Love Supreme

Reading for me can be frustrating because I often read more than one book at a time. I've read a few books cover to cover but mostly, I just sift through a book's different sections, take in the ideas that interest me and when I'm satisfied, I move on. Knowing my erratic reading habits, I wasn't very enthusiastic when someone this past weekend handed me a book she thought I should read. It was a book on the Holy Trinity that I hadn't read and come to think of it, it would be the first I've ever read about the triune God of the Bible. With some down time later that day, I decided I would flip through it. It's an easy read, the whole book containing just 130 pages. It's called Delighting in the Trinity - An Introduction to the Christian Faith by Michael Reeves and I'm going to buy it for myself. It's one of those books every Christian should own and read through often just to reset themselves in the Faith.

The Christian apologist, Ravi Zacharias, once called love "the supreme ethic". Whether he realized it at the time (and I'm sure he did), he was citing the great battle of not just our time but of the ages. The Bible says God is love. Jesus said the greatest commandment was to love God with all that is in us and the second greatest commandment for us is to love one another. Since we are created in God's image, we humans are created to love...and everybody, even the worst of our species, loves. It's true. Hypocrites, criminals and terrorists all have the capacity for love and act upon it. If it is the supreme ethic and we are created in the image of the supreme Being, then we are born to love. As we sit in the highest position of the created order, we are unique among beings. It is, at once, our greatest blessing and our greatest curse because though we love, we don't love as we ought, and that's where things go wrong.

From the book: "What, then, went wrong? It was not that Adam and Eve stopped loving. They were created as lovers in the image of God and they could not undo that. Instead, their love turned. When the apostle Paul writes of sinners, he describes them as 'lovers of themselves, lovers of money...lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God'. Lovers we remain, but twisted, our love misdirected and perverted. Created to love God, we turn to loving ourselves and anything but God. And this is just what we see in the original sin of Adam and Eve. Eve takes and eats the forbidden fruit because a love for herself - gaining wisdom for herself - has overcome any love she might have had for God." This was the same sin that an angel named Lucifer committed - a love of himself rather than a primary love of God. See Ezekiel 28:17.

Self love is inordinate. It is pride and pride is the root of all sin. How different the love embodied in Jesus was. He loved His Father completely and would do nothing to violate His will, even when it meant dying on a Roman cross to fulfill His Father's will that sinful people be redeemed. He rebuked the tempter in the wilderness when that father of lies tried to coax Him into the imitation love that he embraced. Augustine hit the mark when he declared, "You have made us for Yourself, oh God, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in You."

The Bible says, "God is love", and truly He is. But in order for God to be love, He must be in a relationship because He cannot be one Being loving Himself. No, God is the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, one God in a perfect love relationship within three distinct Persons. It is to this divine relationship we are invited to partake. It is nothing less than this. After His resurrection Jesus said to Mary Magdalene, "Go to my brothers and say to them, 'I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.'" That is the proof, the rock-solid word of the Man who demonstrated perfectly what we were created to be like and made it possible for us to enter that reality. That is the Gospel.