This is a follow up to a previous post ‘When Tolerance is not Tolerance’.
Those who read the Bible, the holy scriptures, would be familiar with the words “speaking the truth in love”. Yet ‘love’ is thought of in a mystical sense for those seeking other realms of spirituality. There are those who say that “love is all you need”, reminiscent of The Beatles’ song many years ago. As one internet writer puts it, love is “the force that expands consciousness”. The concept of ‘love’ is re-interpreted in man-centred philosophies,
This is where the gospel, the ‘good news’ message of Christ the Saviour, is seen as rigid or just ‘narrow-minded’, because Love is thought of in a totally different way than how Jesus, the Christ, taught it.
Let’s look a bit closer at this statement from the forementioned internet writer:-
“Try to envision Love as the force that expands consciousness. Love, in this greater sense, is the force that magnifies, increases, grows, develops, and blossoms consciousness towards greater levels of awareness and comprehension of ourselves and the world we live in. To understand more of reality, what ‘is’, Truth, is what allows us to expand our awareness of this reality and ourselves and therefore consciousness evolves and the force of Love/Truth is more profound. Fear constricts and contracts consciousness…”
Love is seen as a ‘force’, a kind of intangible thing which develops your consciousness. As conscience basically means ‘with knowledge’, the writer is saying that the force of ‘love’ will increase your knowledge of self and the world, and then refers to ‘Truth’ as a kind of subjective awareness, intertwining ‘truth’ with ‘love’. Confused yet? Let’s un-confuse these metaphysical mental gymnastics.
For the followers of the Lord Jesus, who is Christ (I write it this way for a reason which I might address in a future post about ‘Christ’), the concepts of ‘Love’ and ‘Truth’ are not merely philosophical, but actually quite practical. Simply put, our Creator, the Author of Life, wants us to grasp the practical outworking of both love and truth. But if we don’t have a clear Truth foundation, what are we basing love on? Love, without a clearly defined foundation, is whatever we interpret it to be… just a kind of relativism with no intelligent boundaries.
Let’s look at what Christ Jesus said about Love.
If you love Me, you will keep My commandments.
John’s gospel 14:15
Looks quite straightforward to me. Love, in this context, is tied in with obedience to His commandments. Love is shown to be related to commitment. This brings us to the particular definition of love known as ‘agape’ (Greek). It is a committed, preferential love not based on romantic feelings. Love, as taught by our Lord Jesus, is commitment to the one loved. It is the love that God our Creator and Father has for His creation – He chooses to/prefers to love us. Yet from our perspective, we are to make that choice commitment to Christ in return. God does not need to obey us, but we do need to obey Him, not merely as a slave, but as a demonstration of our love toward our Maker and Saviour.
This brings us to looking at Love and Truth working together. God’s commandments are Truth – they are our yardstick by which we measure what morality is, what goodness is, what right and wrong are. Without that truth basis from God – found in the Bible, the holy scriptures – we are left with a vague, whatever-feels-right-for-you mentality. We are left with ‘love is truth and truth is love’ abstracts.
The writer referred to in this post also makes this claim:-
“being responsible for our actions in self-governance, self-rulership, self-ownership, self-dominion…”
The ‘self’ is elevated – autonomy is promoted. This in turn is supposed to make us better citizens of planet earth, better neighbours, because of our own expanded knowledge of self and what we perceive to be right and wrong – in a metaphysical sense, tuning our ‘lower self’ into our ‘higher self’. As conscious human beings, we should take responsibility for our actions and choices, but is ‘self-rulership’ the answer? We don’t need God the Creator if we just need to expand our self-awareness and learn to govern ourselves successfully. The best efforts in the world still fail ultimately. No-one is infallible. We cannot become invincible like the character ‘Superman’ (who, by the way, was severely affected by the ‘kryptonite’ green stuff). We all have a ‘kryptonite’ that weakens us – it’s called ‘sin’… we each can become weakened or oppressed, by giving in to wrong desires that come from within us, and sometimes other people’s sinful behaviours toward us. If we only look to ‘self’ how can that be the answer?
Surely we need an objective standard by which to examine ourselves and our motives, and whether we are truly living by ‘Love’…
When we look to our Lord Jesus, we see that objective standard in Him.
Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me
John’s gospel 14:6
The One who is God revealed in human flesh is ‘the truth’. Let’s seek truth, follow truth, obey truth, by a life of devotion to Jesus. Then we will experience love and truth as God intends for us.
Truth Prevails 