What is Love?

What is love? In recent years, wise men have said, “Love’s not a feeling.” However, can the love of a man for a woman or a woman for a man be love if it has no feeling? I think not. Emotions are a gift from God. Even before the Fall, Adam expressed strong emotions about Eve. When Adam first saw Eve, he said,

“This is now bone of my bones
and flesh of my flesh;
she shall be called ‘woman,’
for she was taken out of man.”

The NIV sets this text apart from the surrounding prose as if this is not just a sentence; these lines are presented as a poem. The ESV translates the first line of this poem, “This at last…” It seems that Adam was announcing, with an exclamation point and even a sense of both relief and excitement that, finally, God had provided a truly suitable partner. Because of God’s provision of Eve, Adam may have uttered the first love poem from a man to a woman. Clearly, God wired us to have passionate feelings about our spouses.

While passion is important, I believe that life includes various phases where God works in our hearts and lives in different ways, focusing on some aspects of our soul rather than others. Perhaps a season of passion in a husband-wife relationship may be followed by a season of intellectual growth, for example. Regardless, our love must follow Christ’s pattern, in which his love ultimately fulfilled the law (Rom. 13:10). Christ’s love led to giving his life out of love for his people. Likewise, the husband must in essence lay down his life for his wife, and vice-versa. How? Before he gave his life, Christ taught that the law can be boiled down to two commands: love God and love others. Clearly, such love is expressed in a multitude of ways, by various means, in a relationship. Effective love for others is positive, encouraging, and helpful: “…love builds up." (I Cor. 8:1)

The Apostle Paul also teaches, “Let love be genuine…” (Rom. 12:9) Our world is filled with illegitimate love. The media promotes love of an image rather than true love for a person. Adolescent infatuation and unashamed lust have been substituted for the selfless love of the Bible. These are not true love and are devices used by the kingdom of darkness to prevent and destroy God-centered marriages.