Misconstruing God’s love begins by misapprehending human love and then projecting that defective notion onto God. To ascribe our character qualities to God, as if we were the model after which God is patterned, is idolatry. Such reasoning inverts reality by fashioning a god after our human likeness. Thus, John Calvin rightly observes, “Man’s nature, so to speak, is a perpetual factory of idols.”[8]
Proponents of the sexual revolution of the 1960s glommed onto Freudian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich’s designation “free love.” Reich reasoned that sexual liberation would destroy the morality inherent to capitalism. Others, especially Herbert Marcuse, embraced the notion and capitalized on it in Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud. As the sexual revolution’s new intellectual, he coined the slogan: “Make love, not war.”[1] “Free love” practitioners engaged in casual sex without commitments, reflecting the contemporary expression, “friends with benefits.” Love, lacking self-governance, a moral compass, and boundaries, became eroticized. This only led to bondage, enslaving and ruining individuals, families, churches, governments, and whole societies. Witness the tragic and predictable collapse of the American society that has reached every level of our culture.
“Free love,” a euphemism for “morally unrestrained conduct,” takes root and flourishes wherever belief in the fullness of God’s character revealed in Scripture is compromised. Where theological mischief occurs, there you will find behavioral mischief. When God’s love is preached and believed apart from his holiness and justice, the erasure of moral boundaries invariably follows. When people imagine that God bestows his love without moral commands, sin-corrupted reasoning justifies their immoral conduct. Distorted notions concerning God always lead to distorted human behavior.
“Free love” does not acknowledge any external morality as it ignores boundaries of right and wrong and is covetous, self-absorbed, impulsive, heedless, and amorphous. Unlike “free love,” true love patterns itself after God’s love. It embraces what his character establishes as right versus wrong and is self-giving, others-oriented, unchanging, kind, and structured.
It is fitting for this essay to feature two parts: (1) a short accounting of our society’s spurning of God and its abandonment of the true nature of love for others; and (2) a consideration of God’s love and our Christian role in calling our society to repentance concerning love for others.
Government-Sponsored Erotic Love
Since the 1960s, “free love’s” calculated evisceration of public and private morality has taken its long march through the institutions, ensconcing itself in the Clinton White House and attaining critical mass with presidential candidate Barack Obama who declared, “Change will not come if we wait for some other person or if we wait for some other time. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”[2] Five days before the election of 2008, he announced his mission, “We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.” At first, he and Vice President Joe Biden feigned opposition to same-sex so-called “marriage.”[3] Yet, transformation of America began in earnest near the end of President Obama’s first term.[4]
- On May 6, 2012, VP Biden goes rogue, strongly endorsing “gay marriage” on NBC’s Meet the Press.
- On May 9, 2012, Obama, in an interview on ABC News says, “I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.” That evening, rainbow colors bedecked the White House.
Peter Jones of TruthXChange aptly wondered, “May 9, 2012: The Official End of Christendom?”