As I travel with Barnabas International I need to be rescued from time to time by guest contributors.  Let me introduce Steve Mitchell with this posting: he’s a close friend and gifted writer.  The subject this week is, to my mind, the central question of faith and ethics.  Steve’s reflections are very strong and important.  Read and enjoy!

Alcohol and regret are a volatile mixture. I spent part of a recent vacation learning that lesson when some friction between family members exploded. For a couple of hours after the blow up, I listened as a wayward brother poured out his heart’s venom. He hated everything. His circumstances. His life. And his relationships.

But he wasn’t just full of hate. He also claimed to love. At least, he spoke of his love for me, his children, and God. Even as he affirmed these loves, the relational train wreck that spread out behind him argued otherwise. I don’t believe that he was intentionally lying about who he claimed to love. It’s just that his list was incomplete. There was one love that trumped all others. He had left love of his sinful self off the list.

My brother’s case is more illustrative than unique. We all embrace loves that define our lives and our relationships. For example. I love eggs and I love God. Those are not equivalent statements with the predicate swapped out, but they both indicate some degree of bonding and relationship. When I say that I love eggs, I mean that I am, in some sense, bound to them by my enjoyment of eating eggs. When I say that I love God, I mean that I am deeply bound by a mutual affection between Jesus Christ, whom I received by faith, and myself. It’s a Spirit-led communion that defines who I am, certainly to an infinitely greater degree than my unilateral love of eggs.

This identity as a lover of God in Christ not only defines us, it also motivates what we do. In short, We do as we are, and we are what we are because of what (or whom in this case) we love. Moreover, God’s love for us is formative at a much deeper level. He changes our heart at the moment of conversion, and throughout our continuing communion changes us from the inside out, overcoming lesser un-holy loves that reside in us by nature. As we love Him more, we want to please Him more—not with any expectation of a quid pro quo, but purely and with a deepening mutual delight. This might best be described as the Fruit of the Spirit wherein everything after Paul’s citation of love in Galatians 5:22 becomes commentary on love’s outpouring. If we truly love Christ, we will be ever more joyful, exhibiting more peace, more patience, etc. (see also 1 Corinthians 13:4ƒƒ).

We see this relationship between love and behavior set forth in the Upper Room discourse of John’s Gospel where Jesus so pointedly entwines love and obedience. He bookends a paragraph in chapter fourteen with two declarations (John 14:15, 21): “If you love me, you will obey what I command …Whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me.” He says essential the same thing within a very short section of the narrative, neatly reversing his syntax. Why? Why not say it more simply, and only once? Perhaps it’s for emphasis, but I believe Jesus was making a point about the relationship between loving Him and leading an obedient life. True obedience is always rooted in love, and love always issues as obedience in response to God’s offer of Himself (” He who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love him and show myself to him.”).

Our response in faith to this offer is deeply rooted in a heart transformed by God’s love. “For God so loved…that He gave…that whoever believes…” As the Spirit of God communicates His loving self-offering, what Jonathan Edwards called grace, we are captivated by God’s goodness towards us. Distrust of God is replaced by living, loving faith—the relational bond that is grace’s twin. Obedience in John’s gospel is this very thing: that we believe in the One God sent, Jesus Christ. All other “obedience” flows from this response of loving trust, or faith, in God’s overwhelming goodness towards us. Who, having been truly captivated by such a good God, would not want to do all that pleases Him?

So if what I’ve described above is true of one who is a lover of God and my brother claims to love God—and we grant that he is not intentionally lying—what then is his problem? His is the problem of competing loves. It is not that he doesn’t in some sense believe that he loves God, nor is it that he doesn’t feel some affection towards God. His problem is that he loves himself all the more. Jesus stated the dichotomy flatly when He taught that no one cannot love God and anything else equally (in this context, money) without ultimately favoring one over the other. One cannot serve two masters. We will always love the one and hate the other. The sharpness of Christ’s example is indicative of the forceful exclusion of competing loves. The weaker love will ultimately always give way to the stronger love.

A careful reader will want to challenge me here, sure that I acknowledged my brother’s self confessed love for God. That’s true. I did. But one must consider, as the Apostle Peter did, that we can be carried away by the deceit of our own hearts. If my brother was completely honest, he would have to admit that his love for himself cooled all other loves. And he did when I confronted him in the course of our conversation. But his isn’t merely a question of tepid love. In a very real sense he hated those for whom he professed love as demonstrated by his repeated callousness towards them. He could do no less since he was captured by an overpowering love for sinful self. This self love, what Augustine called concupiscence, is all-consuming and the most basic sin. It stands in stark contrast to God’s self-giving, and overflowing love.

And yet through all the self-help and 12-step programs, through all the sermons he heard about holy living, no one had ever cast his problem as one of competing loves. It is no wonder. The church today is deeply influenced by a philosophy that says it is our will that is deficient in matters of pious living. And so, we must try harder and ask for God’s help, as if The Triune God who sent The Eternal Son to hang on the Cross was concerned solely to make up our lack of self-control—to fill in the gap between what we know we must do and what we cannot of ourselves do.

As a wise friend and pastor of mine says to those who see their losing struggles with sin as a weak willed problem, “How’s that workin’ out for you?” He then takes them graciously and repeatedly through the Scriptures, showing them how God’s love for them and their response, as the Holy Spirit fills their heart with His love (Romans 5:5), is the real issue in their struggles with sin. He gently confronts them over this issue of competing loves, and something remarkable begins to happen.

They repent or they rebel. He sees the same polarizing response in these that Christ stimulated during His time on earth. Those who repent fall more deeply in love with God and His Word. They begin to blossom, and it is almost like watching one of those nature programs where we see time-lapse photography of a flower opening. The sinful behaviors that once offered such powerful attraction begin to lose their savor, replaced by a hunger and thirst for God.

And as unique as this approach to ministry might seem in a contemporary Christian culture that offers endless book store aisles packed with five-, six-, or even seven-step self-help books, it isn’t unique at all. Consider Jesus ministry to Peter in John 21:15, where He asks, “…Simon son of John do you love me more than these?…” The passage is famous and frequently preached. Most reflect on the nature of love in response to John’s use of agape versus phileo. Or they’ll springboard from the obvious parallel between Peter’s three denials and Christ’s three restorative touches. But why so few engagements of Christ’s comparative clause “…more than these?”

I believe it represents the theological bias mentioned above. One that dominates the church. But my pastor friend gets John 21:15 and following. And like his Lord, he asks a simple question: “Do you love Him more than these?”

God is one and only one. He is the only true God, and not one among many. He created the world and he rules it as his own.

This is what I believe and affirm along with many others. But I know not all will agree with us. Why not? Because the world of religion has always been divided by different visions of God. Christendom is set over against the alternative realms of Hindus, Buddhists, Moslems, and so on.

My point here is not to review, or to challenge, or to correct others, but to be reminded of a basic point: differing visions of God lead to different versions of faith. And if God exists in his own right—and not as some ever-pliable human construct—and if God is a communicator who has disclosed to us something of who he is, then we must conclude that at least one vision of God is more accurate than all others. That is, those who are listening to God and seeing him as he really is—as he has actually and accurately disclosed himself to us—are in a privileged position when we worship him.

So I write this as a Christian, privileged—with very many others—by my union and communion with God through his Son and by his Spirit. All this is facilitated by Scriptures that collectively and reliably offer God’s heart to us. There we find the same God who spoke to Samuel of David in 1 Samuel 13:14, as one seeking out for himself those who are “after his own heart”.

Yet Christianity is itself divided by competing visions of God. There are the broad movements that include the Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Reformation clans. And within these are even more divisions such as the Presbyterian, Methodist, and Baptist groupings of the Reformation tradition.

So what do we do with all these differences? One option is to think of them as preference-based communities in the same way that the world is distinguished by clubs and societies—of dog breeders, auto enthusiasts, poetry clans, political parties, and so on—which is to say that the differences don’t amount to much. But Jesus—the defining figure of our Christian faith—did not treat such superficial distinctions as meaningful. Instead he was ever and always polarizing people by insisting that every human heart is either captured by his father or disaffected towards him.

We can think here of Christ’s famous saying, “No one can serve two masters”—one master will be loved, the others hated. So, too, among our current Christian groupings a given person—whether Baptist, Methodist, or Anglican—is distinguishable by this one affective measure: love. This is surprising in that features of creedal devotion, of liturgical tradition, or of church polity—matters that often divide Christians—are not elevated by the Bible as ultimate indicators of God’s mastery of a given soul. Instead every person is tested for either loving God or hating him. In the gospels Jesus returned again and again to this question of heart-orientation. In the book of Revelation the utterly orthodox church in Ephesus was called to repent for having left her first love for God.

That is not to say, of course, that people who “hate” God ever think of themselves as hating God! Instead they find their orientation unveiled only as God exposes their deepest motivations. Their hatred only surfaces once they find that Christ opposes their ambitions. Think, for instance, of what is reported in John 8:30 and following. There Jesus uncovered a group of “disciples” who were actually children of “the devil”. The indicator was that they refused to “abide” in Jesus’ word. Despite professing a belief in Jesus at the beginning of the event they ended up trying to kill him with stones for what he said about himself! Why? Because, Jesus said, they did not have God’s spiritual paternity: “if God were your father you would love me.” A love for the Father and the Son is the indicator of real relationship with God.

Nor is it to say that “love” is a shallow, syrupy sentiment. Instead the love God calls us to experience is both rich in emotion yet as sharply focused as Christ’s passion on the cross as he was accursed for our sins. In love the Son fulfilled the Father’s paradoxical plan to draw us, by the Spirit’s wooing, into the eternal Father-Son love relationship. The Son’s obedience to this plan expressed his own love for the Father and for us. So it is that Christian love is as expensive as Christ’s blood, and as expansive as God’s shared glory. It was this outcome of seeing and enjoying God’s own glory through our union with Christ that Jesus celebrated in his prayer of John 17.

Love, then, is the heart’s devotion to another. It is not a self-concerned, intransitive sentiment—as in “my personal feeling”—but an other-oriented, transitive devotion. As believers we love God because he first loved us. That is, love is defined more by its object of focus than by the subject who loves: it is only in knowing God that we love him properly and truly as a response to his self-disclosures.

This, in turn, sets up every aspect of our faith as “affective”. That is, our faith works through love just as Paul informs us in Galatians 5:6. The basis for this is in God himself: “God is love” and has made us, in his image, to be lovers as well.

Let me say more on this point. We must recognize that when John twice stated that God is love in 1 John 4:8 & 16 he was not saying that God “has” love—as if love is a commodity that God imports to himself. Rather we can say this: God exists the eternal relationship of “Father-Son-and-Spirit” and the bond of his union and the nature of his communion is what we call love. Augustine of Hippo put it this way in speaking of the distinctions of the Godhead: the Father loves, the Son is beloved, and the Spirit communicates the love between them. So it is that love is God’s bond; holiness is the moral ethos of that bond; and glory is the ongoing relational joy, honor, and delight in which that bond subsists.

Yet all too often we Christians still revert to our fallen patterns of acting as if we are in a contractual partnership with God: treating our own initiatives towards God—our perceived duties and responsibilities—as the substance of faith. We can all too readily treat doctrines as ends in themselves rather than as God’s ways and means to express his love for us. And so it is that duty begins to displace delight; responsibility is confused with response; and joy is lost as God is seen as demanding rather than merciful, compassionate, and captivating.

Jesus confronted this sinful misdirection in the religious leaders of his own day:

His [the Father's] voice you have never heard, his form you have never seen, and you do not have his word abiding in you, for you do not believe the one whom he has sent. You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life. I do not receive glory from people. But I know that you do not have the love of God within you. (John 5:37-42; emphasis added)

My concern is that even today we can still miss this crucial point. The reason for a false confidence is that our present generation of theological leaders acknowledge Jesus, unlike those he confronted in this passage. But the deeper question we must still face is whether we “have the love of God” in us. Or—as was the case in those days—do we “receive glory from one another and do not seek the glory that comes from the only God?” (5:44)

To be honest, over the years as I regularly attended the annual theological meetings of the best and the brightest Christian leaders of today I often grieved over the absence of a clear and palpable love for God and for each other. It may have been there, of course, in many relationships; but on the whole the meetings had little in common with the communion of love that Christ shared with the disciples in the upper room as he told them, “By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (John 13:35).

So when we come to God we have a double pathway before us: to love or not to love. And love is a response to the One who first loved us. It is not a love reduced into disaffected acts of willpower and discipline, but a devoted affective love for Jesus that meets every biblical call to know and choose the good—because we love the One who alone is good. Paul captured the point with enormous power when he wrote to the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 13. We all need to pause, read, and reflect: “Faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.” The greatest because love expresses God’s own heart.  Given such love, may our own hearts leap with delight!

Picture a man coming home a day early from a trip, pleased and ready to surprise his dearly loved wife. As he nears his home in the early evening he sees an SUV parked across the street. It belongs to a man in their church home community. Puzzled, the husband also notices that the living room and kitchen lights are off, but the glow of a soft light can be seen through the closed curtains of the master bedroom. With a heart that begins to fill with a quiet horror he gently opens the front door. Moments later, in the bedroom, he discovers his wife in bed with his good friend, sharing an intimacy with her that the husband thought was his and his alone.

Is it proper for the husband to be jealous? Should we be surprised if he expresses horror and outrage? Or would we consider him noble and properly self-controlled if he knocks on the half-open door and says, “Hi honey. Hi Sam. Sorry to catch you by surprise! When you two are done why don’t you come on out to the kitchen and let’s have some coffee. I had a great trip and I’d love to tell you about it!”

Of the two options—of fury versus passivity—God affirms the former. The jealousy of a betrayed spouse is a proper and powerful response to adultery; and one that God shares with us. In fact God’s confrontation of adultery is among the most commonly expressed themes in the Bible, with the Old Testament far surpassing the New.

In the Bible physical adultery is treated as fully parallel to spiritual adultery. This because we are ultimately spiritual beings—created in God’s immaterial, relational image—so that physical adultery is only the tangible extension of a prior spiritual violation (cf. Matt 5:27-28 & 1 Cor 6:12-20).

Yet jealousy can be a confused and unhealthy passion—properly dismissed as a selfish feature of narcissism. Think, for instance, of the jealousy of a 3-year old when he or she finds a new infant sibling in the home, now drawing parental attention in new directions. I can also think of a woman I knew years ago who, after having an affair with a married man, was angry and jealous when the man returned to his wife. With these kinds of exposures to jealousy this is hardly a passion suitable for God, is it?

The answer is, “yes”, it is suitable to God in the measure that jealousy is suitable in a marriage! A proper jealousy can and should exist when the bond of mutual, exclusive marital love has been violated. In a marriage the “two” have become truly “one” and that oneness is not to be adulterated by additional partners. It is a function of ontology—of the true union of marriage. Yet the unity of marriage is treated in the Bible to be subordinate to an even greater unity: that of the Godhead as reflected in the constitutional language of creation. “Let us make man in our image; male and female he created them.” Marriage, as this text reveals, is our closest point of continuity to God’s own being.

Not only that, we also find in Ephesians 5:32 that human marriage is merely a precursor to the greater marriage of Christ and the Church. Marriage offers a lens for looking ahead to our eternal estate as the collective bride of Christ. This, in turn, also gives us the context for God’s proper, powerful, and passionate jealousy. A jealousy so great that it accounts for his future judgment on humanity—as in the call of Psalm 2 for all of humanity to “Kiss the Son, lest he [God the Father] be angry, and you perish in the way, for his wrath is quickly kindled.”

Indeed, among the Bible’s ten commandments we find jealousy at the heart of God’s relations with Man:

for I the LORD your God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing steadfast love to thousands of those who love me and keep my commandments. (Exodus 20:5)

This is not an arbitrary and selfish love, but the love of the Creator who stirs us with his own steadfast love; and he then looks for us to reciprocate that love or to face his jealousy. God, after all, exists in the eternal communion of triune love and our own creation was accomplished with the intent that we should see and experience the eternal glory of the divine companionship as Jesus shares in his great pastoral prayer (John 17:24). So the biblical narrative is one of love and hate—of jealous passion versus requited love. The measure of our standing before God is in what—or who—we love most.

I’ll leave it to readers to survey the entire Bible with this theme in mind, but at least two texts will get us started. The first is an extended warning from Joshua who anticipated the coming dissipation of Israel once they settled in the land:

Therefore we [the people speaking] will also serve the LORD, for he is our God. But Joshua said to the people, “You are not able to serve the LORD, for he is a holy God. He is a jealous God; he will not forgive your transgressions or your sins. If you forsake the LORD and serve foreign gods, then he will turn and do you harm and consume you, after having done you good.” (Josh 24:18-20)

While God invites such fear it is only because he made us for himself. Remember that when our hearts despised him before our salvation he was patient and persistent in breaking down the hostility that once held us. How? By sharing his love through the loveliest gift he could offer: his Son. By pouring that love out into our hearts by the Spirit.

Picture, then, someone trying to smuggle a foreign god into heaven! Can a spiritual opponent to God survive within the intense and holy embrace of the Father-Son-and-Spirit? It’s impossible! So it is that we must give over every alternative love to the pit of eternal destruction. God is properly jealous for our hearts, our whole hearts.

The other verse I have in mind is from James in the New Testament (4:4-6).

You adulterous people! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. Or do you suppose it is to no purpose that the Scripture says, “He yearns jealously over the spirit that he has made to dwell in us?”

Let’s take that on board as an invitation: God yearns for our spirits! He made us for union with his Son by the working of the Spirit in a Spirit-to-spirit bond. He is the lover who finds us bedded with the unbelieving, disaffected world. How does he feel? As jealous as the husband of our initial story should feel! Yet he works for restoration and reconciliation. Why? Because of his steadfast love.

What a God and what a lover. One who comes to us with a proper and powerful jealousy.  May all of us repent and be restored.