I’m reading (and loving) Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist. The story centers on a shepherd who has reason to believe that a treasure awaits him at the Egyptian Pyramids. He sets out on a journey for his treasure.

While making his way through the desert, the caravan he is traveling with stops at an oasis and makes camp while a battle is being waged between warring tribes up ahead. At the oasis, he meets, and falls in love with, a girl. But since he must continue toward the pyramids, he stops to tell her that he loves her. He also wishes to explain why.

In response, the girl says something remarkable.

“One is loved because one is loved. No reason is needed for loving.”

I have often struggled with the question of why God would love his creatures. If his love is unconditional and not based on our performance as his children, then his love would seem arbitrary.

Well, perhaps there is a reason God loves us; I could ramble off a few ideas the bible seems to support. But maybe it’s not needed. Maybe no reason is needed for loving.

I was listening to the soundtrack from Where the Wild Things Are, more specifically the track called All is Love from Karen O and the Kids.

“L – O – V – E, It’s a mystery”

The lyric is repeated several times throughout the song and it got me thinking about how really fascinating the reality of ‘love’ is. From a purely rational standpoint, it doesn’t make all that much sense. Now, I know the naturalistic arguments for love. I just think they all sound to me like ditch efforts to explain something profoundly confusing. From my perspective, the practice and experience of love, outside of sexual pursuit, really is quite a mystery.

Why do two good friends care about one another, sometimes regardless of what the other one does, or does not do? Why do two brothers defend one another at the potential loss of their own lives? Why will a mother risk her other children to protect one?

To me, love really is mysterious.

I was just reading a short article on Gajitz.com about a Swiss team of scientists who developed a controlled colony of simple robots. After being introduced into a ‘natural’, evolution-like environment which involved communicating, feeding and mating, the robots eventually learned to lie to one another in order to starve their fellow robots and further their own progress.

All of it compounded to highlight the mesmerizing phenomenon that is human love. Impossible to neglect is the even wilder notion that an immortal, all-powerful, all-knowing God would love creatures of his own imagination that fail even his most basic standards. And a plan, devised by that being, for redemption which involves deep-seated self-sacrifice would then seem absolutely ludicrous.

Yet, this is what we believe and in this we place our faith. And for me, the basic phenomenon of love is an impossible evidence to ignore.

In Tim Keller’s book Counterfeit Gods he talks about this concept of ‘Apocalyptic Love’. A concept that says once mankind lost faith in God and thus, lost any ultimate meaning, they sought to create that meaning by intensifying the meaning of romantic love. The idea that love is the absolute end all of everything—Apocalyptic love.

That term, for me, resonates. Although perhaps for slightly different reasons.

I’ve often listened to love songs and thought to myself, “I wish love really were like that”. In music and theater, romantic love is elevated to these impossible heights. To a place which I’m sure would be a profound experience. But, in truth, there is no experience between humans quite like that.

It seems like the grand romantic view of love is in part responsible for the huge number of divorces. As Keller puts it:

“We maintain the fantasy that if we find our one true soul mate, everything wrong with us will be healed. But when our expectations and hopes reach that magnitude… ‘the love object [becomes] god’. No lover, no human being, is qualified for that role. No one can live up to that. The inevitable result is bitter disillusionment.”

Bitter disillusionment. That’s what we all finally experience when we think we’ve found that apocalyptic love. We’re left disappointed, disillusioned and divorced.

The only place to find true apocalyptic love is in the Lord, in the proven and reliable love of Christ.

I was gearing up to write about some thoughts on John 20:17 and was reading Matthew-Henry’s commentary, when I was caught by what he said on another verse entirely. About verse 11 he writes:

“We are likely to seek and find, when we seek with affection, and seek in tears. But many believers complain of the clouds and darkness they are under, which are methods of grace for humbling their souls, mortifying their sins, and endearing Christ to them. A sight of angels and their smiles, will not suffice, without a sight of Jesus, and God’s smiles in him.”

It’s extremely easy to forget that the gloom we are under today is often among God’s gracious means of bringing sanctification tomorrow.

For the believer, it may be that the hardest part is not overcoming that difficulty or pain, but learning to embrace it while it is here as a tool God is using. Learning to believe that it is a tool God is using. And learning to expect and search for God’s gracious hand in it.

These are things that, for me, do not come with any kind of ease, but are a perpetual struggle. Thank you Matthew-Henry for the reminder and a renewed sense of confidence.

Twice in the last short stretch of Jesus’ high priestly prayer he mentions the concept of unity. And both times he attaches it to the world’s belief.

John 17:20-26:

“I do not ask for these only, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be in us, so that the world may believe that you have sent me. The glory that you have given me I have given to them, that they may be one even as we are one,  I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me. Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world. O righteous Father, even though the world does not know you, I know you, and these know that you have sent me. I made known to them your name, and I will continue to make it known, that the love with which you have loved me may be in them, and I in them."

He illustrates unity by his own relationship with the Father (a relationship marked by perfect love and respect). “Just as you, Father, are in me, and I in you…”. Then, moves on to express how this unity opens opportunity for the world to believe. He distinctly makes this comparison twice, all within just a few breaths. All of the Word is crucial, but I think we would be wise to pay special attentions to things that God saw fit to say over and over again.

Now, I don’t necessarily believe that the splintering of denominations is a bad thing. In fact, that’s really much to large an argument for right now. But even in the existence of many denominations within our faith, this prayer for unity isn’t lost.

See, when the world looks at the Church and dismisses her because she has splintered into all these different sects, I don’t think it’s the disagreements they’re seeing and responding to, it’s their lack of love, respect and cooperation.

Lets say there were an agency started by two friends. Its business was to help deal with conflict resolution in families. If the two business partners had a disagreement and out of frustration and anger, they broke apart and formed two competing conflict resolution agencies, we would probably have difficulty trusting either one. However, if the disagreement was over the best methods to resolve conflict, and the individuals, in cooperation with each other, decided the best thing to do was to start two different agencies, each with its own unique method—well, then people would just pick the one that’s right for them or their situation.

Well, the Church’s business is love. First for God, then for the church, then for the world. Trouble is, the church fails all three of these. The problem is not unity in a geographical or even theological sense. The problem is love—or lack thereof.

When Christians love God, and love and respect one another, regardless of disagreements over fringe-topics, the unity that Jesus is speaking about here is fulfilled and people do see it. Christians should be encouraged by this, and empowered to love and respect even their brothers and sisters they have disagreements with.

Of course, on a larger level, this is all null and void until the ‘church’ makes love for God and people her main objective— instead of the next gigantic mortgage payment on her brand new church building.

In the book of Amos there is a startling saying. Amos 5:18:

“Woe to you who desire the day of the LORD!
   Why would you have the day of the LORD?”

The book of Amos is a declaration of God’s judgments on mankind for their wickedness. A wickedness that everyone shared. All were guilty and the day of God’s judgments would be vast and painful.

But in the words Jesus taught us to pray, we read something else. Matthew 6:10:

"Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name. Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.”

Jesus teaches us to pray that His Kingdom would come.

Before Christ’s work, the coming day of the Lord was dismal and hopeless. For the saved in Christ, the coming day of the Lord is one of ultimate and absolute comfort. As seen in Revelation 7:17:

“For the Lamb in the midst of the throne will be their shepherd,
   and he will guide them to springs of living water,
and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”

We can hope and pray diligently for the Lord’s return, yet at the same time pray and trust that Jesus will stay his return until all of the elect have accepted his gift of eternal life.

There is hope and encouragement in that.

For three transgressions and for four God would not stay the judgment pronounced on seven different peoples. But on only one of them God was angry for the injury to himself.

In the first two chapters of Amos, God pronounces judgment on Gaza, Damascus, Edom, the Ammonites, Tyre, Moab.

But to Israel he says this (Amos 2:6-7):

    "For three transgressions of Israel,
   and for four, I will not revoke the punishment,
because they sell the righteous for silver,
   and the needy for a pair of sandals—
…

a man and his father go in to the same girl,
   so that my holy name is profaned”

I had to stop and think about this. It was specifically the people called by God’s name that their sin not only stood in its own as a heinous crime. But was much worse than that. Their sin was actually profanity against God’s holiness.

Today, when the people called by God’s name fail to emulate his character to the broken world around them it’s not only a bitter failure, but it’s a caustic reflection of God himself. The church’s abhorrent behavior toward each other and the world is many people’s only picture of God.

Is it any wonder they don’t listen to us?