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Keeping God's commandment to love

Regular Network Norwich and Norfolk columnist James Knight asks why God tells us to love each other and how we can attempt to keep this commandment. 

I suppose if one is on the outside of the Christian faith, this viewpoint is understandable, after all, most intelligent and reasonably minded people object to things like arranged marriages, they think (rightly) that such an institution is immoral and that men and women should be free to love whomever they choose. But if the truth be known their objection to God’s instruction to love everyone is based on a serious misunderstanding of what God’s love for us is really like, and how important it is for us to comply with His wishes. The key precept regarding our being told to love everyone is this; it is only when love is given under such a directive that there can be any hope that it will stretch beyond our immediate interest, to everyone. The principal reason that we receive the command is because the command removes the problem of loving those whose characteristics and traits we do not like and would not ordinarily love. 

Let me tell you what I think the situation is like with an analogy. A few weeks ago I was in the city centre and I saw a man walking happily with his young son. His son had reins attached to him and his father was holding the other end of the strap to keep his boy safe from the road. As they approached a lamppost, the man’s son had walked to the left of it and his father had stepped to the right of it. The reins were caught around the lamppost and the father had to gently pull his son back round the other side of the lamppost in order for them to continue together round the easier route. But his son was unaware of this and, caught in his own forward motion, he carried on going forward. This is very much like the situation with which we are faced when we are being told to love and yet feel in our hearts towards a bad person some malice or indignation or loathing that we just cannot shake off. We know deep down that we should forgive and love everyone, but our desire to carry on recriminating is holding us back. We are just like the young boy - we have our reins caught around the lamppost, and our attempts to go forward really need to be halted so we can go back round the other way. 

Here, in the case of our being told to love, God has the role of the Father holding on to the other end of our reins. He sees that we can’t go round the lamppost that way so He pulls us back. In other words, He pulls us back to enable Him to take us forward. And just like the young boy on the wrong side of the lamppost who wants exactly the same as his dad but is going about it the wrong way, we want the same as our Heavenly Father, namely to progress forward – and for that very reason we resist the pull back because while we are indignant it seems contrary to our instinctive will. But regarding the boy round the lamppost and ourselves in relation to God’s will, we only ultimately get what we want by yielding to His will, only then will we get to go where we want and, more importantly, where He wants us to go.

When thinking about all the times we do not love as we are called to love, we must regard our desire to go our own way as a sin of not loving as we are called to love. If our will is to go forward then, of course, God shares our will – it is just that He does not share our wish to pull against the resistance and force ourselves in a direction that is no use, so He cannot accede to our wishes, for He knows better than us what it is we need. 

Pressing on with love

Our attempts to overcome our indignation and press on with love and the employing of outrageous undeserved grace toward those who are fairly despicable people is a situation with which God has much sympathy – after all we are told by St Paul in the book of Romans to ‘hate what is evil’ – not the person but the evil deeds. Now given that our only way to progress with a man in such a situation is to love him and help him remove his evil, God has to pull that bit harder on our reins to get us back on track; for the more we resist His pulling back (His call to love this bad man) the more we are rendering the attainment of our real wish to progress with this man impossible. God knows that any attempt we make to get on in life with the principle of ‘love your neighbour as yourself’ is only partially or nearly wholly complete, and is actually making us fall short of that which will truly bless us – if we really can master the ability to love everyone, as well as hating their evilness. 

What lies at the heart of our aberration is perhaps something at least a little admirable - a thirst for justice that a wrong is put right or, in particular, that as long as an evil man carried on being evil or ghastly, we really remain indignant that he does not know his wrongs or does not appear to be sorry for them. Our voracious appetite for justice may be in one metaphorical sense a feeling that God shares – but the appetite will never be fed while feelings of justice outweigh or overshadow feelings of outrageous love. If a man submits to the pull of the reins, he will have done what God wants; that is, he will have stepped into the position that God wanted him to be all along – his thirst for justice will have been quenched by being replaced with outrageous love. By having the love he will naturally turn away from feelings of justice and retribution, and as hard as this is to imagine when we are faced what the most despicable people, that is how love never fails us (1 Corinthians 13:8) – in other words, love may not always be successful in bringing an evil man to goodness but it will never fail the person who is doing the loving.  

And as hard as it may be to cope with sometimes – every instance of our supplanting feelings of love and grace for feelings of justice and payback must be completely at odds with the Divine wishes, and wholly contrary to the will of God. God is not like a policeman who can overlook your speeding because he is in a particularly good or lethargic or indulgent mood. God has no off days; the more He loves you the more determined He will be to pull your reins and help you on the right trajectory. One can only get to the best destination by acceding to God’s will - by going His way – and that is why we are told to love, so that we will not harbour grudges or love on merit, for both will hold us back and slow down our progression. God can justifiably tell us to love because He IS love, and He knows that our loving Him is an injunction to loyalty, and our restitution for our loyalty will be immeasurably more in receipt than in giving. In other words, we cannot possibly return to God even a millionth of what He gives us through blessings and wisdom – and our being told to love is, like everything else in the Bible, for our own good.

The views carried here are those of the author, not of Network Norwich and Norfolk, and are intended to stimulate constructive debate between website users. We welcome your thoughts and comments, posted below, upon the ideas expressed here. You can also contact the author direct at james.knight@norfolk.gov.uk  

James is a Norwich local government officer, author and Proclaimers church member in Norwich. You can access his current collections of columns here

Meanwhile, if you want to find out more about Christianity, visit: www.rejesus.co.uk