‘A hissing cauldron of illicit loves’ – living in a crazy world

Matthew Mason | Features

Date posted: 1 Jul 2023

‘A hissing cauldron of illicit loves’ – living in a crazy world

‘For in Christ Jesus neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but only faith working through love’ (Gal. 5:6).

If you had to summarise the Christian life in four words, you probably couldn’t do better than ‘faith working through love’. This is what it means to live as a new creation in Christ (Gal.6:15).

True Christian faith is not merely believing gospel truths: it works through love. For what does the gospel do when it takes root in a Christian life and in a Christian fellowship? Paul knew that the Thessalonians were loved and chosen by God because the gospel had worked powerfully in them and produced fruit, including their ‘labour of love’ (1Thess.1:3-5). The fruit the gospel bore among the Colossians included ‘the love that you have for all the saints’ (Col.1:5). And so, confident that God would complete the work he had begun in the Philippians, Paul prayed that their ‘love would abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment’ (Phil. 1:9).

Paul taught that of the three great theological virtues – faith, hope and love – ‘the greatest of these is love’ (1 Cor.13:13). In saying this, he was simply reflecting the teaching of the Lord Jesus Himself. Jesus summarises what God requires by teaching us to love. ‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind’, which is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbour as yourself’. This, he says, sums up the law and the prophets (Matt. 22:34-40).

Faith, hope and love

In previous articles I have for en, considered faith (en October 2023) and hope (en March 2023). Now we’ll think about love. What could be more important? For, without love I am nothing and I gain nothing (1 Cor.13:2-3). Without love, we are no better than Cain – still evil, abiding in death, children of the devil (1 John 3:10-14).

But if true faith leads to love, how do we know we are loving truly? True love for God is not half-hearted or insincere; it is not a matter of mere words. We are to love Him with all our heart, all our soul, all our mind, all our strength. True love for the Lord Jesus Christ is not merely an external show. Even though we have not seen Him, we love Him and our faith is filled with inexpressible and glorious joy (1 Peter 1:8). Similarly, brotherly love for other believers is sincere and rises from deep in our hearts (1 Peter 1:22). But love does not stay within us. It is not just a feeling or an attitude. Nor is it expressed in words alone. True love acts, sometimes in costly ways, to provide for the needs of our brothers and sisters (1 John 3:17-18).

True love – sincere, from the heart, expressed in actions as well as words – is the essence of the Christian life. For, as the Holy Spirit exhorts us through John, ‘Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love’ (1 John 4:7-8).

However, as John indicates, to understand love, we cannot start with human love. This is because we are creatures. And so we must look outside ourselves to discover what love is and where it comes from.

God is love

One of the most arresting and lovely truths the gospel teaches us is that God Himself is love (1 John 4:8). Not just that God loves, which would be wonderful news, but that God is love.

In Himself, God is an inexhaustible and unchanging ocean of life, power, wisdom, goodness, holiness and freedom. In the beauty of His perfect life, He is utterly lovely and desirable, infinitely satisfying. Therefore, He is infinitely satisfied in Himself. He is infinitely delighted in His own delightfulness. He is perfectly at rest, because in Himself He possesses everything He could ever want.

The form God’s love takes is the Father eternally begetting His Son. In this act of begetting, which has no beginning and no end, the Father communicates the fulness of the infinitely lovely divine essence to the Son. And so the Father loves the Son with an entire and unhindered delight, and the Son loves the Father (John 17:24). This love proceeds eternally from Father and Son as the Spirit, in whom they delight, and who delights in them. In these eternal relations of the Godhead – Father, Son and Holy Spirit – God is love, lacking nothing. As the theologian John Webster reminds us, God does not become love. As the Father who eternally loves the Son in the Spirit, the one God just is love, eternally, and unchangingly.

God acts in love

Yet, precisely because He is love, God’s love is not self-absorbed or self-revolving. In His love, God the Holy Trinity freely turns towards creatures as our Creator and Redeemer. In love, He created us out of nothing, in order to freely share His love and goodness with us. Knowing we would spurn His love, He chose and predestined us, in love, before the foundation of the world to be forgiven, redeemed and adopted in His beloved Son (Eph.1:3-7).

After we had turned from Him in hatred, God freely loved us and sent His only begotten Son into the world, to take our human nature, bear our curse in death, turn aside His wrath from us, and deliver us from sin and damnation (John 3:16; Rom.5:8; Gal.3:13-14; 4:4-5; 1 John 4:9-10). In love, God poured His love into our hearts by the Spirit of adoption, so that as dearly loved children, assured of our Father’s great love for us, we might cry ‘Abba! Father!’ (Rom. 5:5;8:15; Gal.4:6-7). In love, He assures us that He is for us, and that nothing can separate us from His love in Christ Jesus until we are made like Christ in glory (Rom. 8:28-39).

‘See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are’ (1 John 3:1). ‘In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins’ (1 John 4:10).

This is good news indeed. Why does God love us? Why does He love you? Not because you are lovely in yourself: in our sin and corruption, we are by nature haters of God, hostile to God, enemies of God, objects of God’s wrath, dead in trespasses, followers of the devil, without hope and without God in the world (Rom.1:18-32; Eph.2:1-3, 12). But God loved us. Not because we loved Him. But because He is love.

This is so hard for us to grasp because, as Martin Luther pointed out in 1518 in his Heidelberg Disputation, human love ‘comes into being through that which is pleasing to it’. We love things that are loveable. We love things because they delight us. And we recoil from things that are not lovely to us. So we assume that if God loves me, it must be because I’m lovely. Or we assume that if I am unlovely, God could not love me.

But God is not like us. And His love is not like our love. His love does not depend on our loveliness – thank God! As Luther explains, unlike human love, ‘The love of God does not find but creates that which is pleasing to it’. God does not wait for something worthy to love. ‘God demonstrates his love for us in this: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us’ (Rom. 5:8). His love for us is simply the free overflow in Jesus of the eternal fountain of love which is His very nature.

Muddled loves and crazy hatreds

It’s a good job that God’s love does not depend on the worthiness of our love! Our world loves the idea of love. We are, in the words of Augustine, in love with loving. Like the prodigal son, we are starved of God, and so in our famine we cast about for something to love. We rush headlong into love, longing to be captured. All around us, says Augustine, is ‘a hissing cauldron of illicit loves’, and we long to plunge in. But, in Adam, sinners barely know what love is, and do not want to love truly.

Before God intervened to save us, all of us were foolish, hardened, darkened, disobedient, enslaved to sinful passions and pleasures (Rom.1:21-22; Eph. 4:18-19; Titus 3:3). Rather than loving God with all our heart, soul, mind and strength (Deut.6:5; Matt.22:37), we were haters of God (Rom. 1:30). Rather than loving our neighbours as ourselves (Lev.19:18; Matt.22:39), we ‘passed our days in malice and envy, hated by others and hating one another’ (Titus 3:3). Sinners in Adam are a mass of crazy loves and perverse hatreds: ‘lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy… swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God’ (2 Tim. 3:2-4).

Sometimes, our corrupt loves are focused on objects that God absolutely prohibits, because they oppose His will for us and our created nature. In relation to our duties to God, one example of this would be worshipping created idols made of wood and stone rather than our Creator (Ex.20:4-6; Isa.44:9-20; Jer.10:1-10; Rom.1:22-23, 25).

In relation to our duties to our neighbours, same-sex desires, acts and relationships are, unfortunately, a particularly pressing contemporary example. All sexual sin is sin, and abhorrent to God. But until very recently, evangelicals (with the whole church throughout the ages) have understood that same-sex sins are a distinct category of corrupted sexual love, because they are sins against our God-given nature (in line with Rom.1:26-27).

The framework Jesus and His apostles give us for thinking about sex and sexuality is our creation as male and female, the nature and purpose of marriage and procreation, the honourable place of chaste celibacy, and the marriage of Christ and the church (Matt.19:3-12; Gen.1:26-28; 2:23-25; 1Cor.7:7-8; Eph.5:22-33; Rev.19:6-9). Within this whole-Bible context, responsible interpretation recognises that Biblical texts on homosexuality quite clearly rule out all forms of same-sex sexuality (Lev.18:22;20:13; Rom. 1:26-27; 1 Cor. 6:9-11; 1 Tim.1:10).

The language of these passages – ‘abomination’; ‘dishonourable’; ‘shameless’ – is hard to hear. But it is one way God lovingly conveys His holy hatred of these lusts and practices. It also shows that, no matter how loving such relationships might seem to us in our own sinful muddle and confusion, they are best thought of not as love, but as false love – tragic and destructive hatred of self and neighbour.

Often, though, our corrupt loves are focused on objects that are at least potentially permitted to us. But we love them in the wrong way: at the wrong time, or too much, or too little. In relation to our duties to God, we always love the Lord Jesus far too little.

If we think again about sex, in relation to our duties to our neighbours, we see these kinds of corrupt loves in a couple who engage in sexual activity before they are married. Or in a husband or wife who use their spouse lustfully for their own sexual gratification rather than lovingly giving themselves sexually for the sake of their spouse. Or in a husband or wife who fail to give themselves to their spouse sexually (1 Cor 7:3-5).

But sexual sins are far from being our only disordered loves. Unbelief, spiritual apathy, lack of zeal for the gospel, coldness in worship, prayerlessness, laziness, workaholism, dishonouring our parents, neglecting or provoking our children, anger, fits of temper, bitterness, malice, lack of generosity, wastefulness, gluttony, drunkenness, gossip, slander, lies, manipulation, covetousness and, perhaps supremely, pride – all display how chaotic and out of control our loves are.

And in this life, these corrupt loves remain present in believers even after regeneration. Our sinful flesh is constantly at war against the Spirit (Rom. 7:7-25; Gal. 5:16-17).

Love renewed

But regeneration does mark a real and decisive change in all believers. Our old selves have been buried with Christ in baptism and raised in him to new life in the Spirit. Sin no longer reigns over us (Rom. 6:3-11; 8:5-11).

God has loved us freely in His Christ. But love like this – so free, so rich, so undeserved – does not leave us in our unloving and unlovely state. Because He first loved us, we love. To return to the Heidelberg Disputation, notice what Luther says God’s love does to us: ‘The love of God does not find but creates that which is pleasing to it’. Or, in the words of the old hymn by Samuel Crossman:

My song is love unknown,
my Saviour’s love to me;
love to the loveless shown,
That they might lovely be.

As Luther explains: ‘The love of God which lives in man loves sinners, evil persons, fools and weaklings, in order to make them righteous, good, wise and strong. Rather than seeking its own good, the love of God flows forth and bestows good. Therefore sinners are attractive because they are loved; they are not loved because they are attractive.’

Or, in the words of the Apostle John, ‘We love because he first loved us’ (1 John 4:19). The order is important – God’s love is not a response to our love. He loved us first, and He loves us best. But because He loved us, we too begin to love.

When the Spirit enters a believing heart, He renews our loves. The Spirit brings us to Christ, and Christ to us, in an intimate union. And Christ begins to live His life in us as we live by faith in the gospel (John 14:16-18; Gal.1:16;2:20). He is formed in us (Gal. 4:19). The Spirit works within our hearts to produce fruit that counters the evil desires of the flesh (Gal. 5:16-26). And the fruit He produces begins with love (Gal. 5:22-23).

Under the guidance of the Spirit, we learn to love all kinds of things for the glory of God. We love created objects, like rivers and rocks, chocolate and chips. We love activities like dancing and painting, cycling and gardening. We love other creatures, like birds of prey and family pets. But above all, the Spirit renews us to love God, to love others, and to love ourselves.

God is the first and supreme object of our love. We love Him because He sent His Son to die for us, and He poured His love into our hearts by His Spirit. We love Him because He is ours in Christ and we are His. We love Him simply because He is lovely. To the believing heart, God ceases to be a matter of indifference or dread, and we learn to say with the psalmist that God is ‘my exceeding joy’ (Ps.43:4).

Secondly, we learn to love our neighbour as ourselves. For no one can claim to love God if he hates his brother (1 John 4:20). We love them because this is what God commands (1 John 3:23; 4:21). We love them because God has loved us so wonderfully and so well (1 John 4:11). And we love them – not just our brothers, but our enemies too – because our Father loves them, and we are to be perfect as He is perfect (Matt.5:43-48).

Our love for our neighbours varies depending how near or far from us they are. It is right to have a particular love for our natural family (Eph.5:22-6:4;1Tim.5:8), and to be particularly concerned for the church, the household of God (Gal.6:10). God has placed us near to neighbours and colleagues, with whom we most readily share our lives in common. But love of neighbour also recognises that all humans are made in God’s image. And even enemies are to be loved.

Finally, there is a right love of self. As we love God most, and our neighbours for God’s sake, we fulfil the nature that God gave us in creation and renewed in Christ. And so, we find true happiness in God, and we experience the pleasure of being loved by those we love.

The shape of love

‘For in Christ Jesus, neither circumcision nor uncircumcision counts for anything, but only faith working through love’ (Gal.5:6). At first glance, it might look like Paul is setting obedience to the law (circumcision) against faith working through love. But Paul writes to the Corinthians: ‘For neither circumcision counts for anything nor uncircumcision, but keeping the commandments of God’ (1 Cor. 7:19). The first half of that verse exactly matches Galatians 5:6. But this time, instead of saying ‘faith working through love’, he says, ‘keeping the commandments of God’. We are no longer bound by the ceremonial aspects of the law of Moses (circumcision, food laws, sacrifices), but the moral law (‘the commandments of God’) still stands as a guide for life and love.

Keeping God’s commands and walking in love by the Spirit are interchangeable realities: they’re the same thing. After all, in the New Covenant, when someone is born again by the Spirit, the Spirit writes God’s law on their heart and makes them careful to obey God’s statutes and rules (Jer. 31:31-34; Ezek. 36:26-27; Rom. 8:4).

Jesus himself said that He had not come to abolish the law but to fulfil it (Matt. 5:17-20). And when he summarises God’s requirements as love – love of God and love of neighbour – He is quoting and summarising the Old Testament law. Love does not contradict or replace the law; it summarises the law. The moral law (which is summarised in the Ten Commandments) does not contradict love; it spells out in greater detail what it means to love.

Therefore, when Paul says to Timothy that his goal is love that comes from a pure heart and a sincere faith (1 Tim.1:5), he expands what he means by applying the Ten Commandments to the situation in Ephesus. And he says that this accords with the gospel (1 Tim.1:8-10). He does the same thing in Ephesians. When the image of God is renewed in us in true righteousness and holiness (Eph.4:24), we imitate God as beloved children and walk in love as Christ loved us and gave Himself for us (Eph.5:1-2). Paul defines that walk of love in terms of the Ten Commandments. Honour your father and mother (Eph.6:2-3). You shall not murder (Eph.4:26-27,31). You shall not commit adultery (Eph.5:3). You shall not steal (Eph.4:28). You shall not bear false witness (Eph.5:25,29,31; 5:4). You shall not covet (Eph.5:3,5).

Even as believers, our minds are still confused, our loves are still so muddled. We are only slowly learning to love the God we used to fear and the neighbour we used to hate. Left to ourselves, our sense of what is or is not loving would be a hopeless guide in our ongoing battle with the sin that still dwells in our flesh. But in His law, God has shown us what it means to truly love.

Not that we can do this perfectly. Even at our best, our loves are fragmentary and stumbling, painfully incomplete. But when our hearts condemn us for our lack of love, ‘God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything’ (1 John 3:20). And when we keep His commandments in our clumsy imperfect way, it pleases Him (1 John 3:22). Because love pleases Him. Because He is love.