I was sitting in the pew at church on Sunday, and the thought occurred to me to ponder why it was in the first letter to the Church of Corinth that it is said that there remain, or abide, but three - faith, love and hope - and that the greatest of these is love.
1 Corinthians 13 is the Love chapter - I’ve heard portions of it read in so many weddings, whether religious people were involved or not, that I cannot recall the exact number.
Since I tend to ramble a lot, I will try to be brief in my synopsis so we can get to the core thought - the ship that is currently sailing.
The first three verses seem to speak to religion and the religious, as if religious action divorced from Love is in fact dead weight, or useless, or caustic and distracting to the those who perceive it.
13:1 If I speak in the tongues [language] of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. 2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. 3 If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.
Everything is for naught if it does not gain you Love[1]. Now it would be easy for the religious person, especially the Christian, to affirm that this word is essentially the same as you would find in so many places for how God loves His people (John 3:16 anyone). This is all good and well, but there’s something more to get at.
The next four verses are what I hear most often in marriage ceremonies. Even if you aren’t religious, even if you don’t believe in God, or in gods, or anything other than in being able to hope for something good, somehow these verses are loud and full of hope. It is almost as if Love expressed by the subjective being flows in this way.
4 Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant 5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; 6 it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. 7 Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
The next five verses are the crescendo to the last verse of the chapter. Here we find, perhaps, an expanding of the paradigm as to why the last verse is significant. We see that everything we do is but a part, and that all things partial pass away when the Perfect has come. Thus we are told that all partial things are never the sum of the Perfect, but that it is a shadow for us to know now, but one future day we shall know fully. (Stay with me, we’re getting to the exciting stuff.)
8 Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. 9 For we know in part and we prophesy in part, 10 but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. 11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. 12 For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.
So now the final verse of chapter 13, which is verse 13.
13 So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
Why is Love the greatest here? I mean, aren’t faith and hope important? Yes, they are. Without faith it is impossible to please [God] for whoever would draw near to Him must believe that He exists and that He rewards those that seek Him. (Hebrews 11:6) And everyone hopes in and/or for something. But they are, perhaps, only important to we who play with the shadows of the partial, we who must deal with the parts because we are not yet in the perfect presence of the Perfect.
Perhaps Love is the greatest because within the scope of the Trinity - the triune God; the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit - the only thing that exists is Love. No member of the Trinity needs to hope or have faith since those are based on promises unseen or in a future regard. But Love is here, and now; Love is the present activity within the Triune and Holy God.
The Puritan Jonathan Edwards (of Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God fame) wrote an essay on the nature of the Trinity [2]. In a nutshell he proposed that just as a person has an idea of himself, a reflection of his nature, so God the Father has a perfect deified reflection of Himself, which is God the Son. The love that God the Father has for Himself (the Son) - which makes sense if God is by nature and definition the most beautiful, worthy, paramount, and ultimate person/thing/whatever in and before and after “existence” - which is Perfect and deified is thus God the Holy Spirit. [3]
If this is true then of course Love is the greatest; it’s the only thing left. Which if we now go back to the beginning of chapter 13 we see, perhaps, or at least may consider, with greater illumination why religion is empty apart from God, why love is action and attitude, why beauty is significant, etc.
May I cite a few verses from The Gospel of John for you to consider in light of this?
- But the Helper, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you. (John 14:26)
- But when the Helper comes, whom I will send to you from the Father, the Spirit of truth, who proceeds from the Father, he will bear witness about me. (John 15:26)
- Nevertheless, I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Helper will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you. (John 16:7) [4]
So the thing purchased for people by God the Son dying sacrificially is God the Spirit, or, if Edwards is correct, the Love that God has for Himself. One does not merely get atonement, one is gets invited into the very ebb and flow of the Love of God for God by God.
But I run amok here. Just a new thought, based on an old thought, inspired by someone else’s thought. This ship has never come back to port. It probably never will. But it is a thought voyaging through the ocean of my mind that I like to consider.
In fact, and to close, I will leave you with this other thought - inspired by my original reading of Edwards’ essay - what if in Song of Solomon the characters of Lover and the Beloved are in fact God the Father and God the Son, and what if the audience, or the chorus, is us? What if the point of creation is a story about God’s love for Himself (God the Son) and we are but witnesses, spectators, and perhaps participators? [5]
Notes
All Scripture references taken from the English Standard Version (ESV) Bible, Crossway Bibles, Wheaton Illinois, 2001, or as found online at www.gnpcb.org/esv/
1. Every instance of “love” mentioned here is ἀγάπη (agape) - Strong’s Concordance #26 - at least as noted in the Textus Receptus based Greek-English New Testament that I have sitting on my bookshelf. Interlinear Greek-English New Testament, Third Edition; edited by Jay P. Green, Sr.; Baker Books, Grand Rapids, 1996.
2. It went unpublished originally and you may simply use a search engine to find it online; search for Jonathan Edwards Unpublished Essay on the Trinity. My first reading was probably back in 2002 or so, and I found it on Yale University Press’ website.
3. Yeah, so your mind is trying to wrap itself around this I bet. My mind still is too, and has been since 2002 or so. Edwards admits in his essay that he does not pretend to have figured out all the mystery of the Trinity, since he feels he raises more questions that he can answer. I imagine he felt it a worthy thing to consider, as do I, which is why I posit it before you now it’s most basic and abridged premise.
4. Or in Mark chapter 1 where John the Baptist speaks of the Messiah as the one who will baptize “in the Holy Spirit”. Maybe this illuminates why blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is unpardonable:
28 “Truly, I say to you, all sins will be forgiven the children of man, and whatever blasphemies they utter, 29 but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin”— 30 for they were saying, “He has an unclean spirit.” (Mark 3)
5. I am by no means a Messianic Universalist. God would not offend me if He were to tell me it was so in the next life, but though Scripture says God is Love (1 John 4:8), it also says that there is a “Lake of Fire” where one is tormented “forever and ever” - where one who has not repented of his sins, of his evil, and turned in faith to trust in Christ (God the Son who died the death the we deserve for our sin as our substitution) will find himself in (Revelations 20:10, 14-15).
Hebrews 9:27-28 And just as it is appointed for man to die once, and after that comes judgment, 28 so Christ, having been offered once to bear the sins of many, will appear a second time, not to deal with sin but to save those who are eagerly waiting for him.
All that to say He hasn’t given me much room to become a Messianic Universalist - if by some chance that may have been your thought. I simply don’t want to add fuel to the “God is love” camp where they neglect that God is Holy and that it is His holiness that in fact vindicates His goodness. But that’s just me. I can understand a story that has a protagonist and an antagonist, and where the Hero defeats the Villain and the villain is never redeemed, but defeated. I might even consider a story quite dull if there were no real consequences to any action - but I am not a very smart man.
0 comments:
Post a Comment