Love Must Be Uneven to Be True

Show Outline with Links

Introduction

In a world filled with leftist levelers, one of the central duties of faithful Christians should be to keep everything as uneven as we can. It should be uneven and still truly loving, but it really needs to be truly uneven. As those who love equity, we must despise the flattening imperative that insists on a particular kind of soul-rotting equality.

By this, I mean that if you don’t love some people more than others, then you don’t understand yet what it means to love. Let me begin by stating what I mean by this, and then I will spend a little bit of extra time picking up the pieces, offering definitions as I go.

You should love your mother more than you do other people’s mothers. You should love your children more than you love the children of another country. You should love your neighbor/neighbor more than you love your seatmate/neighbor on a three-hour flight. You should love your own country more than you love other people’s countries.

Otherwise you become like that line from The Mikado, where a man is described as the “idiot who praises, with enthusiastic tone, every century but this and every country but his own.”

And so love, to be genuine, must be uneven. This is because all of us are finite and we have to start somewhere.

The Distortion

As we shall see in a moment, the Scriptures do summon us to a kind of universal love. However, this truth has been taken and distorted by those who would flatten the world. They say that this means that everyone should be loved and treated the same, and by everybody. The end result of this is that nothing is loved except for this rancid ideology, and everything and everyone is equally impoverished and mistreated. If you don’t think that this confusion is a real threat, in just a few weeks millions of your fellow citizens are going to vote for it.

If we would be equipped to deal with this, we need to understand in what sense the Bible commends a universal love, and in what sense the Bible demands from us a particular focus in loving. To that end . . .

Where Does the Bible Say . . .?

The Bible does teach us that we should love everybody. As my father used to say, Scripture requires us to love our wives, love our neighbors, and love our enemies—and everybody you meet all day long is at least one of those. So we are to love everybody.

And then this . . .

To love someone is to treat them lawfully from the heart. This must be our disposition, and this must be our intention. We do not get to exclude anyone with our shifts and evasions. We do not get to ask, “well, who is my neighbor exactly?” This is because your neighbors include those who curse and despitefully use you.

And so clearly, if we are to love these people, then no one is outside the pale. We are to love all men.

But how does this translate on a practical level. There are billions of neighbors currently alive, and we don’t have billions of hours in the day. In what ways must our love be particular and focused?

The Uneven Part

All this said, there is absolutely no expectation in Scripture that we will love everybody at exactly the same levels. It would be disobedience even to attempt it. As we turn to Galatians, pay attention to the key word especially.

How should I love all those people out there in the great, wide world? Well, the apostle says that we should do it as we “have opportunity.” When something arises. When you see the beat-up guy between Jerusalem and Jericho. When you have a chance to do something for a fellow, make sure to do it. But to whom should we make a point of it? To those of the household of faith. To our fellow Christians. Especially to them. They should have priority—spiritual priority, emotional priority, financial priority, practical priority. They are at the head of the line.

There must be a line, and you must start at one end of it. You are finite, and God has assigned a pattern of triage for you. Your family first, your fellow Christians second, your physical neighbors third, and the random guy with a flat tire fourth.

We can see this in numerous places. Another example of this principle is seen in one of the qualifications that Paul sets down for an elder in the church. He is supposed to prioritize his own children before heading off to conduct seminars on the importance of family. It does not matter how good his teaching gifts are. He must make sure everything is in order at home. More than one big time teacher has headed off to yet another conference to talk about the importance of family, and all his kids usually see of him is the back of his head.

Here Paul is requiring that a man with leadership gifts deploy them in his own family first. Other people’s children can wait.

We can also see the uneven nature of love in the instructions that Paul gives slave-owners in Colossians. Notice that this teaching is given in the context of a master/slave relationship. This is what Paul says.

Masters, give your slaves something, What should they give to their slaves? That which is just and equal. In short, Paul has no trouble seeing Christians function within a hierarchical society in a godly and equitable way. These slaves were not at the head of the line, but they were in the line, and they needed to be treated as though they were.

Nothing is more apparent than the fact the universal love required of Christians is not a leveling love.

Having established this, there are a few other things to sort out.

Relative Hatred

As we discuss this, we have to budget for the fact that human language can be squirrelly at times. For example, the Bible tells husbands that they must love their wives as Christ loved the church, and gave Himself for her (Eph. 5:25). But this same Bible also tells men that they must hate their wives (Luke 14:26). Jesus plainly says that if a man does not hate his wife, father, mother, and so on, he cannot be a disciple. So yikes.

The solution to this problem is found in the parallel passage in Matthew. There Jesus says that whoever loves father or mother more than Christ cannot be a disciple (Matt. 10:37). Putting Matthew and Luke together, we see that Christ requires an absolute allegiance be given to Him, one that puts all other loyalties and loves into the shade. This love for Christ, placed alongside a man’s love for family, needs to make his love for his family pale in comparison. If we compare them by means of hyperbole, the comparison makes a man’s earthly loves look like hatred.

While we are on the point, I should make the point that this does not result in anybody getting ripped off. A man who loves his wife more that he does Christ is doing so from his own limited resources, and his love is going to be paltry and limited. She will be shortchanged as a result. A man who loves Christ more than his wife is in fellowship with the source of all love, and his love for his wife is going to far more genuine than it ever could be if she were to remain an idol. In short, he is going to love her far better if she is #2 than he would be able to if she were #1.

In other words, when Christ requires this of us, He is requiring us to be in fellowship with ultimate love. He is requiring us to be in step with the only possible way of integrating all of our loves. If we refuse this demand, we are actually opting for the disintegration of all of our other loves. If you doubt what I say, look around at the world you are living in. Yet again, it is Christ or chaos.

And so of course, our love must be uneven. You should also be ready, at the drop of a hat, to help out the guy beat up by the side of the road, even though you do not know his name. He is in the line-up, “as you have opportunity.” This is actually how we know that your love back home is genuine, and not something you have punched in on cruise control.

Worrying About Other People Sinning Is Not a Good Reason for Sinning

Christ requires us to love Him above all, and as we examine His Word to us, we see that we are to start loving, as He would have us love, in our immediate proximity. We must learn to love within the radius of our reach. We are to love the people we know more than the people we don’t know. And this is an inescapable concept—not whether but which. If we refuse to obey Him at this point, then we are going to wind up loving the people we don’t know more than the people we know. And that, when translated, means that we don’t actually love anybody.

But when we disobey God’s clear commandments, we always seem to be able to come up with excuses and reasons. In this case, more than a few people are very worried about what might happen when people are taught how to cultivate their particular loves and loyalties. You guessed it, the bogeyman here is white supremacy.

In this polarized climate, the problem with arguing as I have been arguing above is that some “responsible” types are afraid of where some unstable sorts might take it. If we agree that we have a certain responsibility to love some people more and other people less, the expressed concern is that somebody is going to come along pretty soon and turn it into an excuse for malice. “If I should love some people more, then this means that I should actually learn how to hate the other people.”

This is actually a very old trick, and some people really do go that way. This does happen. Scripture said to love your neighbor and the carnal heart of man cooked up an interesting second half of the sentence. Love your neighbor and . . . here it comes . . . hate your enemy.

So fastidious people are afraid that if we establish from Scripture that we are to love our own people more, this means we should love others less, which turns into a lot less, which then by the end of the day turns into hate. The fact that this follows in no conceivable way does not keep some people from worrying about it, and does not keep other people from actually doing it.

And so the fastidious people and the venomous people link arms to wander off into the void together. The latter would rather hate than learn how to love properly, and the former would rather avoid hating than to learn how to love properly. The Scripture addresses both of them, and rather bluntly.

The progressive refuses to love the seen, which bleeds over into hating the seen, and the malicious one refuses to stop hating the unseen, which bleeds over into hating the seen. Both of them together are refusing the Way, and they deserve each other. We can hear them quarreling as they disappear into the fog.