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Each weekday in the month of August, we will pursue “prepositional truth” by zeroing in on a single Greek preposition in a single verse, noting the theological richness so often embedded in the humble words we so often overlook.
Easter Day in France is celebrated as in no other part of the world.
A particular phrase is sung, chanted and recited in churches. It is scrawled in various places, even on that girl’s arm in the picture above. It’s exchanged as a greeting between strangers:
L’Amour de Dieuest folie!
Just in case you’re struggling to recall what you learned from those two semesters of high school French, that means, “The love of God is folly!” God’s love is illogical. It is beyond anything we can intellectualize, articulate, or even begin to grasp. God looks like a fool for loving us the way he does.
The greatest scandal in the church is not that Easter Sunday services are packed with sinners – no big surprise there – but that we have accepted the unconditional love of God in theory, only to deny it in practice. We’ve surrendered our souls to a laundry list of dreary rules instead of surrendering ourselves to grace.
Where in Scripture do we find a crystal clear statement that God’s love for us can never be defeated or overcome?
A great place to land is Romans chapter eight, especially the apostle Paul’s final few lines. He asks, “What, then, shall we say in response to this? If God is for (HUPER) us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all – how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?” (Romans 8:31-32)
Karl Barth, arguably the most influential theologian of the 20th century, suggested that HUPER, a humble preposition, is the most important word in the New Testament. It has a fascinating etymological history.
In the Greek-speaking ancient world, HUPER originally seems to have signified something that was “over and above” something else, without actually touching it. In his book Prepositions and Theology, Murray Harris notes that it gradually came to reflect “the image of one person standing or bending over another in order to shield or protect him, or of a shield lifted over the head that suffers the blow instead of the person” (original emphases).
Paul writes in Romans 5:8: “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for (HUPER) us.”
If you’re ever called to summarize the entire Bible in three words, try these: God For Us.
And what does that “for” mean? God is one who stands between us and every kind of trouble, who hovers over us, who has willingly taken the blow for our own sins that should have fallen upon us. No wonder Paul asks, “If that’s really so, how can anyone or anything possibly be against us?”
But he’s just getting warmed up.
A few verses later he continues, “No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:37-39).
That sounds way too good to be true – which is why so many of us suspect that if we keep screwing up, breaking the promises we said we would never break, disappointing Jesus one time too many, he’ll finally conclude that forgiveness can only go so far and start reeling his love back in.
But that’s not what the Bible says.
When Paul declares that nothing in all creation can separate us from the love of God, he means nothing. Not lousy church attendance, nor half-hearted Bible study, nor crummy theology, nor fear, nor doubt, nor divorce, nor thoughts of suicide, nor outright moral failure can separate us from his grace. God loves us recklessly and relentlessly, even when we don’t want him to. Jesus is not repulsed by who we are or discouraged by what we have become.
Paul’s phrase “more than conquerors” translates the single Greek word hupernikomen. Notice that HUPER is used here as a prefix in the sense of “above and beyond,” followed by nike, the Greek word for “victory.”
If you have opened your heart to Christ, you are Huper-Nike. You are a super-conqueror. The next time a sales person tries to interest you in Nike apparel, just say, “Oh, thanks, but this pastor I know just told me that I am already way beyond whatever you are selling.”
If God is for us, we are more than conquerors – no matter what we happen to be facing.
But what if, after doing my best to open my heart to Christ, I keep flunking the part about following him?
Following Jesus isn’t just one decision that we make at one point in time, after which we shift our hearts into autopilot for the rest of our lives. Being a Christ-follower comes down to hundreds and even thousands of smaller decisions.
Why does it take so many? Because we keep trying to take our decisions back.
I know this drama well. Hundreds of times I have decided to “follow Jesus forever.” From this moment on I am seriously – and I mean seriously this time – going to be dedicated. And then I re-dedicate myself. And then I rededicate my rededication.
From now on I am going to pray. And eat and exercise to the glory of God. And share my faith. And share my resources. And never again whine or complain at home. I’ve even made decisions that I will never again have to make this kind of spiritual decision.
I have seriously intended every one of those decisions. Yet most of them have lasted approximately five days – except for the ones about not whining at home, which last approximately five hours.
Time after time, I fall back into the same old ruts. I am filled with shame that I cannot or will not do better. And I wonder why God even bothers to listen to me the next time I turn to him.
But the truth is that each of those decisions has prepared the way for the next decision – which I couldn’t even have attempted if I had not endeavored to keep the previous one. Slowly but surely, I grow spiritually. Strange as it may seem, this is what following Jesus looks like after making that initial decision to cross the line of faith.
If God is for us, even our failures to follow him cannot defeat us. I keep falling. But I discover that I have fallen forward once again into the love of God.
As the late Brennan Manning reminds us, whenever we’re prompted to find our way back into heartfelt fellowship with God, we can’t put off doing that until our motives are just right. For our motives will never be just right. God simply wants us to show up – empty-handed, with nothing but unadorned trust in the preposterous notion that he is actually for us.
That’s grace.
No wonder they call it amazing.
And no wonder we say, “L’Amour de Dieu est folie!”