18. Humans And True Love: AGAPE

For a long time, we often mistake the love humans express to one another for the love God shows to us. There are a little similarity and huge differences. The following article, although not comprehensive, still shows us the basic differences between the two types of love, based on the revelations in the Bible.

In the gospel of Matthew, Jesus said, “If you then, who are wicked, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give good things to those who ask him” (Mt 7:11). Jesus shows us that there is a clear difference between the love of earthly parents and the love of God revealed to humans.

So in what ways is human love different from God’s love?

To summarize:

– The emotions of our senses are different from the spiritual will of God.

– Our relative changing love is different from God’s eternal, unchanging love.

– We are imperfect creatures, different from absolute perfection.

– The image is different from the truth.

1. HUMAN LOVE:

• Biological and psychological emotions

Where is love located? Is it in the heart? Scientists say it is not, and human emotions come from a series of hormones, including oxytocin, controlled by the brain.

The concentration of oxytocin in the blood determines the intensity of emotions we express. This love may be male-female attraction, motherly love, friendship, blood relation … It is oxytocin that makes us vibrate and a special drug that helps us reduce pain or increase pleasure. Oxytocin creates trust, closeness, increases longevity, and reduces stress.

Dr. Gabija Toieikyte, a neuroscientist at Shelfield Hallam University (UK), said that love comes from the deepest place of the subconscious. She believes that “the subconscious mind stores ten times more information than the brain which has to work hard to calculate and create that emotion” in humans. There is nothing noble or mysterious about love. It is just human biochemical and psychological activities. In other words, Creator Himself marks happiness right in our hormones. Although it is intense, you can control, devlop or limit, the relationships.

• Relative and variable:

Because emotions have a biological origin, they change depending on the body’s biochemistry, one way or another sometimes. The strength or weakness depends on how much oxytocin is secreted, but not necessarily always the same. We see that our feelings of love rise or fall at will, depending on physiological and psychological changing conditions.

One proverb says, “the more we love, the more we may hurt each other.” It is normal that passion sometimes burns and sometimes fades. Understanding the relative nature of love makes our feelings last longer. People often distinguish between love and gratitude: love is blind, while gratitude is an understanding that will take longer to fade than temporary feelings.

It is recorded that up to 40% of young Western couples no longer live together after a period of cohabitation. Even though when they got married, they loved each other dearly. Human love is very relative and changeable.

• Creation is imperfect:

“No human is perfect.” Human love is therefore as imperfect as it is created. Human love is not based on any clear standards. Someone love you crazily while another hates you bitterly. That why people say, “love rounds square things, hatred squares round things.” Love and hatred are really subjective, depending on the person’s heart.

We cannot explain how love or hatred is formed, except in general terms that it depends on unconsciousness, aesthetics, concepts, conscience, era, crowd psychology, and compatibility, etc. How come we feel someone is cute or hateful? Why does love turn into hate so easily? That shows the imperfection and shortcomings of humans.

• Image and truth:

Love between people is through the senses and feelings of the brain. Our senses are limited in all directions. Besides what we feel directly, we only gain understanding through measuring instruments. The amplitude is measured on the level of science and technology.

It is impossible to conclude what the nature of love is and how much it is. We can only know its phenomena, reflections, and images but cannot clearly know its true nature, its inherent truth. That’s why eternal love is always a question that no one can properly answer, whether they are poets, musicians, scientists, or philosophers.

However, it is impossible to say that love or hate is completely subjective. It still has common standards that most of us agree on, so that we love or hate, and express our emotions quite correctly and quite firmly. That is the reflection, the ‘image’ of the ‘truth’ that we are talking about.

So is there true love?

2. GOD’S LOVE: AGAPE.

“God is love” (1 John 4:16) and is His nature.

• Love comes from will and spirit:

It is not a temporary, superficial emotion. God’s love does not come from hormones. He is love. Saint John affirms that this understanding results from revelation. We should not understand love in the meaning analyzed above, because human language is limited and can easily lead to confusion. True love comes from clear will and spirit. It is not blind like human instinct.

Love and will are closely linked in their psychological impact. Willpower represents perseverance and steadfastness, self-control, decisiveness, independence, and stability. In the second letter to Timothy, Saint Paul wrote, “God did not give us a spirit of cowardice but rather of power and love and self-control” (2 Tim 1:7).

Love is not an emotion of the senses but is spiritual, cognitive, and creative.

Saint John said, “God is spirit” (John 4:24). He does not belong to the physical world with senses and emotions like we do.

• Absolute and unchanging love:

In the book of Exodus chapter 34 verses 6-7, the Lord said, “The LORD, gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in love and fidelity, continuing his love for a thousand generations, and forgiving wickedness, rebellion, and sin” (Exodus 34:6-7).

He also spoke through the prophet Jeremiah, “With age-old love I have loved you” (Jeremiah 31:3).

God’s love for us is absolute, steadfast, immutable and eternal, unchangeable, unlike the weather. “Know, then, that the LORD, your God, is God: the faithful God who keeps covenant mercy to the thousandth generation toward those who love him and keep his commandments” (Deuteronomy 7:9).

• Perfect love:

Fullness, perfection and immeasurability are characteristics of God’s love for humans. Because His nature is love. Saint John said, “Whoever is without love does not know God, for God is love” (1 John 4:8). He cannot help but love.

Love must have an object, and “What is man that you are mindful of him?” (Psalm 8:5)

Why does God love humans so much? God told us through the prophet Isaiah, “Because you are precious in my eyes and honored, and I love you” (Is 43:4).

We have a physical body, but God, different from mortals, belongs to the spirit world. So does God love like we love?

• The truth is different from the reflected image:

God is the creator of everything, there is nothing that He does not know, including the ‘gift of sexuality’ that we still call “eros” love. Furthermore, God became a man, Jesus. “Who, though he was in the form of God, … took the form of a slave, coming in human likeness and found human in appearance” (Phil. 2, 6-7). God is a real person with sufferings and passions like us.

God has concretized His love for humans through similes such as an earthly mother’s love. “Can a mother forget her infant, be without tenderness for the child of her womb? Even should she forget, I will never forget you. See, upon the palms of my hands I have engraved you” (Is 49:15-16).

Motherly love is like “as a hen gathers her brood under her wings” (Luke 13:34), a strong and selfless love, daring to sacrifice herself to protect her children. God’s love for people is “to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13).

God only uses similes to help us imagine something similar, but not really like that, because our sensory world and brain are limited and cannot fully grasp that truth. We are just a reflection, an image of reality, the truth of things.

Conclusion:

Saint Paul summarizes true love Agape in the following song:

“Love is patient, love is kind. It is not jealous, [love] is not pompous, it is not inflated, it is not rude, it does not seek its own interests, it is not quick-tempered, it does not brood over injury, it does not rejoice over wrongdoing but rejoices with the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Cor 13:4-7).

Nothing is difficult to understand or unfeasible, because nothing is strange to everyday life.

He also added, “At present we see indistinctly, as in a mirror, but then face to face. At present I know partially; then I shall know fully, as I am fully known” (1 Cor 13:12).