Love's Ascendency

Just one more post about this, so hang with me. Because when I get on a certain topic like homosexuality and gay rights, and it's important for me to have my opinion on firm footing, it tends not to leave for a while. At least not until I get through the major arguments.

So, when all you have is the material world, love turns out to be one of the strongest motivators -- hate is up there, too, but we don't promote that one for obvious reasons; and, really, hate is the same passion, just turned the opposite way. So without God, love becomes the complete and utmost expression of humanity, in a way. There's no greater drive, and there's no reason it should not be fulfilled within certain cultural limits.

The problem is that, as Christians, we've bought into this.
We should know better: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and strength; and, You shall have no other gods before Him. Secular society has made Love -- physical love, at least -- a god; and Christians have adopted it.

Well we are to love our neighbors, right? We need to separate types of love: there is agape, God's, which is all-encompassing; there is Christ-like love as expressed through self-sacrifice through the recognition of another human being as a fellow image-of-God-bearer; then there is physical attraction, most often expressed through lust. The last one is the one society recognizes and defines most easily. Any other definition of love -- and watch when they try to do it, it can be kind of funny -- is strangely inexpressible, at least without God and an understanding of Him. Whether a proclaimed atheist or functionally so, a solid, fundamental definition of the kind of "love" that sustains people through a life-time of marriage is incredibly hard to come by. So we redefine "lust" and call it good.

Now, suddenly, expecting a person to deny this expression of themselves becomes ludicrous. But again, Christians should know better. Especially when it's iterated four times in the Bible: God creates it; Levitical Law establishes it; Jesus re-affirms the creational aspect; Paul re-affirms the Levitical Law. And marriage, according to many passages in Scripture, is not a "right." It is not divinely ordained that every man and woman on the planet be married. Jesus didn't marry; neither did Paul. Our first love is to be for our Creator: it is He who makes us complete, and not anything else we can receive on this earth. Any void we have is filled by Him; and if we love Him, we strive to live in the way He intended. He did not by accident create them male and female. We do not repair the fall by gluing together unmatched structures with man-made and man-defined adhesive, and call it good. I really don't see the wiggle-room.

See you Wednesday.