Leeman The Rule of Love

How the Local Church Should Reflect God's Love and Authority
1. Auflage 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4335-5966-2
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 176 Seiten

God Is Love vs. Love Is God Our culture's view of love-with no boundaries or judgments or conditions- justifies whatever our hearts want and whatever our hearts feel, rejecting any authority that gets in the way. Falsely heralded as the only path to true selfexpression and self-realization, this kind of love diminishes-if not completely redefines-the holy love of God revealed in the Bible. In this book, Jonathan Leeman directs us toward a biblical definition of love by answering critical questions: How is love commonly misunderstood? What is God's love like and why is it offensive? And how does all of this relate to the church? In an age of consumerism, individualism, and tribalism, Leeman demonstrates how God showcases his holy love and authority to a watching world through the lives of his people living in true community with one another as the church.

Jonathan Leeman (PhD, University of Wales) is the president of 9Marks and cohost of the Pastors Talk podcast. He is the author or editor of over a dozen books and teaches at several seminaries. Jonathan lives with his wife and four daughters in suburban Washington, DC, and serves as an elder at Cheverly Baptist Church.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Leeman, Jonathan

Leseproben

Introduction: When Love Is God

We got to let love rule.

—Lenny Kravitz

God is love, says Scripture. It’s one of weightiest and most precious truths imaginable for a Christian.

God is love like oceans are wet and suns are hot. Love is essential, love is definitional, of God. His goodness is loving. His holiness is loving. His judgments are loving. His affections, motions, purposes, and persons are loving. Father, Son, and Spirit abide together purely and forever as love.

How sweet is that! The One who designed comets and acorns, who sustains our souls and bodies, who knows every one of our days before each comes to be—he is love.

Yet slow down. We need to think about what the Bible means here. When it says, “God is love” (1 John 4:8), it’s not saying there is this thing out there called love and that God measures up to it. There is no dictionary definition of love hovering outside the universe, independent of God, so that God answers to it. Rather, God in himself provides the definition, the reality, of what love is. Love is not an abstract concept but a personal quality of God.

It’s super important that you understand this. God’s own character gives us the definition and standards of love. Dictionary writers should observe God and then draft their definition of love on that basis. Anything called love that does not have its source in God is not love.

Which means that understanding what love really is requires us to look at everything else about God—his holiness, his righteousness, his goodness, and so forth. God’s righteousness, for instance, shapes his love, just as his love shapes his righteousness. The two are inseparable. Lose one and you lose the other.

Which also means that people today might say they love love, but if they reject God, they don’t really love love.

Now, you and I could name dozens of romance movies and love songs popular today or yesterday. Love sells. Love is enticing. We devote a holiday to it every February, and our children give each other stale heart-shaped candies in celebration. Love is in the air and in the culture. But remember what I’ve said. Most fundamentally, love is not something independent of God but is a personal quality or characteristic of God. So to reject God is to reject that quality or characteristic, at least in part. We might think we love love, but rejecting God means it’s something else we love.

Today you can justify pretty much anything by invoking the word love: “If they really love each other, then of course we should accept . . .” “If God is loving, then surely he wouldn’t . . .” Yet notice what’s happening in these statements. We’re no longer interested in the God who is love. Rather, we’re interested in our own ideas of love, which become god. “God is love” is traded in for “Love is god.” Instead of going before the Creator of the universe and saying, “Tell us what you are like and how you define love,” we start with our own views of love and deify them.

As a result, we harbor an idol hid in an utterly convincing costume, a lie no one can recognize, an angel of light. Love—or our notion of it—becomes the supreme justifier, boundary setter, and object of worship. That’s what a god is and does.

So now we carry around something called love which possesses all the moral authority of God himself. The trouble is, it’s not God. It’s nothing more or less than our own desires—especially the desire to rule ourselves.

A “Love” Story

I read a love story in high school that popularizes this kind of costume. Generations of students have been shaped by it.

The story opens on a sunny summer’s morning with five women gathered on a grassy plot outside a town jail. The date is unspecified, but it’s sometime in the seventeenth century. The place is a small Puritan settlement in New England called Boston.

The action begins with a hard-featured woman of fifty offering counsel to four other women:

Goodwives, I’ll tell you a piece of my mind. It would clearly be for the public’s benefit, if we women, being of mature age and church-members in good repute, should be given responsibility for handling a malefactress1 like this Hester Prynne. What think ye, gossips? If the hussy stood up for judgment before us five, would she have come off with such a sentence as the worshipful magistrates have awarded? I think not.2

The so-called hussy, Hester Prynne, has committed adultery. The proof is the infant daughter cradled in her arms inside the jailhouse. On this particular morning, the town’s magistrates have decided that Hester will emerge from her cell, proceed to the town scaffold, and receive several hours of public scorn for her sin. Along the way, and for the remainder of her days, she will be required to don an embroidered scarlet A on her chest. The A stands for adulteress.

The church is mortified, and the church’s preacher, Reverend Dimmesdale, is aghast. A second woman explains, “People say that the Reverend Master Dimmesdale, her godly pastor, takes it very grievously to heart that such a scandal should have come on his congregation.”

It’s not just Hester’s sin that scandalizes the church and the town. It’s the fact that her illicit lover, the child’s father, remains unknown. A hypocrite is at large, a hard fact to stomach in a “land where iniquity is searched out and punished in the sight of rulers and people.”3 Hester’s refusal to reveal the father’s identity doubles her guilt, and the gaggle of gossips wants blood. A third matron speaks: “The town magistrates are God-fearing gentlemen, but too merciful. At the very least, they should have put the brand of a hot iron on Hester Prynne’s forehead.” Then a fourth: “This woman has brought shame upon us all, and ought to die. Is there no law for it? Truly, there is, both in the Scripture and in the statute-book.”

I read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic 1850 novel, The Scarlet Letter, in my junior-year English class. Perhaps you did too. The entire class was scandalized—not at the tragic heroine Hester but at the townsfolk. Did people like this really exist? We glared at them with all the disdain they poured onto Hester. How could they be so self-righteous, cruel, benighted?

Hawthorne’s own sympathies in his story are hardly hidden. His descriptions of the five gossips make them look like gargoyles. This last woman he describes as “the ugliest as well as the most pitiless of these self-constituted judges.” Compare this woman’s portrait with Hawthorne’s portrait of the woman she is attacking. The young Hester

was tall, with a figure of perfect elegance on a large scale. She had dark and abundant hair, so glossy that it threw off the sunshine with a gleam, and a face which, besides being beautiful from regularity of feature and richness of complexion, had the impressiveness belonging to a marked brow and deep black eyes. . . . And never had Hester Prynne appeared more lady-like . . . than as she issued from the prison. Those who had before known her, and had expected to behold her dimmed and obscured by a disastrous cloud, were astonished, and even started to perceive how her beauty shone out, and made a halo of the misfortune and ignominy in which she was enveloped.

The contrast is clear. The reader can sympathize either with ugly and pitiless old women or with Hester’s shining halo of beauty—not a tough choice for most people. Who wouldn’t choose to sympathize with Hester? Employing a beautiful woman to “make the sale” is hardly an innovation of our marketing-hysterical age.

The reverend mentioned by the gossips, Arthur Dimmesdale, has a character of more complexity. It turns out that he’s the secret scoundrel who impregnated Hester and left her to absorb the town’s attack. Yet his character is more pitiful than malignant. He and Hester speak several times through the course of the book and at one point plan to run away and begin a new life together. Yet Arthur remains torn between his affections for her and society’s hold upon him. Love pulls him in one direction; the Bible and the church, in the other. All but the most pitiless reader can’t help but cheer for his liberation and their reconciliation. Ultimately, he is destroyed by the conflict between heart and mind, soul and society.

Hester’s disgrace, ironically, frees her from church convention and social constraint. Never stingy with his symbolism, Hawthorne places her ramshackle shack outside civilization in the woods where witches and Indians abide, like the unclean Jew or Gentile dog outside the ancient Israelite camp. Yet it’s out there, beyond the boundaries of respectability, that Hester is freed to love truly and divinely. She can forgive Arthur and her persecutors. She can dream of a different future with him. She can begin her career of caring for the community’s poor. She can raise the sprightly daughter who will, in the novel’s climactic moment, bend down to kiss her broken...