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The Love That Creates Love Out of the Unlovable
Human love sees what’s good. God’s love creates it out of nothing.
The love of God does not first discover but creates what is pleasing to it. The love of man comes into being through attraction to what pleases it.
— Martin Luther; Thesis 28 of the Heidelberg Disputation
When I look around, there are things that I find good and there are things that I find… not so good.
I, like you, am a human, and this is what we do.
When I go onto Instagram, I gravitate towards photos of cabins, mountain lakes, and pithy theological quotes (like the one above).
Humans have an ideal for what we find attractive, interesting, useful, and love-worthy.
We have two categories for the world:
- Pleasing
- Not pleasing.
By our own volition, it’s downright impossible to change our minds about where things land in these groups. Things/people are either pleasing or not (the ‘meh’ things can go into the “pleasing” category because they aren’t necessarily repulsive, I guess).
