Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us. (1 John 4:7-12 NIV).
There
is an undeniable truth in this world and that is that all men are
vulnerable. Man struggles inordinately to be invulnerable. We can
struggle to attain great monetary security, for example, in an
attempt to escape vulnerability. But alas, the world is full of
forces (even our own limited perception and beyond that extending to
great universal forces) that leave us vulnerable.
But
there is a redeeming vulnerability and that is love. God loves us so
much that he gave his only Son for us. And his Son walked the streets
of Israel vulnerable to love as reflected in his ministry. Warning:
the crucifixion of Jesus was directly the result of the pursuit of
invulnerability in lockstep with Satan’s central lie—that we can
become invulnerable.
Mankind
does tremendously silly things sometimes to escape vulnerability.
Unfortunately the silliness of it does not remove the frequent
tragedy of it. What is the one thing that Hitler sought to avoid? –
vulnerability! His obsession with it brought us a sadly bizarre
chapter in human history. And truth be told in our own country on an
individual and national level we have done some silly things. On an
individual level like Faust we sell our soul for wealth, power, and
influence. On the national level like Nazism we seek to find
sanctuary in mindless projections of power.
In
contrast to these excruciatingly mad adventures stands the love of
God. Love admits it’s vulnerability with the simplicity and purity
of a trusting child. God looks with compassion upon mankind for he
knows our frame and the perversions that the desire for
invulnerability can bring. Our only reliable escape from madness is
the vulnerability of love. This is so because love brings us closer
to factual truth rather sealing us off from it. Sure we can and will
create all sorts of structures to buttress security, but without love
as their foundation all such structures will fail.
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