Resolute Being - A Final Word On Love

Bruce Kokko is a Christian thinker, friend of Resolute Being and teacher turned author as he has recently published his first book, A Final Word On LOVE. We have made the introduction available here to encourage your thoughts, reflections, conversations and living as a follower of Jesus. If the introduction is not enough, we encourage you to email us here and Bruce will send you a copy for $10.00 and the shipping is free.

[The following is an excerpt from the book A Final Word on LOVE by Bruce J. Kokko]

Introduction

___________________________________________________________

Do you know that you are loved? Loved deeply, cherished because of your great worth? You might find this hard to believe. It’s true. You are loved. After considering this idea for a moment, you might tell me that I am crazy or at least uninformed because I haven’t seen your life in all its misery, abuse, and rejection. I cannot possibly appreciate the depth of your despair because I obviously have never been so utterly abandoned--and not just by acquaintances, but by those who are family and should be loyal yet were not. You might then confide how a grief clings to you day and night, like the chill of a drizzling gloomy day in February, and a depression has long since swallowed up all vestiges of hope. “For these reasons,” you contend, “there is no such thing as love in this world… Love is an illusion and a fairy tale.” And I will have to admit that I don’t know your life. But there is one who sees it. God is well acquainted with your misery and pain. He reaches out to you this very moment saying,

“Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke on you and learn from me, because I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy to bear, and my load is not hard to carry.”[1]

Be comforted, dear reader, and know that God’s Love is kind and it never fails.

Then again, you might be someone who is reading this and thinking, “There is no way that this God you speak of could love me because I am unlovable.” You will perhaps confess, “I always got in the first punch—had to. I always took what wasn’t mine. Everyone who has crossed my path has regretted it. Understand me when I say that love is a weakness and, therefore, an invention of the weak.” “In fact,” you might continue, “living in this world is all about wielding power—only fools and dreamers would deny it—and power is attained through fear of pain.” I will respond to your bravado by suggesting that you are, in all likelihood, no different than my first detractor. You see, we all ultimately try to compensate for our despair in one way or another, some passively, some aggressively, some through all kinds of addictions, and some, sadly, by suicide. You might then retort back, “I have made me what I am. I am my own morality.” You might even say these things with pride. And I will tell you that perhaps you protest too much. It may very well be that you believe all that you have to call your own is your ability to intimidate. There is one, He is God, your Creator, who sees through all of your rage and finds a soul no different from any other soul. He is ready to lovingly embrace that soul, unconditionally. Listen to what He is saying.

“Those who are healthy don’t need a physician, but those who are sick do. I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.”[2]

You can lay down your arms, dear reader, because God’s Love keeps no record of wrongs.

Jesus told a parable of the prodigal son[3]. It tells of a son who demands his inheritance in advance so he can leave home. What is not apparent to us but was to the Jewish audience who first heard the parable is that the father would have been within his rights to have his son punished by stoning; consequently, it is implied that the father showed uncompromising mercy so that his son could be free to live his life. The love of the father, who had been robbed and abandoned by his son, did not stop there. We find the father waiting longingly for his son to return to him. The father knows that letting his son go, even though it will be painful for both of them, would be better than pursuing him because the emptiness the son will find at the end of all of his exploits will be more persuasive than any words and pleading. The father waits, not to be paid back, but for his son to understand his true life. When the son, destitute, beleaguered, wretched, diseased, dirty, and guilt-ridden finally returns, the father embraces him, washes him, clothes and feeds him, and restores him to his place in the estate. God’s Love always protects. God’s Love always hopes.

Perhaps you are reading this and scoff. Perturbed, you declare, “No such love exists and no being outside of us has created our world out of love; for no loving being would ever allow such injustice, horrors, grief, and suffering to continue unabated since the beginning of recorded history.” This is a common indictment. But can it be made in the absence of a transcendent[4] love? If there is no overarching love behind everything, by what standard, then, can one adjudge injustice, horrors, grief, and pain as anything but events of a closed system spurred on by the relentless machine of evolution? Without the truth of love, don’t wars and murders reduce to the strong subjugating and culling the weak, like a bitch pushing away the runt of her litter? Doesn’t rape become nothing more than a natural means of strengthening the gene pool? Why would we lament the extinction of any species if we believe the latter has always been in a state of flux, anyway? Yesterday, the dinosaurs ruled; today, man rules; tomorrow, the cockroach will rule. When one denies the existence of a loving God on the basis of the world’s plight, isn’t one borrowing from concepts of love and justice that wouldn’t exist unless there is a God in the first place? God’s Love rejoices in the truth.

However, my skeptical reader, while your indictment may be flawed your observation isn’t. Death, suffering, and injustice have been with us since just after the beginning. This fact demands an explanation in light of God’s Love. God is love. This statement encompasses much, but one thing it means is that all of God’s purposes are rooted in His Love. Everything that God does is an expression of His Love. He created us to share in this Love. Consequently, God wouldn’t hard-wire His Love into us. If He had, what He would have are not creatures who love but ones who exhibit conditioned responses. True love must be an act of will. And there is no will in conditioned responses, only yes/no, on/off, and zero and one. Therefore, God created man with an intact will that was not predisposed to choose a certain way, but simply, free to choose. God would not override our freedom to choose; otherwise, it would be a situation no different from creating automatons. God’s Love isn’t rude.

It should also be apparent that there are no choices available to one who can only respond conditionally because every outcome of a given stimulus is predetermined, automatic, and unchanging. Thus, for there to be a will, there also must be choices. The simple choice God gave us is to love Him or not love Him.

There is a huge risk[5] in creating creatures, like you and me, who were able to freely choose because we might just as easily have chosen against Love as chosen for it. This is exactly what happened. Instead of returning God’s Love back to Him, instead of exerting our will in Love, we turned it inwards. Instead of loving God in respect to His authority, we loved ourselves, setting ourselves up as our authority. When love turns inward like this, it ceases to be the true Love we were created to share in and becomes a malignant self-love. A malignant self-love quickly degrades to hate because it has cut itself off from the source of Love (God) and is possessive. God’s Love is not self-seeking. God’s Love is not proud.

We lost our innocence when we exerted our will in selfish-ambition/conceit[6] instead of Love. From that point on, the predilection of our will has been to serve selfish-ambition/conceit. With everyone promoting themselves ahead of everyone else, hate is rampant (James 3:16). From our rebellion, therefore, came evil that is existence operating outside of God’s Love[7]. God’s Love does not delight in evil.

The follow-up question to all of this is why prolong the agony? God’s Love seeks as many as possible to be given a chance to respond to His Love (II Peter 3:8-9)—a position made possible through the sacrifice, death, and resurrection of His Son, Jesus Christ. This same Jesus, after telling the parable of the one lost sheep from a flock of a hundred and the joy of the man upon finding it, assures us:

“In the same way, your Father in heaven is not willing that one of these little ones be lost.”[8]

We are the children of our ancestors and, therefore, the little ones to whom Jesus refers. God’s Love is patient. God’s Love perseveres.

You may be a reader who agrees that God expresses Love that is compassionate, merciful, true, good, altruistic, longs to be shared, and never fails, yet wonder, in the light of God’s Love, how there has been so much carnage and division all in the name of Christ? Why has the church been so predisposed to condemning the world instead of restoring the world? The answer in brief is we have forgotten our first love (Revelation 2:4-5). Many believers have reduced Love to a get-out-of-jail free card or a matter of rules and regulations. Non-believers see Love as freedom to do anything as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone or a means of feeling comforted in their state of meaninglessness--a kind of leap into the darkness. Most all of us have considered love in only so far as our affections. But love is life and, therefore, must be the way of life. Love is not an emotion but the condition and will of the heart. When love is central to our being, our actions will always be right. Love must be the state of our being--no exceptions. Jesus has admonished us,

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter into the kingdom of heaven – only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven. On that day, many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, didn’t we prophesy in your name, and in your name cast out demons and do many powerful deeds?’ Then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you. Go away from me, you lawbreakers!’”[9]

and,

Exert every effort to enter through the narrow door, because many, I tell you, will try to enter and will not be able to. Once the head of the house gets up and shuts the door, then you will stand outside and start to knock on the door and beg him, “Lord, let us in!” But he will answer you, “I don’t know where you come from.” Then you will begin to say, “We ate and drank in your presence, and you taught in our streets.” But he will reply, “I don’t know where you come from! Go away from me, all you evildoers!”[10]

We must be made anew in God’s Love through Christ so that all we say, do, think, and feel is an expression of His Love rather than dressed up sentimentalism or as a veneer of selfish-ambition/conceit. Contrary to popular belief, we are not made pure by association but by transformation.

I’ve been told that the waters of this book often run deep. I encourage you, dear reader, to brave the swim because none of us can effectively practice Love unless we first recognize it and then fully surrender ourselves to it. Central to Christianity is God’s Love: the Love by which God first loved us through His Son, Jesus Christ, that He expects us to love Him and then others. What’s so disturbing about this is that Christians should not only recognize God’s Love but should be the most conspicuous practitioners of it. Yet too many Christians are failing at an alarming rate to love others as God has loved them. Too many professing Christians have trivialized God’s Love into catchy phrases and gimmicks, affections, pop psychologies, dos and don’ts, social agendas, and flag waving nationalism. Because of this misappropriation of God’s Love, marriages are crumbling, there are law-suits between the brethren, and the church has tended to become adversarial to the world instead of being a living witness of the hope and mercy of Christ. Certainly somewhere along the line too many of us have lost sight of the depth of Love that God has called us to. Therefore, to return us to the depth will necessarily challenge us to think and think deeply. I invite the reader to take the plunge with me.

Through this book, therefore, I will attempt to rein us all back into God’s Love. This is not a self-help book. You won’t find in the pages that follow seven easy steps to being a better lover. It’s because so many such books glut the marketplace that books like the present one have to be written. What you will see is a signpost directing us to a proper perspective and a necessary place where we can truly live and grow. The place is only as far away as our will to apprehend it. In fact, if Christ is Lord of our lives, we are already there. The place is the Love God has so mercifully saved us into through His Son, Jesus the Christ. The more we dwell there, breathe in its air, drink from its waters, and freely give to everyone what we receive in this place, the more we will see restoration in ourselves, our relationships, and in the world around us.

It is my hope and prayer that this book will be used to help restore you and me and all of us to our first Love, which is in God through His Son, Jesus Christ. I join with Paul in praying:

“I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.”[11]

[1] Matthew 11:28-30 (NET)

[2] Mark 2:17 (NET)

[3] Luke 15:11-32 (NET)

[4] Anything outside of, and not limited by time and space is said to be transcendent.

[5] I speak in human terms: nothing surprises God who, eternally outside of time that exists only because He created it, is unqualifiedly immutable and omniscient—God does not gamble.

[6] Even though it is awkward, I use this throughout the book to describe the fundamental motivation of our Sin/fallen/rebellious nature. Selfish-ambition comes from the Greek word eritheia (e.g., as in Phil 2:3), meaning faction, contention, or strife. It has the sense of political intrigue. Aristotle used it to describe one who promotes oneself in a political race through unfair means. The sense is putting oneself before another with complete disregard for how it would affect the other. Selfish-ambition is what motivates our Sin nature, but coincidental to selfish-ambition is an over inflated view of our own importance and ability, so I dovetail to it, conceit. I know of no single English word that captures the perniciousness of malignant self-love.

[7] The reader should not misunderstand this. By being outside of God’s Love does not mean that God stopped loving us, rather we ceased living in the state of God’s Love and live in the state of selfish-ambition/conceit. All of us live only because God’s Love sustains us. He loves us so much that even when choosing against Him He gives us a life. But such life is only a shadow of what it is in God’s Love and the just and sole possible outcome of our decision--not vindictiveness on God’s part, as some would have us believe.

[8] Matthew 18:10-14 (see also Luke 15:3-7) (NET)

[9] Matthew 7:21-23 (NET)

[10] Luke 13:24-27 (NET)

[11] Ephesians 3: 17b-19 (NIV)