About Divine Love: Kaylee Hibbard

Love is not a foreign concept to humans, at least most people don’t think it is. Everyone loves–you love your family, your friends, or even a pet. And everyone has their own idea of what actions or appearances best convey feelings of love. Try as we might as humans to find a categorical system to place everyone’s love into, there is no universal, objective answer to what love looks like. Most often, the way people attempt to place brackets of understanding around this divine concept of love is by finding means of comparison, as greater-than or less-than something or someone else. We are supposed to love our pets less than our friends, and our friends less than our family. But this is a warped, worldly interpretation of the greatest gift God ever gave to man. The type of love God blesses us with is unearned, uncomparing, and unceasing, and there is definitely no hierarchical system.

It never occurred to me until recently how much I truly struggle with this, the idea that the forms of love I grew up knowing were not all that similar to what God’s love feels like. Don’t get me wrong, I feel tremendously loved by the people in my life, but it is inevitable that the human understanding of love will always have traces of comparison and resentment. The study of Genesis we have been doing and the reading we were assigned for our Discipleship Team at The Wesley have all been perfectly aligning with these thoughts I have been having about divine love. 

The main theme of this quarter’s Bible study on Genesis is the blessing God gives, but strangely the minute moments that have been standing out to me are the times when the people in this book are blatantly showing favoritism amongst their loved ones. In Genesis 25:28 when the story of Jacob and Esau, Isaac and Rebekah’s sons, is being told it reads, “Isaac loved Esau because he enjoyed eating the wild game Esau brought home, but Rebekah loved Jacob.” There it is, plain as day, parents choosing a child over another, which is something that is objectively taboo in the world we know today. Even more so, these are people chosen by God, so it was jarring to me to read this so bluntly. This is not the first occurrence of comparison of children in the Bible, because it happens directly before the story of Esau and Jacob with Isaac himself and his older brother, Ishmael. The love of parents, of fathers and mothers loving their children, is the closest analogy we have of what God’s love is for us, and yet even as early on in the Bible as Genesis, we already see this tainted by human hands. There is no love our minds can comprehend, one that our actions can reflect, that is free of comparison in this fallen world. 

In the book of Luke, we see a very different narrative of a father with his two sons. In the story told by Jesus of a lost son returning home, we hear of a younger son who leaves his home to live a life of debauchery that leads to spiritual and fiscal barrenness. When he finally returns home, his father runs to greet him, embraces him, and kisses him. The elder son was not as keen on his brother returning, though, feeling as though his father had forsaken him by killing the calf he had been fattening with his father in the years he was home while his brother was gone. I related to the elder son in this moment more than I would like to admit. In the book The Return of the Prodigal Son, the author Henri Nouwen devotes a whole chapter to the elder son, and he talks about how both sons were flawed by saying, “Both needed healing and forgiveness. Both needed to come home. Both needed the embrace of a forgiving father.” The elder son was beyond resentful of his younger brother and the celebration his father awarded him. But the striking part of this parable to me is how when the father notices the elder son is not celebrating with them, he goes out and invites the elder son to rejoice over his brother being found. The father reiterates that everything he has is offered to his son, even when the elder son is just as enveloped in sin as the younger was. This is such a contrasting approach to fatherhood than the story of Isaac and his two sons. Where Isaac was selective, the father in the parable was accepting. Where one was cold and distant, the other was warm and inviting. Where one reflects man’s natural tendency to have a comparative type of love, even with our loved ones, the other reflects the divine love that is offered to us by Jesus. 

On our own, we so easily fall into the pattern of the favoritism of Isaac and the resentment of the elder son. We so easily forget that there is a love greater than our own understanding. It’s hard for me to imagine myself loving anyone in the all-encompassing and completely forgiving way that God shows his love to us, but even so, 1 Corinthians 13 is entirely devoted to emphasizing how useless our lives are without attempting day after day to love others in a way that mirrors God’s love. Verse 2 says, “If I had the gift of prophecy, and if I understood all of God’s secret plans and I possessed all knowledge, and if I had such faith that I could move mountains, but didn’t love others, I would be nothing.” Our lives are incomplete, they are nothing, without the kind of love that lacks self-consciousness, that is blameless, and that frees us from the burden of thinking we have to earn God’s love. In the same way the father in the parable of the prodigal son immediately welcomes his son home, God does the same for us when we turn home towards Him. My hope resides in the truth that by living in emulation of Jesus, we move nearer to a life that reflects the limitless, unrivaled, and never-ending love that is found in the Father alone. 

Kaylee is an incredible servant of Christ. We are blessed here at Wesley by her joy, love, dedication, and friendship which she pours out in full measure to anyone she meets. Now a senior Kinesiology major at LA Tech, she is a second-year member of our Discipleship Team. We’re so thankful for her leadership!