Jesus declared “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” (Matthew 22:37-40)
Jesus said we "must love one another as he loved us." (John 13:34)
Jesus said "He who has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me; and he who loves me shall be loved by my Father, and I will love him, and will disclose myself to him." (John 14:21)
Jesus said “Do you see this woman? When I entered your house, you did not give Me water for My feet, but she wet My feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair. You did not greet Me with a kiss, but she has not stopped kissing My feet since I arrived. You did not anoint My head with oil, but she has anointed My feet with perfume. On account of this, I say to you, that her many sins are forgiven her because she loved much, but he who is forgiven a little loves a little.” (Luke 7:44-47)
"Love means doing what God has commanded us, and he has commanded us to love one another, just as you heard from the beginning." (2 John 1:6)
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Firstly, Jesus said that the most important thing is to love comprehensively: to love God, others and ourselves (Matthew 22:36-40 & Mark 12:28-32 & Luke10:25-28). And yes, self-love definitely is part of that which Jesus called The Greatest Commandments: "love others as yourselves" (Matthew 22:39) is oftentimes not even mentioned by the Pauline Church, and when it is they don't explain that "as yourself" necessitates self-love, as it clearly and logically does; and on top of that they've also wrongly made self-love out to be an evil, equivalent to conceitedness, which it is not. The Paulinist obsession with self-deprecation, with constantly referring to oneself as "broken" and "depraved," is not only perverse, it's abusive slander toward oneself and all of humanity, thereby violating the self-love and love of others aspects of the Greatest Commandments, and actually violates the love of God aspect as well because it's calling the human being that God created in His own image and likeness inherently wicked.
So secondly, after clearing up that self-love is actually a good thing Jesus told us to do, and slandering all human beings is actually a bad and blasphemous thing, we can now ask: What did Jesus mean when he said to love like he loved, and what kind of love was he pointing to when he described the woman who loved him much?
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| Psalm 50:23 |
He was clearly speaking of action-based forms of love (which are necessarily non-abusive toward people or animals). The ultimate love Jesus pointed us to is in The Greatest Commandments, as he did with his statement that "everyone who hears these words of mine and acts on them is like a wise man who built his house on the rock" (Matthew 7:24), and as does the direct explanation given by the apostle John that "love means doing what God has commanded us," all point to actual expressions of love, not just an internal thought and feeling of love.
We must recognize that there is a noun version of the word love and a verb version; the former is inactive, basically "a strong like," e.g., "I love this meal" or "I love your hat," and the latter is something beyond a strong like, it is instead an action; so what is this action? Again Jesus pointed us to the answer by linking the love he wants us to practice with The Greatest Commandments. Unfortunately, the verb definition of love is usually given in dictionaries as just a variation of the noun, e.g., thesaurus synonyms for the verb version of love are "adoration," "devotion/enthusiasm for," "admiration," "hold high," "esteem" or "cherish." But those are actually all basically synonymous of the noun version of love, "a strong like," and that's a mistake. The verb version has been conflated with the noun version, and because the verb version is wrongly equated with the noun version the antonyms are also wrongly equated, i.e., the correct antonym for "strong like" (the noun version of love) is "hate," but the antonym of the verb version is also (wrongly) said to be hate, as if the noun and the verb were the same, when they're not.
The first of The Greatest Commandments is to "Love God, with your whole mind, heart and soul," and again, what kind of love are we talking about? Was Jesus sacrificing animals to show love to the Father? No, Jesus actually freed the animals that were going to be "sacrificed" as a hollow form of love/worship of God.
Was he praising Him and praying to Him and following everything the Father told him to do? Yes.
But slitting the throats of animals? Again, a big no.
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| Micah 6 |
God says He wants us to pray to Him, praise Him, thank Him, and follow His guidance (which includes following the guidance of how He designed men & women), and all of those things are active, in a nonviolent way); again it's not just a matter of saying you love Him or holding a feeling of love for Him (although that's good of course), the Commandment is calling us to a higher form of love, an active love. (And our lives noticeably change for the better once we start doing all those active loving actions on a daily basis, proving that it is the correct way to obey the Commandment, since God rewards those that do His will. Similarly, if we really love Jesus, we should seek to know him as well as possible, and so that means not limiting our knowledge of him and his teachings to only the collection of letters and books called The New Testament).
“He who offers a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving honors Me; And to him who orders his way rightly [who follows the way that I show him], I shall show the salvation of God.” (Psalm 50:23, Amplified Bible)
So what would be a correct a definition for the verb version of love? "To be affectionate," comes close to defining active love, but that doesn't always fit, e.g., when a man loves his brother or friend in a non-affectionate way. The word that is most fitting as a basic synonym for the verb version of love is "befriend." And again Jesus pointed us to the truth when he said "You are my friends if you do what I command."
We should look to become friends with God, friends with our Heavenly Father, Jesus the Christ, and the Holy Spirit; that means an active relationship that involves daily interaction; that means daily prayer, devotion to His will, and receptivity to guidance and callings every minute of our days.
Identifying the Opposite of This Love is Extremely Important
And so then what is its correct opposite/antonym to that befriending kind of love? Well if you look up the word abuse, you will find that befriend is it's antonym; so, the opposite of active love is abuse, not hate. Therefore Jesus was asking us to befriend him (in a deep and profound way), and likewise with loving others and ourselves; and so, and here is where many people mentally check out: to be abusive toward others is a direct violation of The Greatest Commandments.
One of the three fundamentals Laws of Logic is "the law of non-contradiction." This law states that a proposition and its negation cannot both be true at the same time and in the same sense. A negation is the opposite of the original proposition. Abuse is the negation of love (love being the "original proposition"). Abuse and love can never co-exist, or be performed simultaneously.
Hating/strongly disliking something like a certain food or clothing style is not a violation, and hating evil is certainly correct (see Amos 5:15, Hebrews 1:9, et al.), and because The Greatest Commandments are the perfect moral law (on what's good), if something is completely against this perfect moral law, then it is the opposite of good, which is evil, it is directly disobeying that moral law. Abuse is pure evil, and should not be accepted under any circumstance, including a crisis; evil doesn't ever make the world a better place, it always makes it worse, that's why evil is evil. Confusion over this point, not being 100% certain that abuse is pure evil that is the complete opposite of loving action (i.e., abuse is the negation of love), is a major stumbling block for those that want to align with God's will; if you're thinking it's not that clear-cut, if you're thinking this is just some guy's interpretation, if you're not willing to accept that there must be an exact opposite to loving action, and abuse makes the most sense as being that opposite (not hate), then you can't actually follow Jesus because you don't understand what he was telling you to do and not do, and doing or accepting what Jesus told us directly not to is actually disastrous, it undermines our salvation, so this is no minor point at all.
To give a recent and ongoing example of disaster following moral confusion, officials world-wide have been pushing a false morality that says "hate-speech" is evil, but their own abuse, e.g., medical mandates, disarmament of nonviolent people, arresting and imprisoning Christian pastors for speaking out, is okay. They are only able to pull this off because of people who do not understand the perfect moral law Jesus pointed us to; that the opposite of the love Jesus was commanding is abuse, and so accepting or participating in abuse is therefore direct opposition to God's will. So when you accept tyranny you are disobeying Jesus.
On top of the aforementioned false morality pushed by "authorities," the words of Jesus have been twisted to actually be pro-abuse, when they were actually anti-abuse; Pauline/Empire Christianity has deceived people into ignoring what Jesus actually taught, and to follow doctrine that is abusive toward God, others and ourselves, completely violating the Greatest Commandments. For example, the establishment church will tell you that when Jesus said "but I say, love your enemies and pray for those that persecute you" (Matthew 5:44 & Luke 6:28), Jesus was saying to always be a completely passive pacifist who never uses defensive force against abuse; in reality he was against abuse, he accepted the crucifixion for a higher purpose, not to teach pacifism, something he never actually said was good. "But he said to turn the other cheek!" you may reply. Actually he never said that. The establishment/empire church also mistranslated the words of Jesus to say "turn the other cheek," when in fact it correctly reads "return to them likewise on the same jaw, one of the same kind," explaining that you should not accept any level of abuse! He was refining the Law as expressed by "eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth," not contradicting it! Again this fits the Greatest Commandments, since defensive force is actually an expression of love. This is no theory, it's just a very basic observation; if someone is attacking someone you love and you defend them, you do so because you love them, you do so out of love (and the same goes for self-defense, an act of self-love). The correct pro-defense translation of Luke 6:29/Matthew 5:39 also fits what Jesus said about him not contradicting the Law (Matthew 5:17), yet Pauline Christians once again ignore what Jesus actually said and trust in Empire Church Paulinist dogma. But most Christians will probably think I am the one twisting the words of Jesus, not the establishment church, and so the moral confusion and destructive system of abuse marches on, just as the powers-that-be want it to.
The Empire/Establishment has always been all about justifying and perpetuating their own abusive actions against humanity, hence why they work so hard to keep your focus off of the crucial ethical truth, lest you reject their abusive rule.
The key thing to realize and remember here again is that Jesus was talking about the action version of love, the verb version, and he was saying that you should still not be unloving/abusive even to those that you hate, even those that abuse you; in other words Jesus was saying don't respond to evil with evil action of your own, that is, if you use proportional self-defense force, that is not abusive/evil, it's an act of love. Why is this clear and important moral point ignored?
He wasn't saying "hate is evil" and "accept all abuse," he was saying don't respond to abuse with your own abuse (i.e., excessive defensive force) and be forgiving and pray for those that are abusive, even though you hate what they're doing. Jesus actually said he hated the anti-morality doctrine of the Nicolaitans, and so again, hate in and of itself is obviously not a violation of his own Commandment, because he would never violate his own Commandment.
Returning to the main point of this post, knowing what the opposite of the Commandment to love is just as important as knowing clearly what the positive sense of that love is; the proof of that is all around us to see: a global society that accepts various kinds of abuse (like extortion/taxation) "for the greater good," because: a) they aren't sure that abuse is the opposite of love, and b) they aren't sure what counts as abuse and what doesn't. What counts isn't complicated to know: if it's not right if your neighbor initiates violence against you, steals from you, or deceives you (the three forms of abuse), then the same actually holds true for everyone else, even if they call themselves "governor," and even if that governor declares some kind of emergency! No exceptions! Simple! Don't be deceived that there are exceptions to the rule, that's the deception abusers have been utilizing for centuries.
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