“A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another.” (John 13:34 KJV)
We live in an age where technology grows by leaps and bounds. Near the core of it all seems to be the ability to process instruction sets. Instruction sets which are increasingly complex and require more resources to process. Can an instruction set love?
An instruction set can achieve many good things. Many good outcomes can follow good instruction. Can it choose to follow the instruction? A system may run into errors because it runs into bad syntax or bad logic, but does it ever know any different? Even as it knows more and understands more, does it ever really have a will of it’s own to choose? Love is possible because of the other and the choice. If there were only extensions of the one and no real “other”, and there was no way to process an “individual will”, then this limits how far and wide love can go. Is it any wonder that God, being love, (see 1 John 4:8, 16) would want to create something that could really grow in love? To even better experience what the essence of love is! How about a creature that could in turn love it’s neighbor? We can instruct our neighbor all day long and we can live under the governance of instruction, but to actually want what it will take to live in peace with someone else! It’s one thing to follow an instruction. It’s a whole different level to choose to take what we have learned about patience, kindness, goodness, and self control and want to apply that to another.
How about God’s sovereignty? We as humans (and grossly inadequate judges) put ourselves in a bad spot by drawing a straight line of goodness and expect that if God is good, then he will be somewhere along that line. We want things to progress instead of regress. We want things that are more peaceful rather than chaotic. We at least hope to preserve a world that rots at it’s core. Should such things be granted, the world would be an even more difficult place to save. Pain and discord are sometimes the best tools to remind us of the need for repentance. God’s sovereignty is not there to establish the most agreeable outcomes as a half blind world may see them. It’s there to pull people out of their own death spiral. If John 3:16 is accurate, is allowing the only righteous one to die that the unrighteous may live the best plan? Or is it as Jesus realized in Gethsemane that it was the only plan? The trouble with God’s sovereignty isn’t that the line isn’t straight, it just looks crooked to a bent world. As we learn love and how to reciprocate love, we begin to see that it’s love that God has been trying to teach us all along! Even when we feel that we are absent those things that we thought we needed to survive.
“If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love; even as I have kept my Father’s commandments, and abide in his love. These things have I spoken unto you, that my joy might remain in you, and that your joy might be full. This is my commandment, That ye love one another, as I have loved you.” (John 15:10-12 KJV)