Loving Your Neighbor as Yourself
The central and guiding principle of Christian ethics is love. The world speaks of love quite a bit these days. Nevertheless, they’re never eager to define what they mean when they say it and it’s rather clear, unfortunately, that they don’t mean to love those they disagree with. In this case, the non-Christian world is hopelessly contradictory and achieves much of what they say is true of their opponents. In other words, what the world calls love is shot through with contradictions and, sadly, these contradictions lead to conflict rather than unity.
The Christian definition is simple, yet gloriously profound. God is love. God has poured out His love by dying for those who rejected him. We get a dazzling picture of all this heavenly love at the cross of Christ but it’s easy to miss the point. To help us understand the idea of biblical love better, God has given us the story of Hosea.
Hosea was commanded by God to take Gomer, a prostitute, for his wife. Hosea obeyed and dutifully married the wayward lady. Why would God do this? Well, this can be hard to see, even a bitter and formidable thing to admit, but admit it we must – for it’s the unvarnished truth. Like Gomer, we’re prostitutes. We are created by God for fellowship with Him, to glorify and worship Him. Instead, we’ve gone after idols – both material and immaterial. We worship success, education, money, fame, talent, sex, consumption and, flatly put, ourselves. We pretend that we’re fit to judge good and evil without ever bothering, as rational people should, to define a universal standard in which to do this. So, instead of coming to God in humility and awe, we dare to sit in judgement of His word and everything else under the sun! We put Him in the dock. Such is our arrogance.
It’s to sinners like us that Jesus Christ beckons. “Come,” He says, “and I will give you rest.” What rest? The rest that comes when we acknowledge that this is God’s world and we cannot save ourselves nor be as God. Our anxiety, depression, fear, anger, and regret – which we often try and treat with drugs, sex, fame, money or countless other distractions – are all symptoms of that great chasm between us and the Holy God. So, indeed, Christ died for us while we were yet sinners! That’s the greatest news of all time!
It’s to this background that man’s contemporary insistence that love means whatever he says it means must be understood. Man must come to God in humility and repentance or else he’s lost. And when he comes, he must be changed by truth, by righteousness and by love. Claiming love without truth and righteousness is a deceit since Christ is the source of love. Man wouldn’t know love unless God is love. If God isn’t love then love must exist somewhere in the material universe, which it clearly doesn’t, which means without God love is a figment of our imagination.
Thus, when the Christian speaks of love, he means that God is its source. God defines love just as He defines everything else under the sun. The Bible is man’s final authority in understanding how one is to love and he does this through the application of the divine principles found therein to his particular relationships.
First, as far as all relationships go, the principle of love is grounded in the truth and righteousness of God. When this is rejected, we must ground it in ourselves or something else we create. This is to say that we dare suggest that we are the source of love ourselves. In doing so, we don’t seek God’s counsel as to how to order our lives. It shouldn’t be a surprise then that so many relationships fail, so much heartache and bitterness prevail in our homes, because the default setting of love is two mutually independent final authorities proclaiming an alliance. They swear by their love and that love is independently defined and that means, as people change, so will that definition. Since the standard of love is internal rather than external, and subjective rather than transcendent, each person walks a terrible tightrope. And since that standard resides in each allegedly autonomous person, it’s only a matter of time before those standards clash. Frankly, it’s an incredible grace from God that any marriage works at all.
The non-Christian has no clear and workable definition of love whatsoever and merely follows the principle of autonomy and ascribes to it notions of deep affections. They swear by their loves, on their loves, and for their loves. It’s all a great and vain display for it means in reality that a man or woman is saying that they are love’s source and their heart is only honor, is spotless, and trustworthy for eternity. How else can one imagine the oath one takes to love someone “forever” when they, in fact, have a physical expiration date?
All of this is to provide the reader with the understanding that everything that’s said about love by the non-Christian is utterly futile and vacuous, and because of that, most pitiable. Wishing and hoping for the satisfaction and security of true love, we end up with the bitter wreckage of sin’s false promises instead.
Let me provide a few examples of how this principle is violated every day at a common level.
To love your neighbor as yourself requires personal responsibility. None of us would like it if our neighbor threw his trash in our yard or left his bills in our mailbox. His trash and expenses are his alone and we’d rightly expect – in truth and righteousness – that our neighbor account for his own responsibilities. This is an easy principle to digest in this case.
But does it matter if the neighbor has too many bills? Does it matter that he’s been laid off work? Does the neighbor have a right to make you pay his bills and dispose of his trash because he’s unemployed or ill? We know the answer. Of course he has no right for such things. You may certainly provide assistance should you choose but that’s quite another thing altogether. His reasons are rather superfluous to the greater issue at hand. Your neighbor has no right whatsoever over your time and property.
Now this is quite an easy extrapolation. If one neighbor has no right to make you pay their bills, 10,000 neighbors don’t have that right either. We don’t get to change the principle by replacing the word “neighbor” with “society” or “the poor”. The Bible commands that no one give under compulsion (2 Corinthians 9:7) and this is consistent with the principle of loving your neighbor. Loving a neighbor and putting obligations on them are inconsistent. To give in charity, of one’s own free will, is loving; to demand that others give to you or to another neighbor is a gross violation of this principle.
Political discourse is full of the word love but love would appear to be defined as mere emotion. In the worst of it, we can see it’s only a sexual manifestation of some sort. This produces a philosophical vacuum, however. If love is an ardent emotion, an abiding passion, then what exactly is it and how can it be a political guide for us? I will repeat the question. What is love if not an attribute of God that has its source and meaning only in Him? If love is not from God, then what is it, how can we know it, and how is it an actionable ethical standard?
You see, much to the chagrin of sinners, we don’t get to define the facts of reality. The world is what God says it is. Love comes with responsibility since its source is outside of us – God. And since God is holy and righteous, we must love in holiness and righteousness. In other words, we must love according to God’s standards as learned in Scripture or else we invent our own ever-changing dictates. In a manner of speaking, this is exactly what sin is – the exchanging of the truth about God for the lie of human autonomy. But we know that no person is truly autonomous – that is, metaphysically free. We have a political freedom – which is a derivative freedom given by God. Metaphysical freedom is ultimate freedom but since every person is born and then later dies, we know unequivocally that none of us are absolute. This simple fact, so obvious that we despise thinking about it, proves that any exercise in establishing man-made moral rules is a sham.
Because of this faulty definition, man continues to interpret love in both highly antinomian yet totalitarian ways. It’s common for an individual to proclaim that he/she is loving and loves all in a love that’s open to all love and this love rejects labels because it’s…well, love. But we note that this is generally the love that’s the love of sexuality and sexual licentiousness. And this so-called love, this dissipation, demands that others approve of their love too, which is odd because the definition rests upon a foundation of ethical anarchy (antinomianism). But woe to you who withholds your sanction from this love because you are now branded as a hater and a hater is unloving because they reject your definition of love, which is the supreme act of hate. A hater is, then, a person who disagrees with an arbitrary definition. We remind the reader that the modern atheist, awash in sexual profligacy and abandonment, tries to cover the chill of their lack of biblical ethics with the warm blanket of love. It’s all love, they say. This definition rests upon the premise that all is okay as long as you like it and no one can judge another. That’s love.
But to criticize this definition of love, which has no grounding in logic whatsoever, is to, as we’ve said, be branded a hater. The hater is the person who has another standard of love that disagrees with the former’s definition. The trouble is that if the premise is that love is a personal decision alone, how can that right not be extended as well to those who reject it? By definition, a lover of this sort – anarchy as love – must applaud those who contend against that definition. To do otherwise is in contradiction to the premise of “all” is love. The moment the self-professed lover says, “no, not that” under any pretense whatsoever, he has sawed off the limb he’s sitting on, so to speak.
To that end we see again how man’s wisdom, devoid of God, runs him into yet another dead-end. This is no cul-de-sac, be sure; it’s a road that terminates at the bitter wall of God’s reality. The answer is to turn back or else be dashed to pieces against it. God has written His law on every human’s heart and we should all rise up and rejoice in that fact. We speak of love, experience it in our hearts, and understand it inchoately because God is our creator. But this whole enterprise of using love in our own way is certainly not an innocuous thing and we see the ravages, the inferno of anarchy burning through our homes and land. There is no love without righteousness. There can’t be – even for the atheist, which is why he’s so insistent upon his definition of it. But, as we’ve said, his definition, which he intends to impose upon one and all with quite a religious fervor suffers a great contradiction at the heart of it. You must agree with it, he says! You see, if you don’t support what the Bible calls sin but the atheist calls love, then you’re guilty of the moral crime of intolerance. In this way, please note, that there is no tolerance for dissent in the humanistic ethic. As always, because it’s sin, all secular humanistic philosophies are born in anarchy and end at that wall of tyranny. They may paint that wall with many flowers or scenes of sunsets on the beach but it’s still the same thing: repent or else.
This is what the world now calls love. It’s also why the personal choice of sexuality has become a political issue. Since this is God’s world, it’s His moral law that controls it. To play at this game of autonomy, man must work to overthrow God’s law and the surest way, he thinks, to do this is to legislate his own. This is precisely why politics has taken on a messianic nature in America. In all, it’s not about love but about power and authority. If it was about love, then they’d leave their neighbor alone.
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