The Love Series Part 3: Perfect Love in Perfect Authority

​“Let not your hearts be troubled. Believe in God; believe also in me. In my Father's house are many rooms. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, that where I am you may be also. And you know the way to where I am going.” Thomas said to him, “Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?” Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you had known me, you would have known my Father also. From now on you do know him and have seen him.” Philip said to him, “Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us.” Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you so long, and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on my own authority, but the Father who dwells in me does his works. 11 Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me, or else believe on account of the works themselves. “Truly, truly, I say to you, whoever believes in me will also do the works that I do, and greater works than these will he do because I am going to the Father. Whatever you ask in my name, this I will do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask me anything in my name, I will do it. John 14:1-14

There is truly much we can say about love in this series and sometimes in plenty of words, we can go astray. In the first part, we established that love needs a definition and that the definition should be in Christ. In the second part, we established that we should not sacrifice the Christian idea of love for the shallow waters of universal acceptance that are subject to failure. Today, I hope to perhaps cover why it is important for love to be balanced in perfect authority, why we currently live in a world that despises authority, and why there is perfect love in God. While the principal scripture is John 14, I want us to first understand a few things before we make a parallel. Let us begin.

No One Tells Me What To Do

There is an interesting worldly phrase that was coined by a British historian by the name of Lord Acton about the nature of power and morality and how one tends to rise as the other falls as far as human beings are concerned. Interestingly enough, the context of this quote is presented in regards to the idea of papal infallibility and questions how we can still hold to the Papal office with unquestionable authority in light of the many shady things that involved those in office at the time, more specifically on the recording of the Inquisition. This is where we get the famous phrase...

I cannot accept your canon that we are to judge [the] Pope and King, unlike other men, with a favorable presumption that they did no wrong. If there is any presumption it is the other way against holders of power, increasing as the power increases. Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men, even when they exercise influence and not authority: still, more when you superadd the tendency or the certainty of corruption by authority. Lord John Dalberg-Acton

What you make of the argument, that is whether you hold or reject the notion of papal infallibility, is something for another day but I do want to look at why this quote and particularly the section of the quote that is often repeated the most is interesting. There is an idea, one that history does affirm, that those who are presented with great power are often incapable of presenting great responsibility, to recontextualize the ideas of a certain dead man. If you look into history, you will find that every well-meaning or good-willed civilization always attains great power and always eventually becomes corrupted with said power, performing horrible acts and then, and this is important, dies and to the rise of another kingdom. The moment when the moral code of those in leadership begins to be questionable is at the apex of an empire and it dissolves soon after. Even skeptics will have a hard time trying to divorce authority from morality. There seems to be a relationship between the two that benefits people when it works and damages people when it does not. So, just to clarify, it is not that power is linked with immorality but that great power presents greater temptation to be divorced from morality and once the divorce begins being plain, you can slowly chart the end of an era of a certain civilization. The reason I state that you can see it happen when it begins being plain is that even when people don’t immediately see it, power can slowly erode at a man and sometimes it happens quickly and sometimes it happens over stretches of time. So, up until this point, we may have a general agreement with anyone who has a basic historical understanding. The problem starts when we begin to shed light on ignorance that is intentionally unexplored. Why exactly does great power corrupt? Why does it come with great temptation so strong that even good-willed men are made evil? From this point, the question will be answered with a Christian bias. Reader’s discretion is advised.

Adam and Eve

Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden’?” And the woman said to the serpent, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden, but God said, You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the midst of the garden, neither shall you touch it, lest you die.’” But the serpent said to the woman, “You will not surely die. For God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked. And they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves loincloths. Genesis 3:1-7

Ah, yes. The age-old story of Adam and Eve. What does this have to do with power or love for that matter? Bear with me. The first account of man’s rule over creation is interesting because it offers the answer and the difference between a believer and a non-believer lies in their ability to not only understand this story but see it as true. Adam and Eve were in charge of everything. Do you want to be the President of Super Nation #25? Not enough. Do you own billions of dollars? Adam and Eve needed no currency. You wanna own the world? Adam and Eve were responsible for it all. They represented the power that no man ever will arrive at, even in this capitalist era. Adam and Eve had access to everything they needed. They were just provided with one negation, one thing they could not possess. The tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Essentially, it was the choice between working with God’s morality of following one rule or the freedom to make their own and be burdened with the responsibility of making the right choices. The only one capable of saying what is right and what is wrong is God and He alone maintains that right. So at that moment, Adam and Eve were presented with the test of idolatry; will they submit to God and follow His only rule of obedience? Or will they become a god unto themselves and treat themselves as such. This, the serpent knew all too well. There are a lot of people currently with the idea that the serpent knew what was up; that he had the cheat answers to the score and that God was hiding it from Adam and Eve. Unfortunately, the spirit of the serpent, the Devil, is defined as a being that already failed the test of idolatry. He wanted to be like God and God decided to put him in the most humbling position in all of creation; as a being that would constantly show the might of God throughout the ages. Some of us have this incredibly weird notion that Satan is in active warfare with God over some things. God has crushed the serpent, ladies, and gentlemen. It was never a fight. Every single goal the serpent remains with is precisely where God needs him to be to do exactly what God wants. Nothing more, nothing less. The serpent understood he was done for so he wanted accomplices. Misery needs company. If he is going down, so will the human race. So he appeals to them with the one question that has since plagued humanity; Did God really say? And from that point, every human being has had to grapple with that question. For those of us who do not believe, this question may sound a bit different; am I really supposed to be held to that morality? Am I not benefited by the alternative? If the alternative benefits me and others, is that not what good is? You may not believe this is the same so obviously, the test is to work out a scenario where you want something that actively conflicts with the supposed good of others. Then the question becomes; if I do not hold to the good of many for my own benefit just this once, am I wrong? Surely, there are many other times where I hold to the good of many and if my good outweighs my bad, shall I not still be well? If the alternative is done by me and others, does it not still apply as well? This is how we end up with moral ambiguity where something is unquestionably wrong unless there are times where I benefit just a little. We are all flawed and human after all. But the itch to please yourself strikes again and again and each time seems isolated from the last because there is a lot of moral good you have done to appease your soul. At that point, you are lost, unable to keep count so to you it no longer matters. You’ve been doing what you initially found morally wrong for so long and so there’s no good reason to change it now. Your conscience no longer bears witness to your faults since it seems normal now. So the problem becomes the fact that you are not only divorced from God’s morality, you are also divorced from your own. This is why a lot of us find morality to be completely subjective. It doesn’t seem to make any sense otherwise because the alternative is the reality that the law, both your own and that of God, cannot be kept. The law does not exist to offer hope of being followed but continuously gets more burdensome to follow. The strength and holiness to maintain integrity are not present in human beings. Adam and Eve succeeded in awareness of morality but unlike God, have not the other balancing characteristics and thus have no ability to do anything but sin for it becomes easier to do so than to do good.

What then shall we say? That the law is sin? By no means! Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.” But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness. For apart from the law, sin lies dead. I was once alive apart from the law, but when the commandment came, sin came alive and I died. The very commandment that promised life proved to be death to me. For sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment deceived me and through it killed me. So the law is holy, and the commandment is holy and righteous and good. Romans 7:7-12

Paul recognized that awareness of the law just brought nothing but condemnation because it was demanding perfection. Just because it is easy to sin does not make sin right. I often would see someone point to the Mosaic law and claim that Christians pick and choose what rules they follow. This is probably so they can feel better about being in the wrong. When we look into the Mosaic law and see every single command they had to follow, we witness how much we could not follow it even if we tried. The law cries, guilty, guilty, guilty. The journey of the Mosaic law is the journey of man coming to the understanding that there is the only one that can hold morality to perfection and that is God. Be it one rule or a thousand systematic rules that are specific to every matter of life, the Law reveals the truth; we are not moral. We are not perfect, blameless, all-knowing, and all-powerful enough to maintain ourselves; we are not God. But more importantly, that standard is demanded, lest we be persuaded with being flawed. We cannot appeal to ‘We are not perfect!’ because the knowledge of good and evil refuses to give us rest. God throughout the years proves to the civilizations that holiness and righteousness and morality in perfection are foreign to them. They cannot lift themselves by their bootstraps and neither can we. There has to be a solution to morality that is outside of ourselves because history paints a consistent picture of failure every time people look unto themselves. A king can make murder illegal but they cannot purge the desire of man to kill. There remains only one solution. God. Power, therefore, does not corrupt absolutely. Power is given to the absolutely corrupt. With each drop of power, man is only made more aware of their corruption until it is plain to everyone. All that lay in the heart surfaces and the thin morality rips. Every drop of power requires strength to maintain integrity to combat pre-existent evil in our hearts but because we delight in redefining morality to make our load easier, our motivation to maintain absolute morality fails us.

The Power of Anarchy

This is why our current world is more interested in destroying all forms of traditional authority, specifically ones that were established from the fruits of Christian majority states. At first, this rebellion was for liberation. The problem was that those involved in the liberation thought that they were responsible for creating limits and that those who followed them would do the same without seeking their own redefining. They usurped the idea of God’s authority by undermining concepts that were hitherto unquestioned and succeeded in their quest to show Christianity as ignorant baseless claims and hailed instead science as the ultimate unquestionable authority, given the advancements and the ability for science to answer questions that were understood to be godly functions or miracles. Healthy skepticism was encouraged in fields science had not given answers to and anything that could not be immediately verified by the scientific method or viewed with a humanistic lens was deemed foolish. This may have worked for a time. Unfortunately, their greatest strength also began to be their biggest flaw. In light of seeking answers from a more scientific view, more believers got engaged with sciences and philosophy to deter the arguments of ignorance and scientific advancements towards finding new species and new worlds outside of Earth opened up questions that the scientific community could not give immediate answers, some of which do not have clear answers to date. The issue was addressed primarily in two ways; science was to be seen as evolving and as such any answers offered that were later proven to be wrong weren’t evidence that the answers in themselves were under scrutiny but rather insufficient evidence that caused a misunderstanding. The second is a much subtler answer; that there are questions that need not be asked as they are not as important to us as others. But that was just a crack in a dam that was soon to break. By calling certain moral understandings as suspect and subject to scrutiny, that God’s existence should be questioned, it very well meant that nothing really could not. So as time went by, organizations grew in power to question all forms of authority in existence. Feminism questioned the idea of men having power and that being absolute evidence of automatic inequality, regardless of whether or not men were supportive of the movement or actively participating in stated inequality. The LGBTQ questioned the idea of heterosexuality as the normal standard and that being absolute evidence of automatic inequality, regardless of whether or not those who were ‘straight’ were supportive of the movement or actively participating in stated inequality. BLM and CRT as a whole questioned the idea of privilege in light of slavery and colonization enacted by specifically Caucasian people and that being evidence of automatic inequality, regardless of whether or not those who are Caucasian were supportive of the movement or actively participating in stated inequality. The skepticism presented that seeks freedom from oppressive laws that were only moral to benefit a certain class of people. Every single group mentioned started as people with purist ideals that called to question what the world believed to be true and when the world gave way, it saw the rise of another. The irony of the situation is that almost every group that exists has moral grounds that completely deter the previous ones to the point that for you to co-exist, you will have to pretend you have allegiance to one and not necessarily the others. Every one of these groups spells out the same problem skeptics did not expect to run into; a complete overhaul of authority for the sake of tolerance. Everyone seeks equality but because they do not want to be tied to a singular authority, they will attempt to persuade the world that their ideas are the most moral. When we have societies that are built on different groups of people with fundamentally different ideas on morality, we have anarchy and for once the world sees this. We now have people desiring for the uncomplicated past which did not have these issues but actual historical reflection is exactly what undermines these groups so, for the sake of their relevance, they refuse for the world to ignore them and remind people of how bad those days were so that people can only look to the present and them. You may not want to agree with me on this but the reason the past was uncomplicated was that the foundation of many nations was built upon fundamental Christian principles and morality. If you look to the recent past and see flaws, I urge you to look deeper into history. You will realize the problem has never been tolerance. It has been sin. The world has never been a utopia. It is far from that now and it will never be. If you go back far enough in history, you will find...

Jesus Christ

The true cure for anarchy does not lie with man. History has proven time and time again that any power man has had to do good has been abused by evil hearts. There will never be a time where universal acceptance will be a thing. The Roman empire, large as it was, would not achieve it. No government, no laws, nothing man can do can fix the divorce from morality you witness. The true cure for anarchy is a person who has absolute authority and is not corrupted by any of it. One who can say a decree and suffers not hypocrisy for doing so. One who has a morality that is not subject to scrutiny, justice that is not subject to negotiation, the complete historical context of the past, present, and possibly the future to avoid any possible bias, complete knowledge to comprehend human motive, sovereignty beyond any government and empathy beyond human understanding. One whose definition of love lies not with the pain of others but rather who they are to Him. One who is not a man but has a relationship with man as author, that none can question his judgment, placeholder, having an existence that history cannot deny and humanity that is both resonant yet distant from evil, savior, being the bridge between man and Himself in a way man could never be, and judge, that all who seek not the message of hope are as lost as they want to be. Jesus Christ is the true cure for anarchy. A deity that arrived to serve and not served, offered justice to those who were wicked without mincing his words, balanced fragility and sovereignty in a way his own both loved and hated, and at the end of it all, sacrificed in the most shameless way a man could at the time that millions of people may be called fools across 2000 years for holding to this as their only hope that they are redeemed from evil. These men and women would not let their hearts be troubled. They would believe in God and Christ also. In their foolish journey, they would convince people of all walks of life. Those who considered themselves smart and those who considered themselves uneducated. Those who had power and those who had none. Those who thought they were God’s people and those who knew they weren’t. All of them aligned to the idea that there is a God and that this God loved them so much that He gave up the glory and majesty of all of creation to do something He did not need to do; live a perfect life and suffer for it. Whatever you hold to be love right now might be offensive in 10 years because it is a love that is dependent on a universal agreement. Universal agreement is a poor authority of love because men have no interest in seeking unity, however much they sing about it. Love only makes sense when it is defined by something that cannot change and that is who God claims to be. You are welcome to disagree on whether or not God exists but if He does, you might need to look for answers while you still have the time. If you find it to be true, repent and seek God’s face. He will save you and you will find a definition of perfect love in His perfect authority.