Dear Friends of "Dial Daily Bread":
The Word That Turned the World Upside Down
(Part 2 of 3)
Natural human love rests on a sense of need. It feels poor and empty of itself and requires an object to enrich its own life. A husband loves his wife because he needs her, and a wife loves her husband for the same reason. Two friends love each other because they need each other. It’s natural. Each feels empty and alone.
Infinitely wealthy of itself, agape feels no need. The apostles said that the reason God loves us is not because He needs us, but because—well, He is agape. “You know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that though he was rich, yet for your sake he became poor, so that by his poverty you might become rich” (2 Corinthians 8:9, RSV). To this day we are staggered by the idea of a love that “seeketh not her own” (1 Corinthians 13:5, KJV). Even churches seem drawn almost irresistibly to representing God’s love as a seeking-its-own thing, a motivation inspired by His own acquisitive instinct. God saw a hidden value in us, it is assumed; and He was simply making a good bargain when He bought us.
We come to resemble what we worship, so multitudes profess to worship such a God because they too are seeking a good bargain. Their religion is the soul of acquisitiveness—what they want to acquire is heaven and its rewards—celestial real estate, and this self-centered motive is what keeps them going. When agape breaks through into this egocentric milieu, the reaction is pretty much what happened when it broke upon the ancient world and transformed lives.
Natural human love rests on a sense of value. Many Africans still follow the ancient bride-price system, which faithfully mirrors the more subtle basis of all our other cultures as well. The amount of the bride price to be paid depends on the expense of education the girl’s parents have invested in her. A few cows suffice for one who can barely scrawl her name; astronomical dowries are demanded for girls who have been to Oxford or Cambridge.
We also pigeon-hole one another. Few treat the garbage man as courteously or patronizingly as we do the mayor or governor. If, like water seeking its own level, “ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same? And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others?” asks Jesus (Matthew 5:46, 47). “Men will praise thee, when thou doest well to thyself” (Psalm 49:18).
In contrast, agape is an idea from outside this world. Rather than being dependent on the value of its object, it creates value in its object.
Suppose I have a rough stone in my hand. I picked it up in a field. If I try to sell it, no one would give me even a nickel for it. This is not because a stone is inherently bad, but because it is so common it is worthless. (Eros is not bad; it’s worthless, for it is as common as stones.)
Now suppose that as I hold this rough stone in my arms, I could love it as a mother loves a baby. And suppose that my love could work like alchemy and transform it into a piece of solid gold. My fortune would be made. This is an illustration of what agape does to us.
Of ourselves we are worth nothing other than the dubious chemical value of our bodies’ ingredients. But God’s love transforms us into a value equivalent to that of His own Son: “I will make a man more precious than fine gold; even a man than the golden wedge of Ophir” (Isaiah 13:12).
Doubtless you have known some example of human flotsam that has been transformed into a person of infinite worth. John Newton (1725-1807) was one. A godless seafarer who dealt in the African slave trade, he became a drunken wretch who fell victim to the people he tried to enslave. At length agape touched his heart. He gave up his vile business, was transformed into an honored messenger of glad tidings. Millions remember him for his hymn that discloses the “fine gold” that he became:
“Amazing grace! how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found;
Was blind, but now I see.
‘Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
And grace my fears relieved;
How precious did that grace appear,
The hour I first believed.”
Natural human love goes in search of God. All heathen religions are based on the idea of God being about as elusive as a cure for cancer. People imagined that He is playing hide-and-seek and has withdrawn Himself from human beings. Only special ones are wise or clever enough to discover where He is hiding. Millions go on long journeys to Mecca, Rome, Jerusalem, or other shrines, searching for Him. The ancient Greeks outdid all of us in building magnificent marble temples on their highest hills in which they felt they must seek Him.
Again, agape is the opposite. It is not humans seeking after God, but God seeking after man: “The Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost” (Luke 19:10). The shepherd left his 99 sheep that were safe and risked his life to find the one that was lost; the woman lit a candle and searched her house until she found the one lost coin; the Spirit of God searched for the heart of the prodigal son and brought him home. There is no story in all the Bible of a lost sheep required to find his shepherd! This upset all common human ideas.
Paul was obsessed with this great idea: “The righteousness based on faith says, Do not say in your heart, ‘Who will ascend into heaven?’ (that is, to bring Christ down) or ‘Who will descend into the abyss?’ (that is, to bring Christ up from the dead). But what does it say? The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart (that is, the word of faith which we preach)” (Romans 10:6-8, RSV).
That “word of faith” is as closely related to agape as a negative is to a photographic print. Faith is the response of an honest human heart to this tremendous revelation of agape, and Paul’s point is that this tremendous “word is near you.” Have you heard the News? There’s the evidence: God has already chosen you and sought you out where you’ve been hiding from Him! The Good Shepherd is always on safari looking for us.
Our human love is always seeking to climb higher. Every first-grader wants to enter the second grade; a child who is 6 says “I will soon be 7.” No job seeker wants demotion instead of promotion. The State politician longs to get into the national game, and probably every national senator at some time dreams that he/she might make it to the White House.
Who has ever heard of a national president voluntarily resigning in order to become a village servant? Plato’s idea of love could never imagine such a thing. Neither can we!
What sobered the ancient world was the sight of Someone higher than a president stepping down lower and lower, until He submitted to the torture-racked death of a criminal. In what is probably an outline of Paul’s favorite message in Philippians 2:5-8 (RSV), we can trace seven distinct downward steps that Christ took in showing us what agape is:
1. “Though He was in the form of God, [He] did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped.” When we get into high positions in politics, business, or even the church, it is our nature to worry about falling. “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.” But the Son of God abdicates His crown voluntarily, motivated by this strange, unearthly love, agape.
2. He “emptied Himself,” or “made Himself of no reputation” (KJV). We humans will fight to the death to maintain our reputation. And daring deeds of valor are not always the same as emptying oneself as Christ did, for Paul says one can give his “body to be burned” and yet lack agape. When he says Christ “emptied Himself,” he meant a voluntary surrender for eternity of everything held dear, something quite impossible apart from agape.
3. He took “the form of a servant [slave].” Can you imagine a more dismal life than always being forced to work without wages or thanks? Angels are said to be servants, “ministering spirits” sent to wait on us (Hebrews 1:14). If the Son of God had become like one of them, that would have been a great condescension on His part, for He was their Commander. But He stepped still lower:
4. He was “born in the likeness of men,” “lower than the angels” (Psalm 8:5, KJV). Not the sun-crowned, majestic splendor that Genesis says Adam enjoyed, but the degraded level of fallen man in the abysmal human debasement common to the Greco-Roman world. No human being has ever fallen so low but that the Son of God has come far enough to reach him or her. And once let that agape steal its way into our hearts, all lingering traces of any holier-than-thou spirit melt away before it, and agape makes it possible to reach the hearts of others.
5. “And being found in human form, He humbled Himself.” In other words, He was not born to live an easy life in either Caesar’s or Herod’s palace. His mother had Him in a stinky cattle shed, forced to wrap her little one in rags and lay Him in a donkey’s feed box. His became the life of a toiling peasant. But this was not enough:
6. He “became obedient unto death.” This pregnant phrase means something different from the suicide’s mad leap in the dark. No suicide is ever “obedient unto death.” If he were, he or she would stay by and face reality. The suicide is disobedient to it. The kind of death Christ was “obedient” to was not an escape from responsibility. It was not like Socrates drinking his hemlock. It was like going to hell, the conscious condemnation of every cell of one’s being under the assumed or understood frown of God. The seventh step in condescension Christ “took” in our place makes clear what an awful price He paid for us:
7. “Even death on a cross.” In Jesus’ day such a death was the most humiliating and painful possible. Not only was it the cruelest ever invented, not only the most shameful—being strung up naked before the taunting mob who watched your agony with glee—death on a cross carried a built-in horror deeper than all that. It meant that Heaven cursed you.
The reason was that the respected ancient writer Moses had declared that anyone who dies on a tree is “accursed by God” (Deuteronomy 21:23). And everybody believed it, of course. If a condemned criminal was sentenced to be slain with a sword or even burned alive, he could still pray and trust that God would forgive him and look kindly on him. He could feel some support in his death.
But if the judge said, “You must die on a tree,” all hope was gone. Everybody understood that God had turned His back on the wretch forever. This is why Paul says that Christ was “made a curse for us: for it is written, Cursed is everyone that hangeth on a tree” (Galatians 3:13, KJV). The kind of death Christ died was that of the lost who must perish at last in hopeless despair—it’s what Revelation calls “the second death.” Of course it was a million times worse for Christ to endure than it will be for them because His sensitivity to the suffering was infinitely greater than any of theirs.
Imagine a crucified man on a cross: crowds come to jeer at him as today we flock to a ball game. Like an old, wrecked car that children throw rocks at, he is a human write-off, abandoned to be mocked and abused in horror unspeakable. You must not even feel or express pity or sympathy for him, for if you do, you disagree with God’s judgment of him! You are on God’s side if you throw rotten eggs or tomatoes at him. So people thought.
This was the death that Jesus became “obedient” to. In His despair He cried out, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46). Be quiet and reverent as you think about it. You and I are the ones who would have had to go through that if He had not taken our place.
Be sure to check your e-mail for "Dial Daily Bread" again tomorrow.
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