The Idolatry of Love - Tim Phillips

Valentine’s Day is just around the corner, and if you are like me, you have no idea what you are getting your wife. Flowers die, candy is empty calories, and it is next-to-impossible to get a reservation at any of the nice restaurants (I’m also the guy who bought his wife a carpet cleaner for Christmas – but only because she asked for one). Plus, if you are a busy pastor, you likely have a meeting on Tuesday the 14th (I need to attend the Diaconate meeting that evening, for instance). My mind will likely be anywhere but on love (at least romantic love) on Valentine's Day. But, as the Missus always reminds me, it’s just a day on the calendar.

There is no doubt the Bible talks a great deal about love. The two great commandments, according to Jesus, are based on love (love for God and love for neighbor). Paul writes that love is the fulfillment of the law (Romans 13:10). John states that love for the brethren is one of the marks of true Christianity (1 John 3:10ff). Again, the commandment of Jesus is that we love one another (John 15:12, 17). Perhaps the best remembered Bible verse is focused on God’s love toward a world undeserving of that love (John 3:16). Most people who don’t know the Bible probably have that verse memorized, along with this one: “God is love” (1 John 4:8, 16).

Sadly though, the biblical concept of love is very much misunderstood and ill-defined in our day. In Jonathan Leeman’s book The Church and the Surprising Offense of God’s Love, the first chapter is aptly entitled “The Idolatry of Love.” How can somethinglike love be an idol? The author writes, “We have made love into an idol that serves us and so have redefined love into something that never imposes judgments, conditions, or binding attachments.” Leeman identifies the culprits for this idolatry as individualism (“a hatred of authority [resulting from] a diminished God”), consumerism, commitment phobia, and skepticism (particularly toward forms of religious dogma). After exploring each of these in great detail, Leeman concludes:

…[I]n our individualistic, skeptical, anti-authority, God-despising age, we are instinctively repulsed by the idea of being bound by anything. So we have defined God and the expectations of his love in such a way that we are not required to do so. We have erected an idol and called it ‘love.’ And this idol called love has two great commands: “Know that God loves you by not permanently binding you to anything (especially if you really don’t want to be)’ and, following from it, ‘Know that your neighbor loves you best by letting you express yourself entirely and without judgment.’

As examples of this change in definitions of “love,” Leeman mentions the shift in religious songs, away from expressions of God’s love for sinners (e.g., “When I Survey the Wondrous Cross”) to a subjective love of the individual for God (“I Could Sing of Your Love Forever”) — in other words, a transition from the way God demonstrates His love to a priority in the way we feel about love. In addition, this idea of love can be seen in a rejection of Christian orthodoxy in favor of a mushy, murky “tolerant” love that so often finds itself outside the boundaries of God’s expressions of love without even realizing it. Many in our day will decry any reference to the supremacy of God’s word as “bibliolatry,” but it appears in our day as if the bigger problem just might be “phileolatry” (love of love).

If we have made love into an idol in our hearts, we need to tear down that idol and smash it to pieces (a la Hezekiah in 2 Kings 18), for we cannot love “love” and still claim to love God. A servant cannot have two masters — ironically, he will love one and hate the other. On the other hand, God shows us what love really is. “By this the love of God was manifested in us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world so that we might live through Him. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:9-10). The love of God is demonstrated to us most clearly in the cross of the Lord Jesus Christ. If we are ever speaking of a love that it is not centered on the gospel of Jesus Christ, then Cupid’s arrow has missed its mark.