Editor’s Note: This is a two-part article on the nature of God’s love and human love. Part two can be found here.
Proponents of the sexual revolution of the 1960s glommed onto Freudian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich’s designation “free love.” Reich reasoned that sexual liberation would destroy the morality inherent to capitalism. Others, especially Herbert Marcuse, embraced the notion and capitalized on it in Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. As the sexual revolution’s new intellectual, he coined the slogan: “Make love, not war.”[1] “Free love” practitioners engaged in casual sex without commitments, reflecting the contemporary expression, “friends with benefits.” Love, lacking self-governance, a moral compass, and boundaries, became eroticized. This only led to bondage, enslaving and ruining individuals, families, churches, governments, and whole societies. Witness the tragic and predictable collapse of the American society that has reached every level of our culture.
1. In 1964, Time magazine acknowledged Reich’s influence on the sexual revolution. “Gradually, the belief spread that repression, not license, was the great evil, and that sexual matters belonged in the realm of science, not morals” (“Morals: The Second Sexual Revolution,” Time, January 24, 1964).
“Free love,” a euphemism for “morally unrestrained conduct,” takes root and flourishes wherever belief in the fullness of God’s character revealed in Scripture is compromised. Where theological mischief occurs, there you will find behavioral mischief. When God’s love is preached and believed apart from his holiness and justice, the erasure of moral boundaries invariably follows. When people imagine that God bestows his love without moral commands, sin-corrupted reasoning justifies their immoral conduct. Distorted notions concerning God always lead to distorted human behavior.
“Free love” does not acknowledge any external morality as it ignores boundaries of right and wrong and is covetous, self-absorbed, impulsive, heedless, and amorphous. Unlike “free love,” true love patterns itself after God’s love. It embraces what his character establishes as right versus wrong and is self-giving, others-oriented, unchanging, kind, and structured.
It is fitting for this essay to feature two parts: (1) a short accounting of our society’s spurning of God and its abandonment of the true nature of love for others; and (2) a consideration of God’s love and our Christian role in calling our society to repentance concerning love for others.
Government-Sponsored Erotic Love
Since the 1960s, “free love’s” calculated evisceration of public and private morality has taken its long march through the institutions, ensconcing itself in the Clinton White House and attaining critical mass with presidential candidate Barack Obama who declared, “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”[2] Five days before the election of 2008, he announced his mission, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” At first, he and Vice President Joe Biden feigned opposition to same-sex so-called “marriage.”[3] Yet, transformation of America began in earnest near the end of President Obama’s first term.[4]
2. “Barack Obama’s Feb. 5 Speech,” New York Times, February 5, 2008. The line derives from June Jordan’s Poem for South African Women.
3. Twice, Senator Joe Biden voted against the Federal Marriage Amendment Act (2004 & 2006). When asked why, Biden responded, “I can’t believe the American people can’t see through this. We already have a law, the Defense of Marriage Act. . . . Marriage is between a man and a woman and states must respect that. . . . Why do we need a constitutional amendment? Marriage is between a man and a woman.”
4.During the vice-presidential candidate debate with Sarah Palin in 2008, Gwen Ifill asked Joe Biden, “Do you support gay marriage?” He responded, “Barack Obama nor I support redefining from a civil side what constitutes marriage. We do not support that.”
- On May 6, 2012, VP Biden goes rogue, strongly endorsing “gay marriage” on NBC’s Meet the Press.
- On May 9, 2012, Obama, in an interview on ABC News says, “I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.” That evening, rainbow colors bedecked the White House.
Peter Jones of TruthXChange aptly wondered, “May 9, 2012: The Official End of Christendom?”
May 9, 2012 was indeed an historic moment. Though President Obama bathed his decision in Christian principles: “. . . our faith . . . is not only Christ sacrificing himself on our behalf but it’s also the golden rule . . . treat others the way you’d want to be treated . . .” For the first time ever, a sitting US president, considered the most powerful political leader in the world, has endorsed a marital arrangement that formally constitutes the pagan “worship of the creation rather than worship of the Creator” (Romans 1:25).[5]
From that tragic day, the slouching towards Gomorrah intensified.
5. Peter Jones also stated, “May 9th 2012, is in many ways the final “sacralization” of the Sixties, where behind the pretext of the Golden Rule, the “revolution” fraudulently covers its unrestrained libido in the white robes of bridal purity. We must not panic or exaggerate, nor cease to love homosexual individuals. But we must not re-interpret “Christian” love, so that our contemporary culture can reject God the Creator in favor of self-serving desires. The Gospel love story of creation and redemption must be heard via a clear witness to the biblical worldview, as Paul articulates it in Colossians 1:19–20—For in Christ . . . by whom all things were created . . . [God] through him reconciled to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross” (emphasis original).
6. Without embarrassment or shame for his moral equivocation and incongruity, Biden proclaimed, “And now, the law requires that interracial marriages and same-sex marriage must be recognized as legal in every state in the nation.” He continued his false moral equivalency: “For most of our nation’s history, we denied interracial couples and same-sex couples from these protections. We failed to treat them with an equal dignity and respect,” as if there were a moral equivalency between a so-called “interracial” male-female sexual union and a same-sex profanation of sexual activity. Later, he added, “It’s one thing for the Supreme Court to rule on a case, but its another thing entirely for elected representatives of the people to take a vote on the floor of the United States Congress and say loudly and clearly: Love is love. Right is right. Justice is justice.”
- On June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court issues the Obergefell v. Hodges decision and claimed “Same-sex marriage is now the law of the land.”
- On December 13, 2022, President Joe Biden signs the so-called “Respect for Marriage Act” to codify “same-sex marriage.” He celebrated by declaring, “Today is a good day . . . a day America takes a vital step toward equality, for liberty and justice, not just for some, but for everyone—everyone. Toward creating a nation where decency, dignity, and love are recognized, honored, and protected.”
- On December 13, 2022, in a God-mocking exhibition, the Biden Administration set the White House aglow with rainbow colors.
The president of the United States has degraded marriage and love by engaging in definitional obfuscation: “Love is love.” Biden decreed, “Marriage—I mean this with all my heart—marriage is a simple proposition: Who [sic] do you love, and will you be loyal with that person you love? It’s not more complicated than that.”[6] Thus, “love” is used to justify all kinds of evil behavior, especially erotic and defiling conduct.
Erotic “Free Love” Aided and Abetted by Professing Christians
It is unsurprising that love may be the most talked about, promoted, misunderstood, and twisted character trait of God and humans. Incorrectly defining love may be the widest gateway to worshiping a false god. Much like unbelievers, influenced by the culture more than by the Scriptures, many who profess faith in Christ Jesus simplistically misconstrue divine and human love as if love and hate were opposites.[7]
Misconstruing God’s love begins by misapprehending human love and then projecting that defective notion onto God. To ascribe our character qualities to God, as if we were the model after which God is patterned, is idolatry. Such reasoning inverts reality by fashioning a god after our human likeness. Thus, John Calvin rightly observes, “Man’s nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols.”[8] A few lines later, he adds: “Man’s mind, full as it is of pride and boldness, dares to imagine a god according to its own capacity; as it sluggishly plods, indeed is overwhelmed with the crassest ignorance, it conceives an unreality and an empty appearance as God.”[9]
7. A most recent example of this is Amy Grant, who defended hosting her niece’s same-sex “wedding ceremony” by citing Jesus’s command to “love God and love each other.’” (“Amy Grant Faces Criticism for Hosting Niece’s Wedding”). Cf. Amy Grant’s earlier indifference towards defining love in moral categories: “Don’t be afraid; you’re loved.’ . . . Gay. Straight. It does not matter.” (Pride Source).
8. Calvin, Institutes, 1:108.
9. Ibid.
God’s Love Is the Measure of Human Love
Because the Creator fashioned us after his likeness, God gives us his qualities, including his moral attributes, but all with creaturely limitations, now corrupted by sin. All these qualities and attributes God gives us are analogical to his, not identical. The Creator’s character and ours do not differ in mere quantity. Rather, there is a qualitative difference in God’s character and our own. God is holy. God is good. God is love. God is righteous. God is just. We would be wrong to say that God is simply more concerning each of these attributes than we are. God is qualitatively different from us. These qualities belonging to God are what Christian theologians describe as “communicable attributes,” transmittable to us, his image-bearers, to reflect the attributes of our Creator (cf. Col. 3:8-10; Gen. 1:26-31). Every quality and moral attribute that constitutes us creatures “after God’s likeness” is, by definition, analogical, not identical to his moral attributes.
God’s redeeming work is restoring the full array of God’s likeness in us. This God-likeness is what we properly call godliness. So, when we consider love, whether a human or divine attribute, we must always do so in correlation with God’s full character, especially his holiness and goodness, never isolated from these attributes. Also, we must first ponder God’s love as integral to his moral perfections and then consider the exercise of his love in deeds and actions.
In his classic, Knowing God, J. I. Packer correctly argues that while Scripture twice affirms, “God is love” (1 John 4:8, 16), this affirmation is regularly misunderstood and distorted.[10] Distortions occur primarily because people isolate God’s love from his other attributes, especially his holiness, justice, and self-sufficiency. Sin-corrupted reasoning also has a proclivity to project onto God creaturely qualities, limitations, and emotions. Thus, many conceive of God only as a more perfect human.
