I’m not sure we really understand the insidiousness of unbelief. It is not merely to reject the gospel of Jesus, the existence of a Creator God, or to question biblical morality. At its core, unbelief is ingratitude, and by the very nature of this ingratitude, it must ultimately reject every good gift of God. And it turns out that everything, absolutely everything is a good gift of God, leaving the consistent unbeliever with nothing. Literally nothing.
Of course unbelief is rarely that consistent, but unbelief in order to mature must detach from the world, detach from relationships, detach from truth, goodness, and beauty. While sin is certainly a personal act of treason against God, it is also a rejection of the way He has made the world, the way it was designed to be enjoyed and shared.
Rejection of God is certainly part of continuing to live in sin, but a lifestyle of sin also requires a growing rejection of the world God made. Sin is destructive, divisive, depressing. But if someone refuses to admit that the brokenness in his or her life is the result of sin, the only alternative is to blame the world. Stuff happens. Things fall apart.
When God created Adam and Eve, did they love God with their whole heart, mind, soul, and strength? They were certainly created perfect, good, and entered a sinless world, but they had a true but immature love of God. If Jesus learned obedience through the things He suffered (Hebrews 5), surely Adam and Eve were supposed to learn love through their lives in the world. We may speculate that this was at the center of the trial at the tree with the serpent, but even before that moment, they were given a world loaded with goodness and bodies designed by God to enjoy it.
Before sin ever entered the world, God gave Adam taste buds and filled a garden with peaches and pineapples and plums. Before sin ever entered the world, God gave the first humans eyes to take in the sharp reds and deep blues, the laughing yellows and the welcoming greens. And God brought the woman to the man, and they became one flesh. Song of Songs is an inspired glimpse into the delights of the marriage bed. But this is the point: God gave the universe and all of its goodness and beauty to Adam and Eve as a catechism to teach them to love.
The greatest command is to love God with all that you are: heart, mind, soul, and strength. But God is infinite. God is enormous. Loving God is a task for eternity. Loving God begins now, in this life as we babble like little kids trying to say happy words, meaningful words, as we scrawl our stick men and lopsided letters of love to our Father in heaven. Of course God doesn’t mind. He receives our praise, our lisping. The psalmist said that God has ordained praise out of the mouths of infants, and it turns out we’re all infants in the Kingdom of God.
But this brings us full circle. One of the great deceptions of the Devil has been to introduce apathy, suggesting ways to blunt our hungers, to gut the glory of the real world, to offer life on the cheap, thus allowing human love to atrophy. As we detach from the real world that God made, real relationships, real adventures, real tragedies, real beauty, real goodness, we have less and less to actually love. Oh sure, there’s plenty of self-love wound through all human sin, but self-love is always ultimately self-defeating, shrinking and shriveling down into itself, narrowing until there is almost literally nothing left.
The root issue is a broken heart. Sin has broken the hearts of all men, and this is why we cannot love and when we try to love, our loves are often twisted, perverse, and we latch on to cheap substitutes, empty promises, and hollow visions. Moses knew this tragic reality as he preached the book of Deuteronomy to Israel on the borders of Canaan. He called them to love God with all that they were, but he knew well and good that they wouldn’t, that they couldn’t.
They needed to have their hearts circumcised before they could love their God (Deuteronomy 30:6). They needed new hearts so they could begin to love again. This is why the New Testament explodes with excitement about the love of God demonstrated in Jesus. It is that goodness, the beauty of the cross, the glory of God’s grace that breaks our broken hearts and puts them back together new again. This is all grace and all the work of a sovereign God who saves when and where He wills. But we know for that very reason that God is free to display His goodness and glory anywhere He wants.
In the beginning, God taught Adam and Eve about His love through tangerines and blueberries and sunsets and waterfalls and the way their bodies fit together so perfectly. He taught them His goodness through the goodness of life, through the goodness and beauty of the world. As the western world continues to barrel it’s way further and further from its Christian roots, it is more and more difficult to assume that people even know what love is. Perhaps it remains in hints and suggestions in our stories, in our collective memories, but we have less and less to actually love.
One of the tasks of the Christian Church is to awaken love again. One of our central tasks is to point at the world that our Father made, that the Lord Jesus sustains by the power of His Word, that the Spirit fills and is hovering over, calling it into the future of our God. Our task is to bask in the sunsets, to cry at funerals, to sing at the top of our lungs for joy, to kiss, to hold, to taste, to touch, to feel the wind in our faces and say to the world: This is real. This is good. This is beautiful.
It is our job to awaken love in the little things, in the good things, in the lovely things, and as we do, we trust that the One who gives every good thing is drawing the hungry hearts to Himself.
Toby Sumpter is pastor of Trinity Reformed Church, Moscow, Idaho.