Star-Crossed Lovers [deux]

So what are some common things that cause our definition of love to detour from a Biblical definition? Identifying the cause is the first step toward healing. To start, we must go back to the beginning.

Sin in the Garden of Eden caused a breakdown in the first marriage. Adam failed to fulfill his mandate to safeguard the Garden by allowing the Serpent to enter. And rather than (opposed to) heeding the edict of God, he chose to follow the leading of his wife. The Serpent deceived Eve when she attempted to elevate her own status, beauty, and knowledge (Genesis 3:4).

God’s solution to the problem of sin was and is quite brilliant. Woman would now bear the Messiah (seed) who, thru His own suffering (bruise), would crush the head (authority) of the Serpent (Satan, Genesis 3:15). In the pain of childbirth, Woman would gain an insight into the Creative Nature of God, each birth a prophetic step toward the coming of the Messiah and the redemption of Mankind. It is in response to the first birth that Eve becomes the first person to call God by His personal name, Yahweh (Genesis 4:1). Eve’s desire would now be set toward her husband recognizing that her prophetic destiny could not be fulfilled without submission to his leadership (Genesis 3:16).

Man would now toil to provide for his wife and family, recognizing a mandate to rule over them both to lead and to safeguard (Genesis 3:17-19). Bound together by a God ordained inter-dependence (not to be confused with co-dependency), man and woman would now walk together in life as carriers of Destiny. What could go wrong?

Unfortunately, sin was still in the picture. Through the generations, sin would twist the order established by God and produce our first and most common causes of relational breakdowns. For Woman, God’s solution was designed both to protect her from the abuse of her own desires (will-full, emotional, & intellectual) by putting her in a place where her desires were submitted to her husband. And both thru the submission of her desires and thru maternity, Woman would learn to call of the name of Lord (trust in, rely on the Lord).

In opposition, our culture now defines a woman’s worth based on her status, beauty, and knowledge (the very sin that got Eve in trouble). Of course the people defining what status is acceptable, what is defined as beautiful, and what women are allowed to do with knowledge are men. This means that men now control a woman’s sense of acceptance and self worth. Women, from an early age, are taught that without affirmation of status, beauty, and knowledge from a man (father figure), they are not worth anything. As they come of age a desire toward their husband is replaced with destiny dependent on a man.

For man, the need to provide for his family was designed to provoke his natural desire to lead and safeguard them. As man works to rule his family, he is signing himself up for a mission that he cannot achieve without a dependence on God. God would be his role model for how to lead, how to provide, and how to love. Man would be protected from the tendency to advocate the role of leadership to his wife and would now be driven to seek and rely upon the Lord.

Our culture now defines a man’s worth based on his performance. Men are seen as only being worth their ability to perform sexually, financially, and practically. Men are taught from an early age that their sense of acceptance and self worth is based on their ability to perform. As men come of age, they transfer this need for performance-based acceptance into their relationship with God and their relationships with women. Men look to women to determine whether or not they are performing enough to be worth something.

In this ‘sin-full’ model, women are now dependent on men for their sense of value and self worth. Men are now dependent on women to affirm their performance and validate their sense of acceptance. And rather than turning to God, men and women turn to each other (co-dependency instead of interdependence). God restructured romantic relationships in the Garden so that they would foster a dependence upon Him. But now, twisted by sin, these same relationships can become a barrier to a relationship with God.

Rightly seen and rightly executed, a relationship between a man and a woman (in context as discussed last week) can produce and foster a revelation of and dependence upon God. But God never intended for women to look to men for their sense of value and self worth (worship). God never intended for men to look to women to validate their performance, provide acceptance, and affirm self worth (fatherhood). These are roles ultimately reserved for God.

Ladies, Psalm 139:14 states that you are “fearfully and wonderfully made”. You are wonderfully made because God created you that way. No man will ever be able to affirm your beauty, status, and fulfill your desire for knowledge because man did not create you. And knowing that you are wonderful should produce a fear or reverence recognizing that you were ultimately created not for the pleasure of a man, but for the pleasure of the God who created you. It is ultimately God who gives life and your destiny is solely and securely dependent upon him.

Fellas, Romans 5:8 says that, “God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” When you were unable to perform, God did what you could not. He loves you and chooses to accept you based on Christ’s performance at Calvary. There is nothing that you can do to earn it. Women will never be able to affirm your worth as a son so stop looking for them to do so. You have a Father in Heaven who loves you and accepts you without any expectation or requirement for you to perform. His love is a free gift.

If we are going to heal our relationships with each other, we need to first start by healing our relationship with God. Give him the worship (place of honor, trust, and dependence) that He alone deserves. It is only from the source of a life of worshipping God that we can draw the strength and insight we need to properly love each other.

Star-Crossed Lovers [un]

One of the most famous icons of love is Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet. It is hailed as a love story to end all love stories. The essence of this story is captured in the prologue, “A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life” and “The fearful passage of their death-marked love”. Our reverence for this story says something about how we define and think about love.

How is it possible that something so profound and wonderful as love could end in death, even self-inflicted death? Why would we celebrate this? Perhaps, it is because many of us have experienced first hand the tragic end of something that we thought was a timeless love. Many of us have our own love stories that ended in tragedy.

The truth is that real life love tragedies are often self-inflicted. This is not to demean the fact that some of us have suffered serious wrongs from those we trusted, those we loved. And when trust is broken the result is a tragic loss of life (the death of a shared life, the end of a relationship that was to us our life). Retrospectively though, we may find that our definition of love was and is quite different from God’s definition.

An honest evaluation of our motivations for pursuing love may also reveal that we were self serving in our pursuit of love, seeking to satisfy the appetites of our own emotional and physical desires outside of the governorship of God. In Philippians 3:19, the Apostle Paul warns us to be weary of those “whose end is destruction, whose god is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame—who set their mind on earthly things.” Any time we take our definition of love outside of Christ and then (outside of Christ) seek to pursue our own self-interests (our own appetites) in a love relationship, we are setting ourselves up for destruction.

So while we may not have been the direct cause of a breakdown in past love relationships, our decision to enter into a type of ‘love’ that was ultimately not God-centered set us, from the start, on a course toward a tragedy. And in this way, our ‘star-crossed love’ was destined to fail and the wounds we suffered as a result of the ensuing love tragedy were in some way self-inflicted (self-imposed). Our best decision is not to tarry in the place of brokenness, but to move on toward a redefinition of love so that we can both avoid future tragedy and so that we can experience the full blessing that can be offered by True & God-centered love.

We need to question the cultural standard that has been raised as well as our own experiences, recognizing that the two work together to shape our view on love. What causes our definition of love to be skewed from a legitimate Biblical definition? What are some common indicators that should serve to warn us that we are outside of Christ and in route to a love tragedy? And how do we heal our definition of love? We need to address these questions, but first we need to lay two critical foundations upon which we will build a Biblical definition of love.

First, Love is God’s idea; love is God’s design. It is God who, when surveying all that He had created, said, “It is not good that man [Adam] should be alone” (Genesis 1:18). God’s solution was to put Adam to sleep, take a rib from his side, and from this He created woman. God created Eve as a “helper comparable to him”. Adam awoke astonished at what God has done.

There, under the watchful eye of God, Adam gave Eve a name, instituting the covenant of marriage. From the spark of this first romance, love has lived on. And in the context of the first marriage, Adam and Eve were naked and “were not ashamed”. Love and romance are designed by God to have a rich content. However, when we take love out of context, we invite shame into our romantic relationships (shame being the consequence of using love outside of the created design).

This is why it is important to remember that, while love has content, it also has a context. And in God’s eyes (God’s design), love’s content can never be separated from its context. The context of love in God’s design is the marriage of one man and one woman (Genesis 2:24, 1 Timothy 3:2). When we are married, we set ourselves in this context by remaining emotionally and physically faithful to our spouse. When we are single, we set ourselves in this context by remaining emotionally and physically abstinent, setting ourselves apart for the person we one day hope to marry.

Within marriage (love’s context), love can have a rich and enjoyable content. God invented love as a gift to human kind. God is pro romance. And it is because God want’s us to enjoy love that He has given it a very specific context (marriage) in which it can be cherished, subject to God’s leadership, and benefit from His blessing.

Second, it is important for us to realize that there is only one lover who literally crossed the stars for us. Philippians 2:5-11 instructs us to, “Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, who, being in the form of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God, but made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men. And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross. Therefore God also has highly exalted Him and given Him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those in heaven, and of those on earth, and of those under the earth, and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”

Jesus crossed the boundaries of heaven and came in the form of a man, humble and undistinguished. And while His deep love for us deserved nothing but love in return, He took on tragedy in our place. His love was so powerful that the grave could not stop Him. His love was so strong that all the powers of Heaven were subjected to Him. And now He has crossed back thru the stars, longing for the day when we will be re-united with Him.

Jesus has not left us to ourselves. We have been given His Spirit. And by the power of His Spirit we can now overcome any form of death, any type of tragedy, and every trace of shame. All this is possible because He loves us. To Romeo and Juliet, Jesus answers, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in Me, though he may die, he shall live” and “Behold, I make all things new” (John 11:25, Revelation 21:5). If we are going to challenge the cultural standard, if we are going to heal our definition of love than the place to start is Jesus.