What Bigfoot and God’s Love Have In Common

18 Aug 2012

Today I was doing a Google search that contained the word ‘love’ and saw some image results in the results page. I decided that it would be interesting to see how Google visually defined love, so I clicked into Google Images and searched for ‘love’. The results were very telling.

Most of the images were in shades of red, white, and black with almost every image containing a heart of some kind. Some images were light and fun while others symbolized more passionate, erotic love (I had the adult content filter engaged, so none of the images were too risqué). A number of images were sad, showing broken hearts or depicting young people in angst-filled, hormone-juiced infatuation.

None of the pictures captured the love I feel toward God, how I feel he loves all of us, or how I would imagine that God would illustrate his love for us.

Different Types of Love in the Bible

âhab ‘âhêb

This compound Hebrew word used in Deuteronomy 6:5, where the Bible says, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength.”

Eros

This kind of love is in the Bible, but the Greek word eros is never actually used in the Bible. About.com refers to 1 Corinthians 7 as an example of eros love in the Bible.

1 Corinthians 7:8-9 NIV (8) Now to the unmarried and the widows I say: It is good for them to stay unmarried, as I do. (9) But if they cannot control themselves, they should marry, for it is better to marry than to burn with passion.

The burning with passion that verse 9 refers to is written using the Greek word puroō. Puroō means to kindle, to be ignited, to literally glow, to be inflamed with anger, grief, or lust, and to be on fire. If you’ve been in love before, you know what Paul is referring to in 1 Corinthians 7.

Philia

In Romans 12:10, the Bible tells us that we should be affectionate toward one another with brotherly love. The word used there is philadelphia, just like the city of the same name, meaning ‘brotherly love’. This is similar to âhab ‘âhêb, at least conceptually in the Bible, because in Leviticus 19:18, when God commands us to love our neighbors as ourselves, the Hebrew word used is âhab ‘âhêb.

Agape (agapaō)

This Greek word for love is used in John 3:16.

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.

Unlike the other kinds of love, this is the kind of love that God uses.

How God’s Love Differs From The World’s Love

The world’s general feeling toward love is that it is a fleeting and fickle emotion- not always, but it can be. The world’s feeling about love is obviously not baseless. After all, the world is made up of US! We’re human. We’re fallible. When we get hurt, we can decide that we’re not going to love the person who hurt us anymore. We can divorce that person, move away, and hold a grudge that we take to our graves. We could go as far as to chalk this kind of love up to chemicals in our brains. Fortunately, that’s not how God loves, and that’s not the kind of love that we have to operate in.

God’s love is unconditional. There are no strings attached when it comes to how God loves us, and I can’t imagine anyone saying that’s a bad thing. Even an adamant Atheist would probably say, ‘Hey, I don’t think God is real, but if there was a God and he wanted to love me no matter what, cool!’ The problem is that people have a hard time believing that unconditional love really exists.

The closest thing to unconditional love that most people encounter is the love of a mother or father, but even our moms and dads make mistakes, and some people have had really crummy people as parents.

Bigfoot, Unconditional Love, and Other Elusive Things

People have trouble accepting God’s unconditional love because they rarely see it “in the wild.” It’s like Bigfoot. We’ve all seen pictures of what is supposedly Bigfoot, or the Loch Ness monster, or alien spacecraft, but they’re always really blurry or end up being proven to be something else. People have a hard time believing in these things with conviction because the majority of us haven’t seen them first-hand. I certainly haven’t.

It’s the same way with unconditional love. They’ve read stories about Jesus and how he was this really great guy who loved everyone, but they have yet to personally encounter God’s unconditional love.

You know what? That’s our fault as Christians.

Painting of bigfoot in pink forest with hearts

Tough Love About Love

Christians as a people group have done a poor job of loving the world unconditionally. We can get behind a missions trip to some place where Christianity is a rarity because we think that they “don’t know any better” and somehow that makes them a better target for evangelism, but when it comes to the next-door neighbor who never mows his lawn, lives a noisy life, swears like a sailor, and has bumper stickers that would make your grandma’s hair stand on end if she knew what they meant, well… Christians haven’t done a good job of showing ‘that guy’ love. Instead, we tend to show him unconditional judgment.

People have a hard time feeling God’s love because they feel like they would need to clean themselves up before they even approach a house of worship or cry out to God for help. You know where they got that idea? Satan? Yeah, he’s more than willing to heap condemnation on their hearts, but the Church is largely to blame, and Satan uses the words and acts of Christians who don’t walk in love to drive people away from the real Gospel of love.

The world looks scornfullyon ‘turn or burn’ evangelism because it reeks of judgment instead of God’s unconditional love.

When the adulteress was brought before Jesus in John 8, did Jesus say, “Sweet, I haven’t gotten my daily stoning in. Guys, I get first crack at her since I haven’t sinned, but then y’all can join in. Sweetie, if you survive this, you can go to Heaven, but ya know, it’s not looking good. If I were you, I’d get right with me quick.”?

No, he said, “Has no one condemned you? Then neither do I condemn you.” He did tell her to leave her life of sin, but that was after he showed her compassion.

You might say, “Yeah, but that was Jesus. Of course he’s going to do stuff like that. It’s the church’s job to tell people the difference between right and wrong.”

The Ministry Of Reconciliation

First, I must give mad props to my brother, Scott Jackson. He gave a simply awesome message at Bethel Atlanta called Don’t Mix The Old With The New that just knocked my socks off. It still does, and I’m barefoot right now!

Scott Jackson lays out exactly what the ministry of reconciliation is and why it’s so critical. Leif Hetland also preached a great message at Bethel Atlanta, on the subject.

The phrase ministry of reconciliation comes from 2 Corinthians 5

(17) Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here!

(18) All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ and gave us the ministry of reconciliation:

(19) that God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ, not counting people’s sins against them. And he has committed to us the message of reconciliation.

(20) We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors, as though God were making his appeal through us. We implore you on Christ’s behalf: Be reconciled to God. (NIV)

We are called to be Christ’s ambassadors. What does an ambassador do? He acts on behalf of the country or person who he/she is representing. Why would an ambassador act in a way that contradicted the mission or values of the person he/she is representing? That ambassador would be a terrible ambassador and would probably be expelled from the country where he was stationed.

This is one of the main reasons why secular society dislikes the Church as an institution. They see a hypocritical disconnect between what they know in their hearts how a true Christian should act, and they don’t see people who call themselves Christians acting that way. Way too many Christians are presenting a gospel that is different than the one Jesus presented.

You might argue, “No, the world hates Christians because they don’t like Jesus, and Jesus is inside Christians.”

Well, you would have a point. I mean, Jesus did say, that the world would hate his disciples because of Jesus (Matthew 10:22, John 15:18), but imagine if Jesus would have acted like many members of the Church have acted toward divorcees, homosexuals, and the average guy or gal on the street who doesn’t look like what we think a Christian should look like.

Actually, Jesus probably wouldn’t have been crucified if that was the case. He just would have been excommunicated…or maybe made into a powerful Pharisee. In any event, the world doesn’t need us to tell them the difference between right and wrong. The world needs love, pure and simple.

The World Needs A Love Unlike Any Other

Every person in the world needs unconditional love. They need it more than anything else. I know that I do. There’s a saying in the business networking world: People won’t care what you have to say until they know how much you care.

Jesus said that if we forgive people’s sins (not holding their sins against them. 2 Corinthians 5:19), their sins will be forgiven and if we don’t forgive them, they are not forgiven (John 20:23). He also said that we will be judged in the same way that we judge others (Matthew 7).

Why on Earth would we lead with judgment in our evangelistic messages as a Church? Why would we include judgment at all? The only person who has the right to judge is Jesus.

By the power of the Holy Spirit, we can show the world this elusive thing called unconditional love. We can show people Jesus and take the love of God that they may have only read about or heard stories of, and make it come alive. That’s the only message that the unbelieving world wants or needs, and it needs it from YOU if you are a Christian. People personally encounter Jesus’ unconditional love through us, and that may lead them to personally encounter God.