Lesson 7: “A Portrait of Love”
COLLEEN TINKER | Editor, Proclamation! |
Adventist, how do you know what “love” is? When you hear the words, “God is love,” what does that mean? What are you supposed to do when you “love your enemies”? How do you incorporate the example of Jesus to help you love?
What Is Love?
This week’s lesson approaches 1 Corinthians 13 just as I remember hearing it taught when I was an Adventist. In context, this chapter is sandwiched between 1 Corinthians 12 and 14, both of which teach what spiritual gifts are and how Christians are to practice spiritual gifts for the building up of the body of Christ. Chapter 13 always seemed anachronistic, an off-topic chapter tucked between two discussions of that much-disputed topic: spiritual gifts.
The lesson emphasizes what I also learned: spiritual gifts can’t be properly practiced unless they are done in love, and chapter 13 exists to show us how to practice “love” as we live our lives. Yet this understanding misses the truth.
Understanding 1 Corinthians 13 requires understanding the truth about who God is and who we are, and it requires reading Scripture in context.
Adventists all learn that we were created in God’s image, but from the beginning of Adventism, this “image” was understood to involve a physical resemblance of God. I was taught not only that our bodies resembled His, but that our abilities reflected His: we could think, speak, reason, create, and analyze, but these things all depended upon our brains having correct information and education so that we could think, speak, reason, create, and analyze as God does.
We did not learn that we are spirit-beings housed in physical, now-mortal bodies. I had no idea that the Bible directly tells us that God is not physical. It was Jesus Himself—God the Son incarnate in a human body— who told the woman at the well:
“God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.”—John 4:24 LSB
We are in God’s image NOT physically but spiritually. Our identities are not material and are not centered in our physical brains. Of course our physical brains interact with our immaterial identities, but “we” are not our bodies.
Furthermore, our legacy from Adam is that we are born in Adam’s image: human beings who are spiritually dead in sin. Paul says this:
And you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you formerly walked according to the course of this world, according to the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit that is now working in the sons of disobedience, among whom we all also formerly conducted ourselves in the lusts of our flesh, doing the desires of the flesh and of the mind, and were by nature children of wrath, even as the rest.—Ephesians 2:1–3 LSB
Since we are by nature spiritually dead, we are by nature unable to obey God or please Him. We can only serve our own desires, our own minds. Even when we have impulses to do good deeds or help the poor, we are not actually loving them because we are unable to actually love in our spiritually dead condition. We cannot rise above our natures, and no matter how we might emotionally respond to people in need or to helpless puppies or even children, those responses are coming from our condition of spiritual death. They do not recommend us to God or show Him we deserve to be saved.
Our true need is to understand our helplessness to please God or to do good and to believe that God has provided the means for us to have spiritual life. He has sent the Lord Jesus to atone fully for our sins at the cross, to propitiate His demand that sin be punished by death, and to trust that Jesus has already completed everything necessary for our salvation. He even shattered our curse of death by rising from the tomb on the third day because His blood was sufficient to pay for all our sin!
When we trust Him, He changes us. He literally makes us into new creations. Just as God created Adam out of the dirt with no previously existing pattern, so He creates us into something brand new when we believe. He gives us new hearts and new spirits—and He seals us with His own Holy Spirit.
He literally rescues us by having come, in the person of the Son, and by taking a mortal human body so that He could shed sinless human blood for us and be our substitute. When He rescues us, He redeems us from our natural condition of death and condemnation.
When He gives us His spiritual life and empowers us with His Spirit, we become AT THAT POINT able to function in His image, spiritually, in the world. Only then do we become able to love, truly.
How do we “get” love?
Understanding that we have spirits that are not our bodies and understanding that God is spirit is essential for understanding how we finally are able to learn to truly love once we have been born of God. Look at 1 John 4:7–13. These verses describe how God’s personal identifying attribute of “love” is shared with we who have been made spiritually alive through believing in Jesus:
Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; and everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God, because God is love. 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 have loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son [to be] the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has beheld God at any time; if we love one another, God abides in us, and His love is perfected in us. By this we know that we abide in Him and He in us, because He has given us of His Spirit.—1 John 4:7–13 LSB
Since God is not physical and material but is spirit, then understanding that His essence is defined as “love” helps us understand what “love” is.
God shares certain “incommunicable” attributes—that is attributes that cannot be shared with His creations—and those attributes are omniscience, or all-knowing; omnipotence, or all-powerful, omnipresent, or able to be everywhere at once; and eternal. None of God’s creations share these attributes; they belong to and define our triune God.
God also has attributes that are “communicable”, or share-able. God shares His personal attributes of faithfulness, grace, patience, kindness, joy, peace, gentleness, goodness, self-control, and love. Only when a person believes God and trusts the Son’s finished work of atonement can God give us His own attributes by literally indwelling us and teaching us to rely on Him and to practice His own attributes in our lives.
Yes, natural humans who are not born again do have echoes of these shared attributes as part of our being made in the image of God. Yet in those who are not born of God, these attributes are tainted by our natural spiritual death and sin. We cannot love unselfishly. We cannot have true joy, peace, goodness, or self-control when we feel threatened or out of control. Human love always has compromising elements in it because we are sinful beings. Only when we are indwelled by God Himself are we able to learn to love with His love, not merely with human love.
As the text above from 1 John says, only those who are born of God and know God can truly love, because “love is from God”.
Furthermore, the above text actually describes the absolute love that “is God”. True love is not that we loved God and reached out to Him but that He loved us. He even sent His own Son—a person of the eternal God who made us—into the word to “be the propitiation for our sins”. In other words, God Himself came to the world and took human flesh so that in Himself He could legally take the sins of the world by imputation, pay the price of our sin by dying, and thus He fully paid for our sin. He satisfied God’s demand—His OWN demand—of death for sin. He paid for our sin so that He could redeem us from death.
Notice how John says that God sent the Son into the world “so that we might live through Him”. This isn’t a statement of a vicarious life, that we look at His example and live through projecting ourselves onto Him or trying to emulate Him.
No! We “live through Him” when we place our faith and trust in His finished atonement and believe Him! When we believe, we are born again and equipped with Himself, indwelt by His Spirit. Paul tells us we are placed “in Him”, and we no longer live for ourselves; we live in Christ, and we live by His righteous power. We literally live by His love because He Himself indwells us and has placed us spiritually in Him. We are not separated from Him anymore. Our sins no longer separate us. We are literally inseparable from Him and are seated with Him at the Father’s right hand (Ephesians 2:4–10).
Adventists do not Understand New Birth
This spiritual reality is what Adventists do not understand. They deny that we have immaterial spirits that are born dead and disconnected from God and that literally pass from death to life when we believe, and that we are placed in Christ and have full access to His power and mind and wisdom and joy. They don’t understand that believing Jesus means that we literally become grafted into Christ Himself, and we have His personal love in us and informing us.
When we understand that Paul is writing to a church of believers who have been born of the Spirit, chapter 13 looks completely different. We see that it is not instructing the church HOW to love and how to manage their emotions and reactions. Rather chapter 13 is explaining how the ultimate gift of the Spirit looks in a believer’s life.
Love is not a virtue the Christian must develop. Rather it is a gift of the Spirit, as Paul says in Galatians 5:22, 23:
But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such things there is no law.—Galatians 5:22, 23 LSB
God literally grants His love to us as a gift along with Himself when He indwells us when we have heard the gospel of our salvation and believed. The lesson does not understand this fact and uses the great controversy worldview of physicalism and self-denial to try to apply this profound chapter.
In context, 1 Corinthians 13 is between chapters 12 and 14 because LOVE is the ultimate gift of the Spirit. It is the gift from God that is God’s own attribute that makes all the other gifts possible and powerful. Only when a person is grounded in God who IS LOVE can these other gifts bless the body of Christ as he or she practices them.
Adventism, however, sees “love” as something each person can cultivate. Members are encouraged to follow the example of Jesus and develop their ability to respond in love. Love, to an Adventist, is something of a learned skill that can be accessed by example and practiced for perfection. Look for example, at these quotes rom the week’s lessons. From Saturday’s introduction:
As we will see, love is not so much an emotion as an attitude, an attitude that must be expressed in life, in deeds, and in words; otherwise, it means nothing.
What love really is, and does, has been fully revealed in the life of Jesus.
This sets the stage. Adventist “love” is learning to practice a set of responses by following Jesus’ example. It is not an actual attribute of God which is personally and literally shared when we are born again and placed in Christ.
Now look at this excerpt from Sunday’s lesson:
In the power of Christ, we cannot let love grow cold in our homes, churches, and neighborhoods. We have the example of Christ on the cross, dying for us. What better and more powerful expression of this kind of love could there be? Though of course we could never equally express that kind of love, by God’s grace we should strive to reveal it in our own lives to whatever degree we can.
Again the lesson exhorts the Adventist to strive to live self-sacrificingly whenever and to whatever “degree we can”. What a desperate directive! No Adventist can ever attain the kind of self-abnegating love that Adventism says one must!
Most horribly, though, notice what is NOT said in regards to Christ’s “dying for us”. Ellen White taught that atonement was not accomplished on the cross; it is being accomplished in heaven as Christ conducts the investigative judgment and applies His blood to the sins professed believers (read that Adventists) have remembered to confess. So, for an Adventist to look at the example of Christ dying of him or her is NOT to remember that Christ paid fully for sin at that moment when He died. Rather, the Adventist looks at Jesus’ willingness to suffer death in order to provide a means for being saved, a down payment, if you will, to launch the possibility that person can learn to obey and confess and finally have his sins carried away by Satan the scapegoat.
The Adventist, therefore, has to learn to follow Jesus’ example and be willing to die for the sake of Adventism’s values and goals and ultimately for the Sabbath. The Adventist is to look to Jesus as his ultimate EXAMPLE, not as his once-for-all Savior whose atoning work is done.
Even when they present Jesus dying on the cross, they misrepresent His death and do not teach their members that His death fully paid for sin once for all. Instead, they make Jesus the ultimate example of self-denial and self-abasement, and example each Adventist is to learn to follow and to call that self-denial and abasement for someone else’s sake “love”.
Portrait of Jesus?
Wednesday’s lesson states:
As we read 1 Corinthians 13:4–7, we may feel frustrated at realizing that, to a lesser or greater degree, we fall short of displaying all those features of love. Likely, Paul had the person of Jesus in mind when writing 1 Corinthians 13. Indeed, only Christ perfectly revealed all those characteristics of love. Thus, ultimately, Paul’s portrayal of love is a portrait of Jesus.
No! To be sure, Jesus is the ultimate revelation of God’s love, but that love is not an example of details for putting into practice to try to love properly. Rather Jesus showed God’s eternal justice and mercy that He displayed in Jesus’ death and resurrection as the only possible way He could rescue us from our sin and death! Jesus’ death is literally THE EXAMPLE of Jesus’ love as He Himself took His own death sentence leveled on us!
What Jesus did, we cannot emulate. We can only repent and BELIEVE. Then we can live in Him. He makes us alive in Him. He gives us Himself, permanently, as literally makes Himself and His eternal love available to us always. He teaches us, from the inside, to trust Him and to lean on Him and to love others for Him. We learn to minister to others with His presence, and we learn to tell others what Jesus did.
Thursday’s lesson instructs,
Thus far, we have learned that love is patient, kind, joyful, resilient, believing, hopeful, and enduring (or perseverant) because Jesus is all these things. Once we see these qualities in Jesus, the next step is to imitate Him.
Again, this is a hopeless command. Adventism simply doesn’t know that no human can learn to imitate Jesus. We can only believe Him and then, when we have been born of His Spirit and placed in Him, we can learn to trust Him and allow Him to love through us.
The problem of Adventism is that the underlying worldview is not defined or addressed. It is assumed. Without directly addressing it, the superficial words of the lesson can sound almost right; they may be a bit confusing or trite-sounding, but they reveal the reality underneath: Adventism does not believe people have immaterial spirits that are by nature dead.
Adventists cannot deal with 1 Corinthians 13 because they do not know HOW one learns to love as God loves. A person does not develop “love” by examining Jesus’ life and death and learning to do what He did. Rather, a person learns what love is by realizing that Jesus’ death was the eternal, sufficient, substitutionary payment for one’s sin.
When a person repents and believes in Jesus’ complete atonement for sin, God justifies him. When he believes, God seals him with His own Spirit, and that person comes to new life, born again and placed in Christ.
From that moment on, the indwelling Christ teaches the person to trust Him and to love Him. We literally KNOW Jesus when we are born again because He places us in Him and reveals Himself to us, teaching us to understand His word and to live by His own attribute of perfect love.
Because we still have flesh, we will not love perfectly, but as we grow in Christ, we learn to love and trust Him more and more deeply—and He continues to tae us through deeper and deeper ways of knowing and trusting Him.
1 Corinthians 13 is describing the ultimate gift of the Spirit that defines and shapes the way we practice all other gifts that God gives the church. Love is universal among the born again because we know God and are in Him and He is in us. His love forms us and teaches us how to carry out all other things He asks us to do for Him.
If you haven’t let go of your control and tight grip on your Adventist perfection, come to Jesus. See Him taking your sin, dying your death, being buried, and rising to shatter your death sentence. Believe Him! Trust Him! You will be born again, and nothing will ever be the same again. You will live in His love. †
This weekly feature is dedicated to Adventists who are looking for biblical insights into the topics discussed in the Sabbath School lesson quarterly. We post articles which address each lesson as presented in the Sabbath School Bible Study Guide, including biblical commentary on them. We hope you find this material helpful and that you will come to know Jesus and His revelation of Himself in His word in profound biblical ways.
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