If somebody asked you to tell them what the Bible is about in one simple word or phrase, what would you say? It has to be love, right? Other themes rise and fall in Scripture, but there is one common thread found in every patch of the biblical tapestry: love. Love infuses the scriptures, cover to cover, from the fourth chapter of Genesis, when the first two people God made, “made love”, to the twentieth chapter of Revelation, when God expressed love for His city, rising up, and six hundred eighty-four other times.
For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son…
Greater love has no man than this: that he lays down his life for his friends.
Now faith, hope, and love abide, these three, but the greatest of these is love.
Not everyone agrees that the Bible is a love story. Richard Dawkins, perhaps the most outspoken atheist in the world, once said, “The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction.” American revolutionary and philosopher Thomas Paine wrote, “It is not a God, just and good, but a devil, that the Bible describes.” The late author Christopher Hitchens opined, “The Bible…does contain a warrant for trafficking in humans, for ethnic cleansing, for slavery, for bride-price, and for indiscriminate massacre, but we are not bound by any of it because it was put together by crude, uncultured human mammals.”
The animosity some people feel toward the Bible is mostly understandable, but we may also wonder why so many people who don’t care for this book can’t seem to stop talking about it. Why are so many atheists so obsessed with Scripture?
Is it because the Bible is an easy target? Probably.
Is it because humiliating Christians sells a lot of books? Perhaps.
But could it also be because the love of God in the Bible poses a threat?
I think so.
Guys like Dawkins, Paine, and Hitchens claim to live according to the laws of reason. They see everything through a materialistic, Darwinian lens. Everything must be proven – even love – and reasonable people must never believe in something without sufficient empirical evidence. In a letter he wrote to his ten year old daughter, Dawkins attempted to explain love from his rational perspective:
“People sometimes say that you must believe in feelings deep inside, otherwise you’d never be confident of things like ‘My wife loves me’. But this is a bad argument. There can be plenty of evidence that somebody loves you. All through the day when you are with somebody who loves you, you see and hear lots of little tidbits of evidence, and they all add up. It isn’t a purely inside feeling, like the feeling that priests call revelation. There are outside things to back up the inside feeling: looks in the eye, tender notes in the voice, little favors and kindnesses; this is all real evidence.”
While I appreciate Dawkins’ effort to make room for love in his otherwise emotionally indifferent worldview, there are some obvious problems with his definition of love. If evidence is required to prove that you love someone, how much evidence is necessary, and how often must such evidence be produced? If you looked your wife in the eye and spoke to her with tender notes in the voice on your wedding day, but you haven’t done so again since then, do you love her? You’ve got wedding pictures and videos that prove how you looked at her and spoke to her – real evidence! But is that love?
You may be thinking, “But people fall out of love. It might have been real love on the wedding day, but things change.” Fair enough. But what if every day for twenty years, a man looks his wife in the eye and speaks tenderly to her, offering evidence of his love for her, but then he falls into a deep depression and suddenly lacks the resources to prove his love as he once did? Should we say he no longer loves her? Or that his wife now has a license to stop loving him?
Or what if, as was the case in past generations, the man was sent off to war and unable to write home for months, or even years at a time? If he still thinks of her, dreams of her, and prays for her every day, but she can’t see or hear him, does he love her? In the absence of real evidence, is Dawkins prepared to say this man’s wife is unloved?
Or what if, for years, a man shows his wife real evidence of love – sincere glances, tender words, and flowers every Valentine’s Day – but all the while, unbeknownst to her, he has a mistress across town? Despite all her evidence to the contrary, it’s safe to say that she was never really loved.
Love cannot be reduced to mere data and facts. To believe in love requires faith, and therein lies the problem for Dawkins and his friends. Although they claim to be committed to a strictly scientific worldview, they can’t stop believing in love. No one can.
The Bible offers no shortage of well-known extraordinary claims, but Scripture’s most audacious proposition is found hidden away in a little-known letter toward the end of the New Testament:
“God is love.”
Even if you’re not a believer, this is an absolutely stunning idea. The Bible doesn’t just say, “God gives love,” or “God wants love,” or “God expects love.” The outrageous Christian claim is that God IS love. Love is God’s essence. Love isn’t what God does; love is who God is. In every section of Scripture, the love of God shines through the world’s darkness.
I once heard a preacher say that when Paul wrote his most famous lines about love in 1 Corinthians 13 that we’ve all heard at every wedding we’ve ever attended – “Love is patient, love is kind…” – it wasn’t just the emotion of love that he had in mind. That actually wouldn’t make sense in context of the rest of his first letter to the Corinthians. Chapter twelve is all about the Body of Christ, and chapter fourteen is all about worshiping Christ – why would Paul interrupt this deep teaching with a sappy love poem in chapter thirteen?
I don’t think he did. No – I think Paul was still writing about Jesus in 1 Corinthians 13. In fact, I think that’s the only way to make sense of Paul’s most famous passage. For Paul, Jesus is the perfect representation of love, so whenever you read the Love chapter, try replacing the word “love” with “Jesus.” What you’ll find is the most comprehensive description in the entire Bible of who Jesus is:
Jesus is patient, Jesus is kind. He does not envy, he does not boast, he is not proud. He does not dishonor others, he is not self-seeking, he is not easily angered, he keeps no record of wrongs. Jesus does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. He always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
Jesus never fails.
