Because He First Loved Us

Reasonable Faith 1.2—obedience and love

After my last post, I wanted to flesh out more of how I think about obedience. In that post, I basically said that the works which testify to a living faith, are our obedience to God. While true, to me it seemed a fairly one dimensional way of saying it. Obedience is something even more important — love. I struggled more than usual in this one to say what I mean and am uncertain that I pulled it off.

Introduction

We love because he first loved us, 1 John 4:19.¹

Very early in my religious education, I was taught that Christ’s arrival on earth was the central event in all of biblical history. I do not know how universal this teaching is, but it’s a simple concept. Christians look back on the time of Christ, from his birth to ascension, as the most important happening in our history; while Old Testament believers could only anticipate this most important event. They were looking forward while we are looking back.

This concept implies that Christ’s arrival held the same significance to pre-Christian believers as it does to us. More recently however, I learned that this is not the whole picture. The children of Israel were looking forward to the promised messiah, but they had a historical event of their own which was at the heart of their religious identity. For them it was the exodus.

Until the time of Christ, Israel’s exodus from Egypt was the biggest thing that ever happened to the people of God. The exodus event and the work of Christ contain many parallels.

1. They are both deliverance events.

   1. The exodus delivered Israel from bondage in Egypt.

   2. Christ’s work on the cross delivers us from the bonds of sin.

2. They both contain signs and wonders.

   1. God tormented Egypt with ten miraculous plagues, staffs became serpents, and the water of the Red Sea was rolled back.

   2. Christ healed lepers, blind men, and raised the dead, etc.

3. Both events demonstrate the supremacy of God.

   1. In Egypt, many of the plagues were phenomena of nature. The water became blood, they were overrun with frogs, hit with a hailstorm, etc.

   2. Jesus calmed a storm using only his words.

4. And both deliverance events involve death and bloodshed.

   1. In Egypt, the Passover event involved killing lambs and painting their blood on the sides and top of doorways. This spared the firstborn of Israel, while the firstborn of the Egyptians all perished, leading Pharoah to capitulate and let Israel go free.

   2. Jesus is the new Passover lamb. He died and shed his blood to free us from sin and give us eternal life.

The exodus event and Jesus’ work through his ministry and his cross, mark the points in history when God’s love for us is most demonstrative. We have the familiar passage;

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,²

—that relates God’s love to Christ’s mission here. In the Old Testament we have verses like this one;

But it was because the LORD loved you and kept the oath he swore to your ancestors that he brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the land of slavery, from the power of Pharaoh king of Egypt,³

—which makes the same connection, but between God’s love and the exodus.

These two events are the benchmark for the love that is referred to by the verse in the heading. They are the first love of God toward his people, and this first love is pivotal for us. God’s love makes it possible for us to love and gives us reason to love all at once.

Love in action

Somewhere in my reading, perhaps in a blog post or a self help book, I came across the idea of “active love”, which focuses on love as a verb rather than love as an emotion. We can express love through our actions even in the absence of any strong feelings of love. For example, I can buy my wife flowers or bring in supper from town because I know those things will mean something to her. I am not required to feel especially loving in order for these things to be an expression of love.

This reverses the order of how we might think about love. The spontaneous affection that I think is necessary for me to buy my wife flowers, can instead be brought on by buying the flowers first.

I’ve liked part of this idea ever since I heard it, because it helped me think through how I felt about God. I knew from the Bible that God loved me and that I was supposed to love God, but found this problematic as a young Christian because I would compare how I felt toward God with how I felt about my friends or family. I didn’t feel toward God the way I felt toward my parents. Could I then honestly say I loved God?

The concept of active love helped resolve this question. It was no longer so important how I felt toward God in the moment, so long as I acted as if I loved him. On this point, the Bible is quite clear—if we love God, we will keep his commandments. This resolution got me part of the way to where I hope to go in the rest of this essay.

The missing element

And this is love: that we walk in obedience to his commands. 2 John 6.

We can rightfully say that true love is active love, and that love is obedience. These are biblical truths. But unless our obedience acknowledges and contains the first love of God, our love will be incomplete. Without God’s love, active love is just a life hack and obedience is mere obligation.

One weakness in the concept of active love is that it implies that we can produce love by sheer willpower. This can also happen when we interpret too narrowly verses that equate love with obedience. But, while active love may prove effective as a tool for strengthening someone’s marriage, God does not require us to produce love in this manner. Jesus did not say, if you keep my commandments you will love me; he said if you love me you will keep my commandments.

When God demonstrates what I refer to as his first love, he is giving us reason to love him. This is what is missing from a simple construct like active love or an isolated statement like “love equals obedience.” When trying to understand why we should do something, people sometimes say, “because the Bible says so.” But God does not set it up this way. He commands obedience because he views relationship as a two way street and he has already done his part. We can see the part he played in the many examples of his love in the Bible, most markedly in the two events that I have highlighted.

God’s primary aim is not to turn us into obedient followers. He does not want mere obedience—he wants to become the reason for our obedience. He wants us to yearn for him, to have affection for him, and to direct all the force of our will and motivation toward him. If obedience was the only objective, he would use the other tools at his disposal, such as coercion. But God left us with the power to choose, and by sending Jesus to die for us he gave us reason to choose him.

So when the recorder of Deuteronomy or the apostle John write that obedience and love are synonymous, it is because love needs to have an active form. It needs to possess the same qualities that God’s love does. For this reason, when we live obediently, we are modelling the love of God. Obedience is the means he gave us by which we can align ourselves with him. It is not a merit based hierarchy that we can climb by good performance, it is a sign of our allegiance to Christ. We are throwing our lot in with his. By doing the work God gives us to do, we are paying tribute to the work of Christ on the cross.

Dead works

The essence and importance of obedience are perverted when we take our focus off of Christ. We have the example of Peter, who successfully walked on water, but started sinking when he took his eyes off of Jesus and looked at the storm driven waves. We could compare these waves to the drama in our human relationships and some of the other things that flare up to distract us. But I think that for myself and many of us, the main reason our focus strays from Christ is more subtle.

This can happen a number of ways and they are all self centered. I do not mean to say that these are selfish ambitions. Many times we are doing the best we know how. The example I used earlier of my doubt concerning my love for God is one instance of this self centeredness. I was focusing on my inner experience to see if I could find some evidence that I loved God. By doing this, I was inadvertently focusing on myself.

There are other examples of self-centeredness that are more pertinent to the topic of obedience. Two of these might be reading the Bible as an instruction manual, or going to church to hear some good life advice. When we do this, and I certainly have, we can end up thinking that we are going to find something that we can do that will be critical to our success. Here again, the focus can easily become what we are doing and what we should do.

It is natural to get caught up in what we are doing. Guys can get tunnel vision about work or hobbies and we spend a lot of time thinking about them, calculating how we are going to clear certain hurdles and prevent others from cropping up at all. As parents, we can spend a lot of time thinking about and discussing what we are going to do about our children’s anger issues or their school grades.

In these kinds of thought patterns, we spend a lot of time asking the question “what are we to do?” about a variety of issues. It is precisely because of how naturally this occurs, that I think it is important we go to church and read our Bibles for a different primary reason. We are already hyper aware of what we need to do; hyper conscious of the many items on our plates. No matter how much good advice we hear, there is a limit to how much we can put to use.

Living like this does not feel very victorious. We are too aware of our failures—failures to perform to our own standard and failures of omission. We should’ve done this and shouldn’t have done that. While this can be a pressure we put on ourselves to appear righteous before men, it can also be done out of a sincere desire to the right thing. But no matter the motive, it will not be ultimately effective.

Instead of being concerned for what we should be doing, our worship and devotion time should be spent remembering what Christ did on the cross. (Here I unavoidably gave a piece of advice.) Christian life has never been about what I am doing or will do or should have done. It is about what Christ did, for you and me. We seldom lack for good ideas of things to do, but what we are often missing is the reason for doing them. This reason, is Christ; and without it we are just performing dead works.

Conclusion

And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love. 1 Corinthians 13:13.

The Bible tells us in a number of ways that our actions are important. Jesus calls them our fruit, warning that every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown in the fire. James calls our actions our works, and tells us that without works our faith is dead. The apostle John writes in his letters, and also in his gospel when quoting Christ, that love equals obedience — and love, we know, is the greatest.

I drew a parallel between the exodus and the cross at the beginning of this essay, to show God’s faithfulness in demonstrating love toward his people. I think it is important to recognize that God always establishes his love before asking any in return. As modern people who are insulated from the visceral reality that ancient people faced, we tend to look at God’s behavior in the Old Testament as being on the harsh side. But I think familiarity has calloused us to the main event in the Old Testament, which is the magnitude of God’s good favor toward the children of Israel in bringing them out of Egypt.

Mostly, Israel also became calloused to God’s great demonstration of love, which is why they strayed from God and were displaced or conquered when Jesus did arrive. But while we sometimes portray Old Testament believers as living in a darker time with fewer joys and less to live for, they were not merely hanging on by their finger nails until the messiah would arrive. They had a cultural memory of their God, who actively participated in their deliverance and could do so again. There was a historical backdrop to their faithfulness because of what God had already done for them. They had hope because their God had a track record of coming through, and they remembered this.

In order to bring forth good fruit and loving obedience, we will also need to cultivate our own memory of God’s goodness to us through Christ. We will need to seek out who God really is, and let him go to work in our hearts. We will not become fruitful by putting forth superhuman effort, but by planting the joy of the gospel deep within our hearts.

Obedience is supposed to be an expression of this joy. Doing the Lord’s will is not supposed to be an insurmountable task. Jesus already conquered the insurmountable task. Being obedient is entirely possible, and because of Jesus’ victory over death, doing the possible will be enough.

1. All verses quoted in NIV

2. John 3:16

3. Deuteronomy 7:8