What Does the Bible Work say concerning Love and Relationships?

Photo by Allison Saeng on Unsplash

Introduction

Everything we literally bump into is love, eh? Pizza? Love. Our country? Love. Kids? Love. Spouses? Love. We put love in our mouth so carelessly, it begins to sound a little like a spam filter like you are holding it when you are not supposed to. The Bible however is not that messy. Scriptures exude love in a completely different tone. It is not a sense you can get on the weekend or a vibe that you may see on Instagram. It is a big push of something- much more demanding and much more gorgeous. And when it addresses itself to relationships, such as friends, marriages, church crews, families, it paints a picture that excavates ground deeper than the generic cultural script. At least this we ought to think. The texture of our entire grind is determined by how we love, what we love, and how we develop tension with other people. Getting it right matters. And the Bible really has a lot more to say it than some people think.

The Foundation: God Is Love

It is even when the Bible begins to tell us how we ought to love one another that it falls in on us with a single big fact about God.

 God does not simply express love or practice it at times. A decade or so before his death, John turns it over a notch higher - he writes that God is love. Not a poetic exaggeration. It is a theological argument that has enormous implications. Love does not come as something that God does here and there. Deep down within himself He is wrapped into who He is. And since we are his creatures created in the image of that God, love runs through us as well. And our need to be connected, our skill to form great friendships, and that hurt that we experience when relationships spark off is not incidental. The love created us, we were created in the likeness of love, and in love we were created. That is where the other lessons on relationships in the Bible depend. We are not in love with one another because it is socially convenient or its good. Why we love, it is because it is the God who made us that way. When life seems empty or a marriage breaks or you lose your friends, the depression that goes through you is the disappointment of the fact that something is not going the way it is supposed to work. The villainy of frustration has not gone unnoticed by the bible that provides superior and more credible solutions.

The greatest commandment -and what it really means.

Jesus was once asked concerning the greatest commandment. Dude was to the point: love God with your whole heart and love your neighbor as thyself. All the rest is suspended upon those two. Most people know the words. A limited number of them take time to unravel the demand in their rear.

Loving God with all heart and soul and mind and muscle, then love is not buffered and packaged into a Sunday church appointment. It rewires the way that you live, what you appreciate, much you are. He that is indeed geared towards loving God, is inverted, and the turning over inside out destroys his intercourse with all other men. The second commandment is not any less intense. You should love your neighbor as you love yourself. Not becoming to himself, as to you, better--Jesus is not asking you to kill yourself--but as to yourself. You naturally give the same actual care, patience, instinct of yours to your own life. That sets a high bar. We are over sensitive to our needs. We are much aware of tiredness, unjust looks, and the desire to sleep or have a pep talk. It is indeed burdensome to love a neighbor and with the same care that you would with someone you ought not to care about, which Jesus made very clear with the neighbor being the folks you would not normally care about. It also magnifies on the nature of what love appears like. The love in Bible does not mean loving people who are lovable. It is unrefined duty to follow the true good of another. The commitment is made first followed by feelings.

Love: What It Means, It Should Be Like.

The best known love passages is the discussion of love that Paul provides to the Corinthians, in which he presents it in the most concrete, almost grotesque, terms. He does not draw a love as a romance. He does not put it in the perspective of a warm glow or a spiritual high. He portrays it as patient, kind, no envy, no boasting, quick temper. No systematic marks or dancing when a person falls. Bearing, hoping, enduring. Read that list very slowly and it starts to no longer sound like poetry. It is more of a hard-work job tutoring. It takes action everyday. It prefers the virtue of forbearance on mornings who would fain have done any other thing. It opts to be kind to the individual that cranked you down. It will never submit a run-off of all the evils even when you have a pile of receipts. Paul does not mean about some flashing feeling. This is what he is talking about, the character you create out of practice, failure and never giving up. It is what occurs when love ceases as a feeling and transforms into a lifestyle. This has a direct relationship to relationships. Last bonds, immense confiding, glee--those are not made on a first flash. They are seamlessly sewn by ten-thousands of small purposeful decisions of how to love well even when the emotion is at a timeout.

Friendship in the Bible

When we discuss relationships, we are mostly referring to romantic love, but friendship is also hard-realized by the Bible. Proverbs is overwhelmed with vibrations about what forms a sound friend and what destroys him. It boasts of a friend that is even closer than a brother. They will tell the truth when it is ugly, and when they are in trouble, they will show up rather than turn tail. The entire David-Jonathan tale is one of the saddest episodes of the Old Testament. The fact that Jonathan, who was virtually preparing to ascend to the throne, is the one who cares about the well-being of David more than about his dreams puts the life of the latter in a different perspective. He braves going out in honor of his friend at an enormous price to himself. He speaks directly, he cries when they are apart, when David is told that Jonathan is gone his sadness is enormous- he goes so far as to say the love of Jonathan was greater than that of a woman. I do not mean by this anything romantic, nor is it a platonic love that is deeply intense. That type of love is not less romantic love in the scriptures, it is a deep something in itself, something to care about and give respect to. And Jesus was the best role model- he had a large congregation but a smaller circle of intimate friends. He would go all in with some, and rather open with others. He wept at the grave of Lazarus so much that all could see how deep it had gotten to him. He was not such an individual who maintains everyone at a certain distance. He simply allowed himself to be actual with the people he loved.

Marriage Covenant and not Contract.

The bible perception of marriage is doubtless counter-cultural.

Where marriage to this day is still to many people little more than a contract, a legal transaction that can only roll on as long as the parties acquire in some form or other, God provides us with the concept of a covenant. And that difference is huge. A contract is conditional. A covenant is binding. A contract is I will do my business and then will you do yours. A covenant means... I will be bound with you--the smooth and the rough--because I gave a covenant with God and myself that I would keep it. The marriage portrayed by the Bible is all about excessive mutual giving. Paul explains that husband should love wife just as Christ loves the church that is, sacrificially that is, placing needs of others first. Women are also expected to respect and honor men as husbands (as well). It is a respectful, mutual thing since the two are taking care of the other so that they are both basking in the presence of God. It is not a play of power, but genuine talk love or marriage. The Song of Solomon--laugh, all that book about romantic love--pours the light on the fact that the bodily, emotional, and earthy love that is between a wife and a husband is not something that should be an embarrassment. It is glorious, it is beautiful, it is a piece of what God made us to. However, the Bible has a broader definition of marriage; it is not romance or basic friends. The fact that a man-woman marriage illustrates something greater such as the place of Christ to the church, God loves his people. That is giving it a gravitas and glory plain human connection would have never had.

When Relationships Break

There is nothing casual about the Bible regarding relationship drama. Marriages break. Friendships fracture. Scars of breakage are intergenerational. Scripture will not deceive us that love is smooth sailing and commitment will last. There were complete betrayals and violence in David, Paul and Barnabas parting ways on a major disagreement and the early church was actually fighting in the literal sense, amongst real people. The Bible provides the broken links with nothing short of a brief solution, which is a framework. Forgiveness is not a decision of ours who are believers- not because the pain does not matter but simply because God has paid an incalculable price on our behalf and we are the ones meant to retaliate what we have received. That does not imply that all failed relationships are salvaged. It is not the matter whether to remain in a deeply unhealthy position. It even means not holding the other person to the debt he owes you. Whereas it is possible and safe, reconciliation is a thing to pursue. Jesus is not mincing words over this, when you have a score to settle with a person, go and reconcile. Don’t let it fester. Being all spiritual don’t do it when the relationship busted. Go get it sorted. The Bible too opens the opportunity to cry over failed relationships. Mourning is an authentic spiritual action. All the Psalms are about people weeping about loss, betrayal, loneliness. You cannot fake that it does not hurt- you can perfectly miss nothing in lamenting over what is broken.

Loving as an activity and not a feeling only.  

Perhaps the greatest change that the Bible would have us to effect regarding love and relationships is to cease viewing or perceiving love as a sort of fortuitous occurrence that eventually just appears, and instead beginning to think of love as a discipline.  The emotional stuff is real, any kind of closeness you get towards a good friend, a good marriage, the love between a parent and a child- all that is valid and is of some worth. But feelings aren't the base. They're more like the fruit.  

The base is commitment. Choice. It is difficult to go to work every day, to tell the truth, to hang in there when you want to leave, to forgive when doing it hurts you. Such love does not necessarily seem dramatic. Majority of the time it appears quite ordinary, a conversation, a meal, an attentive ear, a promise kept.  Familiar fidelity creates something though, which, upon its own, could not be created through all the feeling. It builds trust. It builds depth. It establishes a connection which two individuals have literally seen one another; have seen one another, the entire sticky reality of one another, and have decided to stay.  That is what the bible is aiming to. Not a feeling. A life.  

Final Reflection  

This is because love, as we understand it in the bible, is the most human thing we can do since it is also the God-like thing we can do. It is the point of intersection of our created nature and our redeemed nature. That is what we were created to do and what we are being created to do.  It is not merely the backdrop of your life because the relationships you have with your friends, the marriage you are showcasing or in the process of showcasing, the family you prevent, the community you fit in to are not with just a mere background scenery. They’re the main event. They are where either love becomes concrete or abstraction.  The Bible does not provide a recipe of ideal relationship. It gives us something better. It presents us with the image of love that is based on the nature of God, is practiced in the most basic human decisions, and is maintained by grace when we clearly fail.  It is that love, long, enduring, loving, patient, kind, honest, costly, patient, building your whole life around.