Love in the Bible

"So God created man in his own image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.
And God blessed them, and God said to them,
"Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it."Book of Genesis 1:27-28

Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother
and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh.Book of Genesis 2:24

One can see from the Bible and the very biology of the human body that it is natural for a man and a woman to be together. God created woman because "it is not good for man to be alone" (Genesis 2:18). From the beginning of time, as recorded in the Book of Genesis, God planned for man and woman to unite in love and harmony for continuity of his creation, the human race.

True love between a man and a woman leads to marriage. Marriage brings mutual comfort and a family. Children are the fruit and bond of a marriage. The family provides a framework for each family member to grow as a person in love and security.LOVE
"You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart,
with all your soul, and with all your mind.
This is the greatest and the first commandment.
The second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself."Gospel of Matthew 22:37-39
"The aim of our charge is love
that issues from a pure heart and a good conscience and sincere faith."First Letter of Timothy 1:5

Love is the favorite subject of artists and poets throughout the ages. Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare's story about two star-crossed lovers, is one of the most moving plays ever written. Mary's love for the Christ child is evident on her facial expression on paintings throughout the West. We are familiar with Alfred Lord Tennyson's famous line, "Tis better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all;" The poet Kahlil Gibran wrote "Love is to know the pain of too much tenderness," and "Ever has it been that love knows not its own depth until the hour of separation." A Severe Mercy, the 1980 National Book Award winner by Sheldon Vanauken, is a beautiful novel about love. Popular music is filled with the subject of love, such as the number one song Love is a Many Splendored Thing by the Four Aces in 1955; the 1929 classic Stardust, the last popular rendition by Spanky and Our Gang in 1968; My Heart Will Go On by Celine Dion, the theme song from the 1997 movie Titanic; and the number one country song by Josh Turner, Would You Go With Me, one of the most popular songs on Valentine's Day, 2006. Love makes the world go round!

Loving someone and being loved brings happiness. There are many loves in one's life, such as your spouse or sweetheart, your parents, your family and children, or your best friend. We all want and need love. This is essential to the human race. We need to help each other, cooperate with each other, and reaffirm each other.

Mystery and a kind of mysticism surround love. Why do people fall in love? The heart is the seat of the emotions, one of the three spiritual centers of the person, along with the intellect and the will. It was the writer Blaise Pascal who said "Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait pas - the heart has its reasons which the mind knows nothing of." The higher emotions, such as love, joy, sorrow, or contrition, cannot be willed, but suddenly well up in a person, and pervade his whole being.

God is important to your love relationship! Love of God grows as you mature in life. We become grateful for all his gifts, such as the beauty of creation and our family. And we become especially grateful for his forgiveness when we fall. His gifts to us are so plentiful that it is only just that we love him. We begin to appreciate that"God is love!" (1 John 4:8). He is a wonderful example of love, because His love is unconditional. We find that if we live in harmony with God and nature, we are the happiest. Someone who loves God will strive to be good, honest, and faithful, and develop all the values necessary to sustain a love relationship through the years. Loving God means you are both trying to live His way and that you are being fair and true to each other.

The Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) stresses this important point in Works of Love: "Worldly wisdom thinks that love is a relationship between man and woman. Christianity teaches that love is a relationship between man-God-woman, that is, that God is the middle term." He then contrasts this with romantic love: "when love ceases - when in erotic love, in friendship, that is, when in the love-relationship between two persons something intervenes and love ceases - then as people say, these two have a falling out. The bond is broken. When a relationship is only between two, one always has the upper hand in the relationship by being able to break it, for as soon as one has broken, the relationship is broken. But when there are three, one person cannot do this. The third, as mentioned, is love itself, which the innocent sufferer can hold to in the break, and then the break has no power over him."

Love gives one a sense of immortality. The existentialist Kierkegaard described love as uniting the temporal with the eternal. This is best understood when you lose someone you love, such as your mother or father. Even though your loved one has died and is no longer with you on earth, your love lives on for the one you cherish.The following are some famous Biblical passages about love and choosing a husband or wife.

"Place me as a seal upon your heart,
like a seal on your arm;
for love is as strong as death,
its ardor endures to the grave.
It burns with blazing flame,
a raging fire.
Torrents of rain cannot quench love;
nor floods sweep it away.Song of Solomon 8:6-7

Love is patient,
love is kind;
love is not jealous or boastful;
it is not arrogant or rude.
Love does not insist on its own way;
it is not irritable or resentful;
it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right.
Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends.First Letter of St. Paul to the Corinthians 13:4-8

For this is the will of God, your sanctification:
that you abstain from sexual immorality;
that each one of you know how to take a wife for himself in holiness and honor,
not in the passion of lust like heathen who do not know God.First Letter of St. Paul to the Thessalonians 4:3-5