much less offensive it is to the unbelieving world.”

The voice of the serpent is now the voice of the apostate church.

The reason “queer” people are more likely to kill themselves while attending church, is not because of their self exalting, hopeless, warped view of reality, whereby they have launched an insolent full frontal assault upon the created order of almighty God. It certainly isn’t that. No, it’s because of the refusal of unloving, hateful false Christians to abandon their anachronistic God and accept these people on their own terms.

Of course it’s tragic when somebody takes their own life and of course Christians are genuinely grieved when someone does. However, under no circumstances are we at liberty to revise God’s holy Word because it may make us feel better by bringing about an emotionally desired result.

Redefining sin according to one’s own personal preferences is not loving. Attempting to shape God’s nature according to one’s own is the pinnacle of self righteous, self worshiping idolatry. These sin and serpent deluded people are the ones who have created a false God in their own image. Theirs is a false imaginary christ, who did not exist before a few decades ago.

As we said in part one of this series:
“Question one or more of God’s revealed precepts or principles, His Word in other words, elicit a receptive response by presenting a seemingly more attractive alternative, and encourage action in embrace of that alternative, which results in an immediate prideful compulsion to export this newfound superior alternative to others. “

We see exactly this in the words and attitudes exemplified by the mortally deceived individuals in the screenshot at the top of this post.

There is even a “hermeneutic of love” whereby this anti-biblical notion of love is made the axiomatic lens through which all of scripture, and indeed all of reality is interpreted, but that’s also another article.

God gives simple commands, also in the garden of Eden. “A MAN shall leave his FATHER and MOTHER and cleave to his WIFE.” “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth” which of course is possible only through the union of a man and a woman.

And the serpent hisses:: “Yea, hath God said?”

To be continued.