10 Questions Every Teen Should Ask (and Answer) about Christianity by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL109030/REL012160/REL023000
Publisher: Crossway
Published: 2021-03-16T00:00:00+00:00

7

Why Can’t We Just Agree That Love Is Love?

At the climax of Frozen, Anna’s body is becoming ice. She’s been told that “an act of true love” can thaw a frozen heart, so she rushes back to her fiancé, Hans, expecting that a kiss will do the trick. But to her horror, Hans turns out to be a villain. Reeling from this shock, Anna realizes that Kristoff, not Hans, is the man who truly loves her, so she staggers out into the cold to find him. But then Anna sees Hans about to murder her sister. Anna has a choice to make: save herself or save her sister. She rushes to protect Elsa and turns to ice just as Hans’s sword falls. But as Elsa weeps over her sister’s frozen body, Anna thaws. The act of true love that could thaw Anna’s heart was not a kiss from Hans or Kristoff, as she’d thought. It was Anna’s own act of love: sacrificing herself to save her sister.

In this chapter, we’re going to look at the popular claim that “Love is love.” When people say this, they mean everyone should be allowed to date and marry whomever they like, regardless of whether they are male or female. This message seems so powerful. We all know love is good, and that the more love there is in the world the better. But as Frozen beautifully depicts, there are different kinds of love. Powerful, life-changing, self-sacrificing love need not be sexual or romantic. Sister love and brother love, parent and child love, friend-to-friend love all matter too. But according to the Bible, the most powerful love of all is the love that comes from the heart of God himself. In fact, the Bible tells us not that “Love is love,” but that “God is love” (1 John 4:8), and that we get glimpses of God’s love through different kinds of relationships.

Windows into Love

We saw in chapter 2 that God created human beings in his image, and that he designed us for relationship with him and with each other. And just as we can see different rooms of a house when we look through different windows, God planned for us to see different aspects of his love through different kinds of human relationships.

For example, the idea of God as Father springs out of the Old Testament (e.g., Deuteronomy 32:6; Isaiah 63:16–17; Hosea 11:1–4) where God talks about his people, Israel, as his son. Then, in the New Testament, Jesus calls God his Father and tells his followers to do the same (Matthew 6:9). If you have a wonderful dad, who cares for you deeply and would do anything to keep you safe, that’s a window into one aspect of God’s love. But the great news is this: if you don’t have a loving father, the Bible says that God loves you more than any human father ever could!

The Bible also gives us glimpses of God’s love through mothers. For example, in the book of Isaiah, God asks if a woman could forget the baby she is breastfeeding.

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