God and eHarmony
Last week, a professor confessed during lecture that he was “turned off” to religion at a young age because he never understood what it meant to “love God, as my Sunday School teachers constantly urged me to do.” In a way, this professor has articulated one of the most troubling questions of Christianity: what does a “relationship” with God really look like? Today, God does not appear to us as a physical presence. We cannot meet God for a casual coffee date or take Him on a stroll through the New Hampshire woods. We cannot send God a facebook message, but instead must direct our silent prayers to heaven, making even daily communication with Him seems vague and ethereal. We can hardly love God in the same way that we love our parents, our friends, or our spouses; He is an omnipotent deity who permanently resides in an unknown spiritual dimension, and we are lowly humans, often more concerned with basic survival and the fulfillment of unexamined personal desires.
My professor proceeded to explain that when religious people speak of “loving God” they are actually using a sort of spiritual slang equitable to “obeying God.” Their expression of loyalty is motivated by fear and mindless slavery, not love. “Love, in the religious sense, is not a feeling,” he told us.
Yet in Matthew 22:37-38, Jesus declares, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment.” By loving God with our mind, we love Him practically: serving Him and remaining faithful to his commandments. By loving Him with our soul, we love Him spiritually: worshipping Him as our Savior and Lord. By loving Him with our heart, we love Him personally: seeking to understand Him better through prayer and reading the Bible.
Allow me to present a helpful metaphor. Advertisements for online dating sites such as eHarmony and Match.com present us with the harsh truth that the internet is slowly destroying all opportunities for meaningful, personal relationships unencumbered by technology. Most of us who have avoided these sites, which proclaim fabulously efficient ways to meet compatible singles, wonder how many permanent relationships can be formed based on a profile page and a photoshopped picture. If statistics are to be believed, however, 17 percent of married couples from 2007-2010 met their spouse through online dating [1]. Some of these people may fall in love before even speaking face to face.
Online dating sites do not provide a physical presence any more than God does. The love felt by a woman on Match.com is based in the belief that the person she is chatting with is real. Though we cannot see Him, we believe that God is real, and we can hold a conversation with Him by reading and responding to His Word. The online-dating couple sustains their relationship in the hope that they can one day meet in Chicago or NYC and go on a date to a restaurant that serves mints with the check. We sustain our relationship with God in the hope that we can one day meet with him in heaven, where Jesus Christ is “at God’s right hand—with angels, authorities and powers in submission to him” (1 Peter 3:22). We do indeed obey God as a demonstration of love, but we also love Him as a Person who cared for us enough to sacrifice his own Son that we might set aside secondhand communication and spend eternity with Him.
[1] “The Evolution of Dating: Match.com and Chadwick Martin Bailey Behavioral Studies Uncover a Fundamental Shift.” Chadwick Martin Bailey. April 2010. http://blog.cmbinfo.com/press-center-content/bid/46915/The-Evolution-of-Dating-Match-com-and-Chadwick-Martin-Bailey-Behavioral-Studies-Uncover-a-Fundamental-Shift
January 31st, 2012 at 9:29 AM
Nice post. I believe there is real communication that takes place between God and me. I hear him through his Word, I hear him through his people, and I hear him through my mind since I have “the mind of Christ” (1 Cor 2:16). Certainly obeying God is one aspect of our love relationship with him (1 John 2:5). Our relationship with God is not one of equal friends, nor is it an Earthly romance, but I believe there is an emotional element of love to our relationship with God. It’s difficult to escape this in the Psalms, for instance Psalms 84. We are whole entities, spirit, soul and body, and our emotions are a real part of who we are.