It is only the unconditional love of God that can fully satisfy the human longing for love. This is because every human love is based on the recipient’s worthiness to be loved and is thus conditioned on the receiver’s ability to maintain his or her worth. God’s love is unconditionally, unmotivated by the recipient. His love is wholly founded in the Giver, so it is unconditional and never changing in strength or direction. Those whom God loves, He always loves with an unwavering passion. His love is not dependent on those whom He loves but on His eternal choice to love them. It is what the Bible repeatedly calls a “great love” (Numbers 14:19; Psalm 69:13; Lamentations 3:22; Ephesians 2:4) No human love can never satisfy us. Such love finds its warrant in us who are ever changing, never-deserving, thus constantly worrying that the love we’ve found will cease. We are searching for love in all the wrong places and from all the wrong people. God’s love is founded in His desire to love a people. Our unceasing passion for His unconditional passion is a divine desire created and fulfilled by only Him.
In the movie, “The Last of the Mohicans” Daniel Day Lewis is forced to separate himself from the woman he loves. He knows that she will be taken captive by other Indians who are hostile to his tribe and the English love of his life. Just before he takes the daring leap into a waterfall, Lewis turns to her and shouts above the crashing sound of the water, “I will find you. No matter where they take you, I will find you.” It’s a movie moment that melts hearts because every human being wants to hear those words. We all want someone to love us whose love knows no bounds. We desire divine, unquenchable, unrelenting passion as evidenced in the cross and empty tomb of Jesus Christ. We want somebody to love us so much that not even death can keep them from us. We long for an eternal love.
Teana and I are at Southern Seminary in Louisville Ky, where I have enjoyed the 2nd annual 17th century Baptist History conference. While at Lifeway yesterday, Teana bought the new Baptist Hymnal for only $13.00. For two days I have enjoyed listening to her sing (I love hearing her sing anyway) her way through the hymnal, songs both old (Jesus, What a Friend of Sinners) and new (How Great Is Our God). I would encourage every person and/or family to purchase a copy of the new hymnal for daily private or family worship. No matter your music taste with regard to hymns or choruses, you will find both in the new Baptist Hymnal. Most importantly, you will daily discover our God, Who is worthy to be praised with voice and instrument (Psalm 150).
Scougal went on to say that “as divine love doth advance and elevate the soul; so it is that alone which can make it happy” (IBID, page 66). In other words, the only way to be happy in this life is to acknowledge another more important Life; the life of God. Your soul needs a Savior. Divine love creates a great soul. Divine love fulfills the human soul. Me first must be transformed into Him first. The most direct route to earthly contentment is to acknowledge and receive God’s divine, unconditional love. Until a soul accepts that love, it can only be “miserable and full of trouble and disquietude.” This is because only the eternal expanse of God’s incalculable love can “answer the vastness of its (the soul’s) capacity…when it finds not wherewith (on this earth) to satisfy its cravings.” That’s because we were created to live for eternity. God created us for Himself. C.S. Lewis once wrote, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.” (Mere Christianity, 106)
Nothing on earth can provide the happiness a human being seeks. God has set eternity in our hearts (Ecclesiastes 3:11) and only eternity is big enough to fill the void that longs for God. Nothing less than eternity will satisfy and please a people who possess a subconscious memory of God’s presence in Eden and long for that perfect relationship to be reestablished. “Your kingdom come” (Luke 16:2) is a prayer whose timeless source isn’t just a longing for an enchanting future but the memory of a glorious past. Every fairy tale is the expressed desire for what once was, to once again exist as what will be. It is what Pascal called an “empty trace”. We long to be loved by God.
As the twentieth century progressed,the me first mindset was transformed into a me only mentality. This was evidenced in a small part by things like road rage, a generation of frivolous lawsuits, an astronomical increase in the divorce rate and a billion dollar pleasure seeking industry. Last year’s spouse, clothes, car, home and job need to be replaced the latest models. Our unrest is the repercussion of a “a passion [that] can not but fret and torment the spirit, when it finds not wherewith to satisfy its cravings.” Even worse is that we’re not only trying to satisfy ourselves but impress a world, most of whom we don’t even know. Think about it, if we were only trying to impress ourselves, the designer clothing label would be on the inside of the clothes. This whirlpool of degradation has regurgitated a people who contribute little and to whom the world owes everything. Everyone wants to be happy but apparently no one knows how to be happy. Yet ignorance never stopped American ingenuity from wearying itself in the effort to achieve eternal bliss. But nothing can satisfy the cravings of a person created for eternity except eternity itself.
Unrequited affections madly and blindly drive us to seek self-satisfaction. Scougal responded to humanity’s dilemma by asserting that only the love of God could rescue mankind. God’s love, especially when it is considered as wholly undeserved and contrasted with the damnation which is deserved, is the ultimate answer to the human quest for happiness. If, according to Scougal, a “noble and well-placed affection doth advance and improve the spirit unto a conformity with the perfections which it loves” (Scougal, 62) then responding to God’s love only serves to make the most heavenly, holy and happy people. Man’s chief end is achieved when he glorifies God by enjoying Him. According to Scougal, godliness is the sole answer to humanity’s crisis and godliness is the natural result of experiencing God’s love. The love of God is the only cure for humanity’s sickness. Inherent within the human condition is the divine desire to experience the eternal, unconditional love of God as expressed through Jesus Christ. Knowing and receiving God’s love promises to birth an earthly bound, heavenly-minded people whose thoughts, affections and resulting behaviors create a fulfilled life.
love must needs be miserable and full of trouble and disquietude,
when there is not worth and excellency enough in the object to
answer the vastness of its capacity: so eager and violent
a passion can not but fret and torment the spirit, when it
finds not wherewith to satisfy its cravings.
If Henry Scougal is right, it is no wonder that Americans are so very unhappy. Only the eternal, unconditional love of God can satisfy the cravings of the human soul yet human beings continually set their affection on people or things that don’t have the capacity to “answer the vastness of its [humanity’s desire for love] capacity”. This unhappiness is clearly evidenced in the discontent that pervades our lives. We have believed the Madison Avenue or Hollywood lie that something or someone on this planet could fulfill us and make us completely, unendingly happy. We have spent our lives trying to discover such a love, only to be continually dissatisfied. Adam and Eve’s disillusionment has been passed onto their children like mounting waves preceding a perfect storm of our own making.
Each successive generation has attempted to satisfy the eternal by obtaining the temporal. The progression of continual disappointments has multiplied itself until the dam of discontent has burst, flooding our twenty-first century lives in an uncontrollable and insatiable demand to be happy, satisfied and fulfilled. Our first parents’ desire has become their children’s demand and the result has been disastrous for the human race. The greatness of this desire is superseded only by the disappointment of the fruitless search. We have examined every nook and cranny of the planet only to find ourselves exasperated and angry with “eager and violent a passion”, primarily because only the love of God can fill “the vastness” of our capacity to be loved.
A quote from this Sunday evening’s message on Psalm 36 titled, “The Fundamental Difference Between Saints and Sinners.”
Never forget that when we are dealing with any pleasure in its healthy and normal and satisfying form, we are, in a sense, on the enemy’s ground. I know we have won many a soul through pleasure. All the same, it is his invention, not ours. He made the pleasures: all our research so far has not enabled us to produce one. All we can do is to encourage the humans to take the pleasures which our enemy has produced, at times, or in ways, or in degrees, which he has forbidden. Hence we always try to work away from the natural condition of any pleasure to that in which it is least natural, least redolent of its Maker, and least pleasurable. An ever-increasing craving for an ever-diminishing pleasure is the formula. It is more certain; and it’s better style. To get the man’s soul and give him nothing in return-that is what really gladdens our father’s heart.
Recently at Heritage I have been commenting on Genesis 12:1-3; its implications about God and its responsibilities for the people of God. If you are a parent or if you are teaching children the Bible, Dr. John Walton’s www.teachthetext.com will be an invaluable resource for you. Below you’ll find an exemplary article that defines the difference between teaching children ‘about’ the Bible, (which takes place in most evangelical homes and churches) rather than actually teaching children the Bible. Sadly, the vast majority of modern Protestants don’t understand the difference and can’t appreciate the difference either in their child’s classroom or from the pulpit. Thus, it is important to ‘retrain’ ourselves to understand the wonderful distinctiveness of actually teaching the text, both to ourselves and future generations. In that regard, adults must first learn and apply Dr. Walton’s hermeneutical observations to their own Bible study.
Hermeneutics and Children’s Curriculum by John Walton
Seminaries and grad programs that train pastors, and the academics who teach in those programs are very concerned about proper hermeneutics. We want pastors to have the very best training so that God’s word is handled properly and that preaching proceeds from the authoritative teaching of the text rather than from human cleverness or tangential ideas. This is as it should be since we seek to teach with the authority of God’s Word. My question is, why do we not show the same interest in assuring that children are taught with the same care?
It has been my practice over the years to work with the Children’s education program in my church to evaluate curriculum and train teachers for the pre-school through elementary grades. What I find in curricula is consistently shocking from a hermeneutical standpoint. I should hasten to say that curricula are often excellent from an educational standpoint—for that is the expertise of those producing curriculum. In the area of hermeneutics, however, the violations of sound method are frequent and obvious. I have identified five basic fallacies that appear repeatedly:
1. Promotion of the Trivial: The lesson is based on what is a passing comment in the text (Josh 9:13, they did not consult the Lord), a casual observation about the text (Moses persevered in going back before Pharaoh over and over) or even a deduction supplied in the text (Joshua and Caleb were brave and strong). The Bible is not being properly taught if we are teaching virtues that the text does not have in focus in that passage. We would like children to be virtuous, but we dare not teach virtues rather than the Bible. The plague narratives are not teaching perseverance nor is the feeding of the multitude teaching sharing (as done by the little boy in one of the accounts).
2. Illegitimate extrapolation: The lesson is improperly expanded from a specific situation to all general situations (God helped Moses do a hard thing, so God will help you do a hard thing. But the hard thing Moses was doing was something commanded by God whereas in the lesson the hard thing becomes anything the child wants to achieve). In these cases what the text is teaching is passed by in favor of what the curriculum wants to teach and biblical authority is neglected.
3. Reading Between the Lines: This occurs when teachers or students are asked to analyze what the characters are thinking, speculate on their motives, or fill in details of the plot that the story does not give. When such speculations become the center of the lesson, the authority of the biblical teaching is lost because the teaching is centered on what the reader provided.
4. Missing important nuance: This occurs when the curriculum pinpoints an appropriate lesson but misses a connection that should be made to drive the point home accurately. It is not enough, for instance to say that God wants us to keep his rules—it is important to realize that God has given us a sense of who he is and how we ought to respond in our lives. It is not just an issue of obeying rules—God wants us to know him and respond to him by following in his ways and being like him.
5. Focus on people rather than God: The Bible is God’s revelation of himself and its message and teaching is largely based on what it tells us about God. This is particularly true of narrative (stories). While we are drawn to observe the people in the stories, we cannot forget that the stories are intended to teach us about God more than about people. If in the end, the final point is “We should/shouldn’t be like X (= some biblical character)” there is probably a problem unless the “X” is Jesus or God. Better is “we can learn through X’s story that God . . .”
If we are negligent of sound hermeneutics when we teach Bible to children, should it be any wonder that when they get into youth groups, Bible studies and become adults in the church, that they do not know how to derive the authoritative teaching from the text?
We all have a working hermeneutic, even though most have never taken a course. Where do we learn it? We learn it from those we respect. For many people this means that they learn their hermeneutics from their Sunday school teachers. Teachers in turn teach what is put into their hands. Perhaps we ought to be more attentive how Sunday school curriculum is teaching our children to find the authoritative teaching of God in the stories.
What has been your experience in your church? Have people in your church recognized this problem and what are you doing about it?
For more information on this problem in curriculum see the article posted on my curriculum website, www.teachthetext.com and for guidelines about how to approach the Old Testament narratives see J. Walton and A. Hill, Old Testament Today (Zondervan, 2004).
