07/25/2021 – “Three Philosophies of Life” by Peter Kreeft // 3 of 3/ “Song of Songs: Life as Love”
I am oftentimes noted this but if I just go out and gaze at the stars at night, I am awestruck by God’s power. It is unfathomable. But then, so is the timeless perfect agape love within the Trinity. It too is so beyond our comprehension, it is just impossible to try to get your head around it.
So “Life as Love” , we find ourselves in the third of three phases as it were. This morning, Alistair noted humorously but appropriately paraphrase a commentary from an author, but asking: “what sense would that make?; I am just going to quote it verbatim with the appropriate credit.” So everything that follows is verbatim quotations from the book, unless I have a “Jimmy note” in parenthesis.
Again, with the hope that y’all will buy this book and pour into it with prayer, I will provide little snippets out from the text. Let’s get started:
-Big picture: “The whole Bible is a love story because God, the author, is love. Behind the appearances of a war story, a detective story, a tragedy, a comedy, or a farce, life is a love story. Thus Song of Songs is the definitive answer to the question of Ecclesiastes and to the quest of Job.” (pg 100)
-If your concept of God lacks awe, circumspection, fear, and trembling, then your concept of love will also lack awe. (pg 127)
– “… Thus Saint Augustine says in the Confessions that he who has everything, and he who has God and nothing else lacks nothing, and he who has God and everything else does not have anything more than he who has God alone.” (pg 136)
- To be free from love, free from God, is precisely Hell. (pg 116)
- No, people do not determine reality, reality determines people. Reality is not simply what people make or do; reality is what God is and does. And God is love. Love is therefore the central law of reality, and when we love, we conform to reality. (pg 116)
- Your eyes are hidden in time, hidden from your eternal destiny and identity. You see only the present crude sketch of yourself. He sees the completed masterpiece, for he sees from eternity. Your life is like a string pulled taut. Like an ant, you crawl along the string of your lifetime, from one end (birth) to the other (death). But God sees the whole string end to end…… And the judgment he pronounces on you is “perfect”. (Jimmy note: By accepting Jesus as our Lord and Savior, who conquered our death by dying on the cross in our place.)
- Love elopes. Gods calls us, as he called Abraham, away from the security we knew, out of our familiar little room, down the ladder of faith and into his arms. Jesus called his disciples that way – just as a lover elopes with his beloved. Whenever we think we have got him planned, he blows away our plans like the clouds of smoke they are, and stands in front of us in place of our dreams, our cloudy expectations, and forces us to choose between him and ourseles, between the God of surprises and the idol of same old self, between God and gazelle and Self the slug. It is ultimately the choise between Heaven and Hell. (pg 127)
- And God’s love is the only totally trustable love (thus the only love guaranteed to cast out fear) because only God totally knows, accepts, and affirms us. “Even if my mother and father forsakes me, the Lor will lift me up” (Psalm 27:10) // (pg 128)
– This book goes even farther back than Genesis, into the eternal heart of the Trinity.” (pg103)
- Nothing can buy love because nothing is as precious as love; nothing can be exchanged for it. (This is also the reason why love must be free, as we will see later.) Song of Songs here anticipates 1 Corinthians 13: “The greatest of these is love.” (pg 103)
- We are all notes in God’s symphony. When we listen only to our own note or to the few notes around us, it does not look like music, or like love, but when we step back and look at the whole, everything falls into place as great music. Of course we are in to position to do this ‘stepping back’ on our own power. How could we possibly get the God’s -eye point of view? Only if God revealed it to us – as he has done here. Faith means believing this divine revelation. The man’s -eye sharing in the God’s – eye point of view is, precisely, the eye of faith. (pg 104)
- It is no accident that love poetry blossoms more in theistic cultures than in atheistic or pantheistic ones. (pg 105) & (Jimmy note – Christians are accused as poly-theists. But, where is the love in a uni-personal God? Is not love relational by definition? So, wouldn’t it require more than one person by definition?)
- We are meant to be with each other because God is eternally with-each-other; ‘each-otherness’ reaches into the very heart of God. Otherness, plurality, individuality, society, and thus love are as ultimate as oneness. (pg 106)
- Love, being the fundamental spiritual force in the universe, transcends all other forces and their law. It especially transcends the principal of physical entropy: its energy does not decrease but rather increases. That is why Heaven never gets boring. That is also the only way earth can conquer boredom, too. (pg 107)
- “I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse, therefore choose life, that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying his voice and cleaving to him (Deuteronomy 30: 19-20).”
- Brennan Manning, reknowned Christian author and evangelist during his time with us here, shared with us in a renewal conference his last visit with a dying young lady, a miracle: As he walked into the room, he said the lady’s face was shining so brilliantly. She immediately confided: “Your Jesus just came to me.” Brennan asked what he told her and she replied: “Arise my love, my fair one, and come away; For lo, the winter is past , the rain is over and gone. The flower appear on the earth, the time of singing has come. And the voice of the turtledowve is heard in our land. The fig tree puts forth its figs, and the vines are in blossom. They give forth fragrance. Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away .” Brennan recognized the verses out of Song 2: 10-13. And so this lady did indeed arise to be with her Lord and Savior, soon after their visit. (pg. 108 – 109)
- Love is Gospel because love is alive. Love is not abstract ideal; love is a wedding invitation. Love is not something for us to approach; it is something that approaches us. We do not turn it on; it turns us on as a lamplighter turns on a lamp. (pg 109)
- Merely to long for God is better than to possess the whole world. This absence is better than any other presence; this desire is better than every other fulfillment. (Jimmy insert: Reflecting on: Mark 8:35 / Luke 9:24 / Matthew 16:25) – (pg 112)
- Thus Dmitri Karamazov, in Dostoyevski’s novel, tells God that if he should put him in Hell, he would sing to God the hymn of joy even from Hell, ‘the hymn from the underground’. That would transform Hell (or the Siberian salt mines) into Heaven. The song of love makes Heaven. Heaven does not make God’s love lovely; God’s love makes Heaven heavenly. (pg 112)
- The only way to protect yourself against suffering is to protect yourself against love — and that is the greatest suffering of all, loneliness. (pg 113)
- “Behold, you are beautiful, my beloved, Truly lovely; Our couch is green (Song of Songs: 1: 15-16) // To a nonlover , this is supremely trite and boring. To a love it is perfect, like a diamond. To a nonlover it is endless repetition. To a love it can go on forever, like God himself, one, perfect, self-sufficent, ‘the one thing needful’. (pg 121)
- That is why Go must be infinite; so that he can give his whole heart to each of us without being divided. Only infinity can do that. We can give our whole heart only to one at a time; to one God, because there is only one, and to one spouse. Marriage is earth’s closest image for Heaven because it is all or nothing, forever – a leap of faith. (Jimmy note: Indeed, the family was created around the Trinity. And the family is under assault now in history like no time ever before. And that comes from our culture turning its back to God in open defiance.) // (pg. 124)
- Though God loves each of us, his love for each one is just as jealous and sealed and faithful as ours. The divine husban wil no more share his bride, your soul, with others than a human husband will. Instead he will ‘husband’ his resource, his possession to himslef, “For I the Lord your God am a jealous God” (Exodus 20:5). Surely there is a connection between modernity’s scorn of this “jealousy” in God and its scorn of fidelity in marriage. We have exchanged the “narrow way” of Christ for an ecumenical orgy, a “group grope” among gods; and we have exchanged the unadulterated, undivorceable “what God has joined together, let no man put asunder” for history’s most catastrophic breakdown of mankind’s most fundamental instituion. The two exchanges are two sides of the same profitless coin and “what does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?”
- The God of the philosophers is simply ‘Being’, but the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob creeps up behind us and says, “Boo!” (pg 126)
- The image of this ultimate Fact in human love is that lovers can really give themselves to each other, so that ‘the two become one’ without ceasing to be two. Already in human love the laws of mathematics are transcended: a powerful clue that we should not expect them to apply to divine love, a good piece of evidence that it would be arrogant folly to deny the doctrine of the Trinity because it does not make mathematical sense. (pg 129)
- And as the Persons of the Trinity become one and as husband and wife become one, so God and man become one, too, in Christ. God’s love exchanges his self with our self. He puts us into his own mystical Body. He puts his own Spirit into us. He is in us, and we are in him. Someone said that if theologians only fully understood the word in, they would have solved all mysteries. (pg 129)
Mystery though this is, it is not remote. Any lover knows it. Slaves belong to their masters out of force and convention, and yuppies belong only to themselves, but lovers belong to each other. Thus, if I love you, wherever you are, I am, for I am more with you than with myself. Whatever, happens to you happens to me, thus it happens to you twice: to you in you and to you in me. This is why a loving father who spanks his deserving child speaks literal truth when he says, ‘This hurts me more than it hurts you.’ And perhaps that is also how it is when God punishes us. (pg 129 – 130)
“Eternal joy, marriage to God, is “without price” because Love has already paid the price , on Calvary. Love you see, can do anything. Love alone can fill Ecclesiastes’ emptiness — and yours. Love alone can satisfy Job’s quest — and yours.”
Soli Deo Gloria!