The Message of Love
VOX columnist Patrick Mitchell’s new book “The Message of Love” is out! Here Patrick, who is Director of Learning and a lecturer in theology at the Irish Bible Institute shares more about his book, which Scot McKnight describes as a “sparklingly clear and faithful exposition”.
(From the October - December 2019 issue of VOX)
Pretty well all of us are interested in love and I am no different. We all want to love and be loved and this book explores what Christian love looks like in day to day life: God’s love for us; our love for God; and our love for others.
Love is an important topic for theology since it is a subject our culture is endlessly fascinated by, whether in books, art or film. Today ‘God is love’ has been reversed to ‘love is god’ – love is what gives our lives ultimate purpose in an uncertain world, love is worshipped, pursued and individualised.
Christians can have two unhelpful responses to this - and I am talking generally here.
One is cultural conformity. God’s love is sentimentalised, judgement is rarely talked about, we are uncomfortable with sexual ethics, we sing cringe-worthy romantic worship songs and much of the Old Testament is quietly ignored.
The other is when the church fails to give love the priority it deserves. We tolerate the scandal of Christian lovelessness, are blind to how deeply our hearts have been captured by the love of money, we push justice for the poor to the margins and treat love as an optional ‘add on’ to believing ‘sound’ doctrine. So, I think an urgent missional challenge facing the church today is to hear afresh, and put into practice, the radically counter-cultural nature of the Bible’s teaching on love. God calls us to be authentic communities of love – this is our mission.
In reading and teaching the Bible, it kept hitting me how love ties together the character of God, His covenant relationship with His people, the motive behind the incarnation and cross of Jesus Christ, the heart of Christian discipleship, the ministry of the Spirit, the mission of the church and the nature of our future hope. And yet love is a strangely neglected topic in theology and biblical studies. So, my prayer is that this book can help, even a little bit, to put love back where it belongs, at the centre of Christian teaching, preaching and experience.
This book is for anyone interested in what the Bible says about love! Each chapter is a stand-alone exposition of a particular Bible passage, so you can dip in and out without feeling you have to read it all from start to finish. I hope it is particularly helpful to preachers and teachers and Bible study groups – there is a Study Guide for groups at the back of the book.
“God’s prime agenda in sending His Son is to create communities of radical love.”
Love is God’s prime agenda
The core message is that love is the primary weapon in God’s war. This idea comes out again and again - God’s prime agenda in sending His Son is to create communities of radical love. Paul says that such love fulfils the purpose of the law. Love is therefore far more than a ‘nice’ idea, it is actually God’s goal for His people and His ‘weapon’ in a spiritual war with forces opposed to His will. Christians are to fight with love, not with the weapons of the world.
Is the New Testament God different to the Old?
Many people think the God of the Old Testament is somehow different to the God of Love we see revealed in Jesus.
This is a question that comes up quite a bit in the book and not only in the Old Testament chapters. Behind the question, I think, is the relationship between love and judgement – is one incompatible with the other? The Bible’s consistent answer is “no”. Take Exodus 34:6-7. Verse 6 celebrates God as compassionate, gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love and generous in forgiveness. While we might be tempted to stop there, verse 7 goes on to rejoice that He also does not leave the guilty unpunished. This is good news because God would not be loving if He were not also a judge. Even we are outraged at injustice, how much more God who created all things ‘very good’? God’s wrath is a consequence of His love – He acts against all that seeks to destroy His loving purposes.
My own “take-aways”
I guess one big take-away is that we are first and foremost lovers. What we love shows who we truly are and what we really believe. This is why Jesus, Paul and John all have so much to say about the heart.
Some other points that really challenged and encouraged me include:
God’s love is not unconditional – it calls for our response of obedience and love in return.
Love is not as easy or instant as our culture likes to think – in the Bible it is a virtue that takes commitment, patience and practice.
“If we don’t read 1 Corinthians 13 as the most searching chapter in the Bible, we are reading it wrong!”
We need bodies to love – biblical love is earthy and practical, not abstract and theoretical. And when it comes to sexual love, the Song of Songs beautifully celebrates it.
Love costs - wholehearted love for Jesus can cost disciples their lives. It is inconvenient to defend the weak and marginalised. It seems absurd to love our enemies. Christian husbands are repeatedly told to love their wives as themselves (Ephesians 5) because they had status and power.
Biblical love is communal; the vast majority of the love language in the New Testament is about the church.
And the best news of all is that God is utterly good and utterly loving – without His steadfast love there would be no Abraham, no Israel, no church, no gospel, no cross, no forgiveness, no hope.
How can people get hold of a copy?
The Message of Love is available on the IVP UK website www.ivpbooks.com/the-message-of-love and through online retailers. Look out for the Dublin book launch on October 14.
What others had to say about it
“For close to two decades I have studied both how the Bible presents love and how Bible scholars have expressed that presentation. Luminaries such as James Moffatt and Leon Morris, from two considerably different traditions, have become standard treatments but I found both coming up short for different reasons. No one will ever offer the final word on what the Bible says about love, but I know of no volume that is as thorough, and sensitive to context and contour, as Patrick Mitchel’s sparklingly clear and faithful exposition of how the Bible presents love, how in fact the God of love loves the world and the people of God in Christ. This will become a standard text for my classes on New Testament theology.”
Scot McKnight, Professor of New Testament, Northern Baptist Theological Seminary, Lombard, Illinois, USA
“The Bible Speaks Today [series] has set a high standard over the years of biblical exposition with relevant application, abreast of scholarship but written in language that laypersons can appreciate. As the series has moved from biblical books to biblical themes that cut across the canon, that high standard has been retained. Patrick Mitchel’s volume may be the best of the ‘Themes’ part of the series to emerge thus far. How can one begin to hope to do justice to a topic as broad and misunderstood as ‘love’? Read this book for the answer. Mitchel has not only done it justice but has charted the way Christian thinking on the topic should proceed in our troubled world for the foreseeable future.”
Craig L. Blomberg, Distinguished Professor of New Testament, Denver Seminary, USA
