Friday, December 15, 2017

TRUE LOVE


True Love

Many years ago my true love bought me a guitar. The first finger-picking song I learned was Scarborough Fair made popular in 60s by Simon & Garfunkel. Are you going to Scarborough Fair?/Parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme/Remember me to one who lives there/For she once was a true love of mine. Then he makes a list of impossibilities for her to complete before he will accept her again as his true love. For example, she’s to make him a shirt without a seam or fine needlework. Apparently some of the lyrics were inspired by an earlier Scottish ballad called Elfin Knight which contains the following line: ‘For thou must shape a sark to me/Without any cut or heme,’ quoth he. Regardless of the song’s origin, true love is ordinarily displayed when someone does something seemingly impossible for someone else. We might say then that the true love in the Scarborough Fair song is a conditional love.

Much has been made of the Bible’s usage of the Koine Greek words for love, such as phileo and agape. Some maintain that agape always means unconditional love. However, D.A. Carson in his book Exegetical Fallacies begs to differ. Is God’s love for us a true love, i.e., a conditional love or is it always unconditional? Bear with me here: The Bible has always taught that the way of salvation is through perfectly keeping His Commandments. Impossible? The Pharisees when Jesus walked the earth didn’t think so. They thought they were doing a fine job of keeping the Decalogue, that was until Jesus came along and exposed their sin by saying things like, ‘You have heard that it was said, You shall not commit adultery. But I tell you, that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart’ Matthew 5:27-28. In other words, to get right with God includes our hidden thoughts as well as our words and deeds. So, if getting right with God and getting into Heaven is based on perfect obedience then it’s impossible for us to satisfy God’s conditional requirements. Enter Jesus! God’s true love for His people is demonstrated in Jesus doing the impossible. He perfectly kept the impossible conditions for all who believe in Him. ‘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.

Unlike the Pharisees, and unlike people who are living today who think all you need to get saved is to try to be good or at least less bad than axe-murderers or Adolf Hitler, God has not made it easier to be saved. It is still impossible – unless you have Jesus Christ and His perfect Commandment keeping as you the believer’s Representative. So, Jesus did what neither you or I can do. He kept God’s Ten Commandments perfectly for all who believe in Him. And what was He doing dying on a cross? He was paying what we owed to God’s justice for our breaking of God’s Ten Commandments – in thought and word and deed! True love then is God forgiving our sins for the sake of Jesus Christ. God gave His Son our sins and poured out His wrath on Him in our stead while giving us His Son’s righteousness, i.e., His Commandment keeping.

A seamless shirt? Too easy! ‘Then the soldiers, when they had crucified Jesus, took His garments and made four parts, to each soldier a part, and also the tunic. Now the tunic was without seam, woven from the top in one piece’ John 19:23. Only God’s love is true love.