Love is Like That

By Virg Hurley

Love is Like That is a book that focuses entirely on love, a universally-necessary virtue. It adapts stories from real life experiences, history and current events.

Love is Like That accepts the necessity of love in human minds, hearts and relationships. While most mortals value love for its emotional depths and erotic pleasures, Love is Like That unapologetically focuses first on God Almighty in Jesus Christ. While everyone profits from any degree of love accepted, it reaches its greatest influence only within that spiritual context.

Love is Like That therefore challenges any reader to appreciate the presence of love in all situations. It encourages believers in God to embrace love as the necessary virtue in everyday relationships. It demands that Christians accept the particularization of God’s love in Christ as its origin and meaning.

Love is Like That sometimes simply recites the story, and sometime sees it as a parable. But it never fails to see its impact on everyday life. And, while we may progressively mature in our understanding and appreciation of love, at whatever we’ve reached, we will be merely at minute one of 10,000 hours; at foot one of 10,000 miles; of day one of 10,000 years.

The result of reading Love is Like That will at least increase our understanding of love’s ever-more encompassing expressions. It may help us love one another more. Hopefully, it will encourage our appreciation of God’s love in Christ—the ultimate goal of the book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Virg Hurley
• Release date: Feb 19, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310443831

Virg Hurley

Born in Lincoln, Illinois, Virg accepted Jesus as Savior and Lord at age 18, and dedicated his life to proclaiming Jesus Christ as Lord. He attended Lincoln Christian College and Seminary, earning a B.A. in Ministry, an M.A. in Church History and a B.D. in New Testament, writing two theses in one year. He has preached in Illinois, Nevada and currently in California. He also taught Ministries at Ozark Christian College in Joplin, Missouri. Presently ministering to a seniors' church in Escondido, California.

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Love Is Like That

Copyright 2015 Virg Hurley

Published by Virg Hurley at Smashwords

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Preface

Chapter One - The United God is the Origin of Love

Chapter Two - Majors in Personal Relationships

Chapter Three - Irrepressibly Expresses Itself

Chapter Four - Affirms the Individual

Chapter Five - Possesses Integrity

Chapter Six - Is Constant

Chapter Seven - Conquers Our Humanity

Chapter Eight - Focuses on Potential, Not Limitations

Chapter Nine - Constructively Manages Adversity

Chapter Ten - Aims to Destroy Evil

Epilogue

Other books by Virg Hurley

About Virg Hurley

Connect with Virg Hurley

Acknowledgements

First, I thank Christ Jesus my Lord. His matchless life, truth and grace have inspired the idea inspiring the book. Second, I thank my wife Judy for her expertise in putting the material in the necessary format. Third, I thank the brothers and sisters of Escondido Christian for their fellowship.

May Jesus Christ be praised!

Preface

Romping like children through toy aisles, Love Is Like That promenades wonderingly among love’s multiple dimensions and refractions. Rejecting mere epistolary possibilities, Love Is Like That emphasizes actualities, revealing how God's love does behave when confronting life, not merely how it should.

Like a tree, that love grows from trunk to canopy; like a vine, it spreads to many trellises; like a river, it teems and brims and overflows. God's love has the unconquerable strength of gentility and gentleness; the inimitable ability to be more expensive but less costly than any virtue; and the other-world skill to answer the question, Can I really live like this?, with the ringing affirmative, I can and I never want to live any other way.

Sometimes noiseless, God's love is never voiceless; it speaks, as Alfred Plummer said, with the eloquence of speechless affection: in a touch, a look, an embrace, a smile, a hug. Originating in the inexplicable, God's love fearlessly achieves the impossible. Being itself divine, as Richard Trench wrote, it delightfully believes Divinities. From bark to core the perfect virtue, God's love self-exists and self-regenerates, simultaneously expending and recovering its treasures.

God's love is seen throughout the Old Testament, most particularly in his relationship with Israel. The book of Hosea relates it in detail. God loved Israel, betrothed himself to her, married her, and wanted his affection returned. Which Israel, represented by Gomer, refused, since she found pagan religions less demanding and far more physically pleasurable.

However, no Old Testament text used Christ's language in John 3:16, as in "God, so loved the world". It never spoke of God loving Israel SO, let alone the world. Not that he didn’t, but he lacked the perfect Person to dramatize it. Abraham, Moses, David, Isaiah, etc., all served God admirably, and perseveringly, but not perfectly.

That's why John 3:16 and Jesus exist in perfect juxtaposition. The greatest person ever to live spoke the greatest single verse ever heard. Having him say it, and throughout his life prove it, and in death express it, we know as grace in truth Jesus personalized what could never be shown through truth in Law.

The delight of that reality has a hard edge, however. When God sent Jesus as the Personification of LOVE it meant God's last appeal to sinners. Should we reject Christ Jesus, only judgment for sins awaits. Which, tragically, represents the condition of most in the human family.

But...sursum corda, Love lives perfectly in Jesus the Christ. This book explores God's love from various perspectives. While not exhaustive, the dimensions noted give hints of the ever-more expansive nature of this essential virtue. There will always be more to learn about God's love. But if we appropriate even a modicum of what this book teaches, our appreciation of it will be stimulated, leading to learning more!

Chapter One

The United God is the Origin of Love

Like Olenka Plemyannikova, in Anton Chekov’s The Darling, humanity cannot live without obsessing over something, whether ideas, personalities, or desires. Love, the positive side of Obsession, importunately besieges our psyche. And, given the books written, songs composed and declarations made about love, it should be not only clearly understood but perfectly practiced; not only often prescribed, but perfectly administered. Alas, by divorcing love from its spiritual origins, much of what we write, compose and declare reveals only fantastic illusions. But ignorance exceeding recalcitrance, we insist on uniting love and humanity like mortise and tenon joints without first embracing the distinct, unparalleled love between God the Father and God the Son.

However, since love remains indispensably fundamental to our earthly and eternal welfare, we cannot be imprecise about its origins or misunderstand how the principle of first use determines future definitions and applications. The greatest power for good or evil in the world—an armory bristling with weapons of birth or death, recrudescence or obliteration—we must correctly identify the provenance that explains love’s ultimate meaning and purpose. It otherwise loses its colossal capacity for good for those soothed in its embrace and assumes the sinister forms tormenting those strangled in its grip. It disrobes itself of an unfathomed capacity for benefaction and reclothes itself in ferocious malevolence.

Yet, what many consider God’s inscrutability prompts questions about love’s specificity. Admitting human limitations, and posturing God’s profound perplexity, critics demand latitude in defining love. Indeed, in their view, love’s mastery rests on its inexplicable mystery, its innocuous impartiality, its refusal to make demands or to offer criticism; in being a generalized, popularized, homogenized commodity, meaning something different to everyone, with all meanings equally true, even if contradictory; with all applications acceptable, even if antagonistic; and with all interpretations reasonable, even if inconsistent. Expounded with such liberality, humanity will universally worship at love’s shrine, unbelievers conclude. It’s only as Christians confidently particularize it that people recoil.

To unsaved humanity, a Faith that’s at once narrow and comprehensive, singular and universal, seems a contradiction in terms. In reality, the principle of antinomy explains it perfectly, proving Christianity’s God-ordained sovereignty. For God’s love must at once be narrow enough to achieve forgiveness and comprehensive enough to save everyone. It must have a Single person as its source with universal appeal in its outreach.

And it must necessarily appear dangerous to us before it achieves God’s determined purpose. Ransom’s experience in Perelandra illustrates. He looked across the lake at ominously tall white men, from whose faces he saw shooting like stars towards him a Pure, spiritual, intellectual love. It as instantly smote him like needles, piercing and puncturing. What was this love that seemed so deadly, not beneficent? 237

That’s the mystery of God’s love in Christ. It so brilliantly flashes that it blinds. It so vigorously demands our self denial, it offends. Why would we embrace a power so obviously devastating to our human dignity and self-esteem?

Tolerant of our opinions, but devoted only to its truth, the Bible decisively invalidates any contrary perspective. Our stares will crumble concrete before we explain love apart from God in Christ. Their all-embracing monopoly, void of distracting compromises, offers the love that goes where danger lurks, that serves where danger threatens, that trusts where danger menaces, that perseveres where danger explodes! Their concentrated mass offers unlimited benefits from its many dilutions; their flagship affinity reveals the many branches of its grace; their principal affiliation allows access to unlimited personal interest. As surely as each of us is the sum of his genes, God in fellowship with his One and Only Son embodies love.

Comprehending love in that context lavishes an embarrassment of enlightenment more accurate than an atomic clock, more consistent than the tides and seasons, and more satisfying than a collection of Van Goghs and Rembrandts. That love, shared between the Father and Son, and proclaimed by the Holy Spirit, is in God like wet is in water; like heat is in fire; like oxygen is in air.

It exists as a specific factor because it issues from their specific relationship; and he has made it the basis of our eternal life or eternal condemnation, depending on our reaction to it. As our misinterpretation of a Biblical principle doesn’t invalidate the truth it represents, our misperceptions of love won’t alter God’s unchanging references to it.

It jealously guards its prerogatives

I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God Exodus 20:5; Love is as strong as death, its jealousy as unyielding as the grave Song of Solomon 8:6

The Ten Commandments describes the Almighty as a jealous God. When Joshua wanted Moses to deny ordination to men who failed to attend the commissioning ceremony, Moses replied, Are you jealous for my sake? I wish that all of the Lord's people were prophets and that the Lord would put his Spirit on them! Numbers 11:29

Why would Moses renounce jealousy while God embraces it? How could it be wrong for God's servant but right for God himself?

It's a matter of mathematics: Moses one of many; God the Only One of His Kind!

While developing a vocabulary to explain God's love, make jealousy its first word—an iron-nerved, unyielding conviction that he’s someone essential, not eccentric; that our relationship with him must be a preoccupation, not a diversion; that faith in him must be the core issue of life, not a surface interest; that commitment to him must grant him monopoly over, not merely a compartment in, life.

However, a singular difference separates human from divine jealousy. Ours originates in the fear of losing something or someone we value. God's originates in the certainty that we lose by exchanging his creations for Satan’s inventions: veracity for mendacity; sincerity for pretense; integrity for duplicity; substance for emptiness; honor for disgrace; life for death. For our good God's love is jealous of itself, struggling to convince our stubborn hearts to live within his will to gain what he alone possesses.

We must love it first and most

Love the Lord your God Deuteronomy 6:5; Speaking the truth in love Ephesians 4:15; Those who oppose him he must gently instruct II Timothy 2:25

Pepper Martin, member of the St. Louis Cardinals Gas-House Gang in the 1930's, later managed the San Diego Padres of the Pacific Coast League. A committed Christian, he untiringly recounted the ways God answered his prayers. One day a Padres batter took three strikes without lifting the bat from his shoulder. When someone on the bench asked why, he explained that he simply froze. Then, thinking Martin out of ear-shot, added sarcastically that he asked God to help him swing, but God hadn’t replied. Martin heard the remark, rushed to the player, grabbed him by the collar, glared at him and forbade him to ever trivialize God’s name.

Christian love reacts swiftly when mortals arrogantly throw God’s name around like it weighs an ounce, casually profaning or superficially invoking it. Convinced that all spiritual truth rests on and issues from God’s unimpeachable majesty, we readily preserve his Name. Like Jesus, we seek to truthfully teach grace and gracefully teach truth, but always in tandem.

Like the Pharisees, we can search the scripture without living its truth, but that doesn’t diminish our need to search the scripture to discover its truth. Nor can we refuse to defend truth by saying we love people more, or that loving others nullifies the need of truth, or that God overlooks untruth if we love one another. The first commandment remains the greatest commandment.

Jesus is its signature personality

Stop trusting in man Isaiah 2:22; Why consult the dead on behalf of the living? Isaiah 8:19-20; This is eternal life...you...and Jesus Christ John 17:3

An episode of the TV drama Quincy rose above itself, eloquently describing the terror of drug and alcohol abuse and criticizing advertisements that encouraged prurience. Then, Peter Principle at work, it reverted to humanism. What we need is a new religion, the leading female character averred. Not a cult or anything like that, she hastened to add, but someone who can help us understand life.

Who is Jesus but that Someone? In a world where at least twelve billions of people have lived, when God says SON, only one head turns to the VOICE—God the Son, the someone exactly like his Father. That reality can't be lost on us. While Adam and his progeny have God's image in them, Jesus alone had the fullness of the Godhead in him. We can’t minimize that difference.

Many personalities shine as religious luminaries, some glimmering, others aglow, a few dazzling. Only God’s love in Christ performs all three functions and, singularly, illuminates by blinding. First searing our minds against religious distortion, his burning light then reveals spiritual truth. Only by equating candles with searchlights can we blunder anyone’s religious search for God into Christ’s undisguised revelation of God.

People keep hoping for something other than God's love in Christ to heal wounds that hate and mistrust have inflicted, but nothing else exists. And that’s why God and the human race have been at odds since Eden. The One who sits in Heaven knows all the answers we want given, but he's not talking, because he’s already revealed the answers we need to know, and we're not listening.

Their love’s least influence is life-saving

And on that day they offered great sacrifices, rejoicing...The sound of rejoicing...could be heard far away Nehemiah 12:43; Now we see but a poor reflection...then we shall see face to face I Corinthians 13:12

Heat from the sun falls into the vast universe to be absorbed and choked by numbing cold. Earth gets only one-half of one billionth of the total heat radiated, like getting fifty cents out of a billion dollars. But that fifty cents worth of heat keeps us alive.

God’s love in Christ is like that. We experience only one-half of one billionth part of their shared affection, because their relationship, accepted by all, even the simplest, is understood by none, not even the most profound. But the little that gets through the layers of carnal insulation in which we cloak our spirit makes life worthwhile and appealing. Its least influence is life-saving.

What great powers exist in the infinitesimal love our present capacities hold. Merely accepting it saves to the uttermost. How it emboldens our witness and bolsters our anticipation of a future when we'll be exposed to all the Love our Divine lover seeks to share. If the full extent of the sun's heat were to be concentrated on earth we would burn to a crisp. But aah, the love of God...the more we receive it, in ever-larger amounts and concentrations, in fuller force and intensities, the more delightful it becomes, the more embraceable, understandable and encouraging. We never have enough; the more we receive the more we want. And can anyone wildly-enough conjecture the ecstasy when we know as we’re presently known; when we see as we're presently seen?

God’s love is the only way

Streams of living water will flow from within him John 7:37-39; You were marked in him with a seal, the promised Holy Spirit Ephesians 1:13-14; God...works in you to will and to act Philippians 2:13

In August 1914, Solzhenitsyn has Sanya asking the fabled Tolstoy to explain man's purpose. Sanya agrees when Tolstoy says we must do the good that builds God’s kingdom, but how can we achieve that, he inquires? Through love, Tolstoy replies. Through love? Sanya asks, astonished. Only through love, he questioned? Didn't that exaggerate its power or overestimate human ability to embrace it? Couldn't something less be used until we could accept love's higher call and awaken us to love's superiority? But no, Tolstoy refused any half-measures. Only love could build God’s