Internet filtering...not so good effects of personalization

A day made of glass...

Off the Grid

Check this out...pretty awesome.
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2011/03/10/garden/20110310-TEXAS.html

Incredible

God is Love

I'm reading a book and most of this is ripped right from it, but I've added a thought here and there.

God is Love

Basic to the New Testament understanding of God is this insistence that God is one, that there is a differentiation in the oneness, and that the difference is familial. In Jesus’ picture of the life of God as seen “from the inside” – God’s life as Jesus sees and experiences it – we discover the key to comprehending God: self-giving love. Jesus affirms repeatedly that the Father loves the Son. In fact, this love is eternal; it was there before the foundation of the world. And it is self-giving love. The Father has life in himself and gives this life to his Son. In such love the Son knows that all that the Father has is his. Nothing is withheld. The Son’s response is the other-oriented, self-giving love – love that causes the Son not to delight in doing his own will but in doing the will of the Father. We should not be surprised, then, when we find the author of 1 John giving us a new definition for God: God is Love (1 John 4:8, 16). Love is not just something God does, but it is what he actually is. Love is his inner life, the divine life, which the three persons of the blessed Trinity co-inherently share.

            The monotheism of Islam and Judaism and that of Christianity are readically different in respect to God’s love. Love is an interpersonal reality. It speaks of the possible relationship of one person to another. Thus, it is by definition other-oriented. (The term other-oriented is an intentional attempt to describe the essence of true personhood, human an divine. Have not found a better word to describe the nature of diine personhood and the intended nature of human personhood.) There must be two for love to exist, the lover and the one loved. One needs an other to love. Jesus indicates that in the inner being of the Godhead there is otherness and that and that the relationship is one of self-giving love. The obvious proofs of the love of God for us are in the incarnation and the cross, where Jesus sacrificed his life in love for us. But Jesus says that the Father loves him in the same way that he, Christ, loves us. The greatest possible expression of love, Jesus says, is to lay down one’s life for another. The Father gives life to the Son, who returns that life to the Father. The Father asked the Son to come to earth, become a human being, and give his life so the world might be saved. The Son joyously did as his Father desired. With this new understanding of the nature of God comes a new concept of love as well – a love determined by the nature of the subject who loves rather than by the nature of the object loved.

            A comparison of the biblical idea of love with the Platonic idea of love illustrates the uniqueness of the biblical perspective. Plato gives a revealing picture of Socrates in The Symposium. Socrates reports to his friends how a wise woman explained to him that love is not something the greatest of gods can experience. She said that to love means to desire; and desire is an indication of need. We love another because the other meets a need in our own experience. We know that the great gods are perfect and have no needs. Therefore, how can the gods love? The assumption behind Plato’s whole discussion is the conviction that the lover seeks in the beloved the fulfillment of the lover’s own needs. Socrates could not conceive of love that was primarily concerned with what the lover could do for the loved rather than what the lover could acquire from the loved. To Socrates love is self-oriented and concerned with how the other can satisfy the needs of the lover.

            The unique picture of love Jesus presents was the exact opposite of the picture that the wise men of his world understood. Jesus embodies the Old Testament revelation of God’s hesed, or “steadfast love,” seen in God’s faithful love of Israel throughout the Old Testament. This love of God is a love relationship in which the lover loves not for what can be acquired, but for what can be given to meet the needs of the beloved. In fact, giving is the lover’s greatest joy.

God created us in His image. His image is one of other-oriented love in which

He loves not for what can be acquired (he does not need our love), but rather for what He can give in order to meet our needs. Our needs, as he created us, is to live in communion with Him. The most personal and fulfilling relationship is one of love. Love that can be understood as desiring one’s will above their own. So when God says that he created us in his image, if his image is love than that is what we were created to do. If someone were to ask then, why does God not do our will if he loves us, I would then ask why do parents not do that which their children want? If there really is a God, and he really did create this incredibly complex world we live in with all of its beauty and splendor, wouldn’t it seem possible that he would know more than us and therefore know what is best of us? If he did in fact create us and loves us as he says he does, and as he has shown he does, I would contest that he does have what is best in mind for us.

                        -me

The true fulfillment in Jesus’ paradigm is in no way related to self=satisfaction unless a person comes to the place where the other’s welfare is more important than his or her own. Jesus’ paradigm is of one who loves to give whether the recipient responds or not. For Jesus love is the giving of oneself to and for the one loved. Greek has no word to express that thought because such a thought is not natural to human beings as we know human beings.  (The will be discussion later about how we deal with the fat that the fall took from us this other-oriented-ness and left us centered in ourselves. An inversion occurred in the fall that affected, not only what a human could do, but also what a huan, without the assistance of the Holy Spirit, could think.)

            The early Christian writers of the New Testament had to develop their own vocabulary to express their message. They had to inject language that reflected humanity’s fallen state with new meaning. Thus, they took a noun (agape) that hardly occurs in classical Greek, poured into it their own meaning, and adopted it to speak of the nature of the relationship that characterizes the inner life of God. The thought of a love that cares more for another than for itself was formed and nominally and verbally expressed. That understanding then come to predominate the meaning of the Greek verbal root (agapao) from which the noun was formed. The New Testament writers and the father of the early church then had the linquistic equipment necessary to describe this God who is seen in Jesus Christ, his essential nature, and his relation to us. Something new had entered fallen human thought. The prophet Isaiah had a foreglimpse of this new thought when he asked, “Who has believed our message?” (Isaiah 53:1). To the one who does not know Christ, the story of Christ is unbelievable. But in Christ and the cross such love can be seen, and with the church’s new vocabulary the story can be told.