Love

Well this post is probably a little late but it's intended to be for the problem of evil week. Oh well. Vacation's as good a time as any to get it done.

So I was really stimulated by Friday's discussion with the guest speaker. Even when responding to student questions he responded promptly and coherently. Seeing as how student comments are unpredictable and so can't be prepared for beforehand, his quick responses show just how well he knows his stuff. If I didn't miss anything, a summary of the discussion is this: his professor's theory to answer the problem of evil proposes that given God is all-powerful AND all good, evil exists for some good reason He knows and He will reveal to us at some point in the future. But toward the end of the class period, the speaker suggested his opinion that God's "power" (given that He is all-powerful) is love-- a self-sacrificing love that entails the ability to negate evil. Hence God sent His son Jesus (who is a part of Himself) as a sacrifice to eradicate the evil that resulted from human free will.

Now here's the kicker... it seems fate decided to toy with me yet again. My previous two blog posts were entitled "Faith" and "Hope". With my Adventist background, I noticed I unwittingly fell into a trend. Check out this Bible verse:

"But now abideth FAITH, HOPE, and LOVE, these three; and the greatest of these is love."
-- 1 Corinthians 13:13 (ASV)

So even before that discussion, and even before the week started, I had decided to follow the pattern and entitle this next post "Love" regardless of what I would blog about. Little did I know that love would actually be the topic of this blog. Coincidence? I think not.

So what's the moral here then? I dunno. But I think there's some truth in both our guest speaker's and his professor's ideas. It seems to me that whether or not love, that is, a self-sacrificing love, will be enough to eliminate evil is something that only time will tell. As I was reading in some commentary on this verse, there is a good reason love is the greatest of these three values. Faith is only good in the absence of sight or experience, and hope is only good until that hope comes to fruition. Once Jesus returns to redeem the saints (assuming He does), faith and hope will become antiquated. But love is the virtue that will characterize the world thereafter, and so it is the true and eternal ideal virtue. Of course, the present world needs both faith and hope that God is who we believe Him to be in order for human society to even place enough value on self-sacrifice to make it a functional virtue. Though that's what makes love an ideal... striving for it is a continual process.