The Unexpected Love Story Hiding in the Bond Between Divinity and Humanity

A tale older than time itself

God and angels can turn wounds into blessings, horror into beauty.

I’ve seen it, you’ve seen it. It’s amazing every time you see it, but it isn’t rare. It’s a common, even expected occurrence. Why?

In all they do, they focus on how to use everything for the best; the method of divine love. Divine love is so unlike human love, it’s a pity we don’t have a better term in English to reflect the difference.

While human love takes its origin in self-maintenance, consuming for the sake of emotional survival, divine love takes its origin in bestowal, giving for the sake of enabling and elevating life itself.

The backstory of divine love

Once upon an eternity, far far away, divinity existed alone, all things in one. However, it was bursting with love, the first, best, and highest of motivations and methods of living. Unfortunately, no “others” existed. Outside of the original personality, no other person was around to receive love and reciprocate.

So, divinity created other personalities, both divine and mortal, as well as everything they’d need; time, space, and energy; tacos, beer, and breath mints.

Humanity’s struggle

Divinity wants to help all levels of life. After all, “love is the desire to do good to others” (The Urantia Book, pg 648).

But the great struggle with humanity (since we’re very low on the spirit-evolution scale) is that we’re nearly dominated by our animal natures. Spiritually we’re near-sighted.

Though we are surrounded by spirits, the solution was for divinity, through down-stepped and attenuated forms, to approach humanity directly, and even live among them. The closer divinity came to us, the better we can see, learn, and even emulate the method of divinity, in our own crude way.

“Human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars.” -GUSTAVE FLAUBERT, Madame Bovary (1857)

Jesus enters the scene

Jesus wasn’t the first being of divinity to live among us, and I doubt very much he’ll be the last, but it’s easy to argue he was the best.

He dedicated his human life to the pursuit of divine love and became a living expression of divine values. All sorts of dates on the religious calendar try to remind us of this; Christmas, Ash Wednesday, and of course, Easter.

However, despite Christian theology’s attempt to convince us otherwise, the supreme value he offers us isn’t in what hedid in life (or after it), but rather in how he lived; the manner in which he approached and executed every life situation.

The lesson of the cross

Even until his last earthly moment, Jesus lived out the highest guiding principle in existence, that the very best use of anything, of everything, is love. His lifelong demonstration of this doesn’t culminate in his resurrection, but instead, in his last mortal experience on the cross.

It’s easy to forgive your friends, but Jesus dared to forgive his enemies, even those who sought and gained his death.

Jesus forgave the Roman soldiers who whipped him to the bone and who pounded the nails. He forgave the Jewish priests who schemed and angled and broke their own rules to achieve his destruction.

Was it to demonstrate that all actions, no matter how heinous, are forgiven? No.

Was it to show that the magnitude of divine love erases the consequences of deliberately evil acts? No.

Then what was it for?

It was to show, on the highest human level possible, that love is the best way to approach all situations in life, even a malicious, excruciating, ignominious death.

He lived it as an example for us. He lived it for an entire universe teeming with celestial and super-mortal life, all breathlessly watching the inconceivable drama play out on a dark hilltop in a dark time on a spiritually darkened and backward world.

What greater contrast could highlight the luminosity of divine love against the impenetrable dark of deepest mortal hate?

“On millions of inhabited worlds, tens of trillions of evolving creatures who may have been tempted to give up the moral struggle and abandon the good fight of faith, have taken one more look at Jesus on the cross and then have forged on ahead, inspired by the sight of God’s laying down his incarnate life in devotion to the unselfish service of man.” — The Urantia Book, 188:5.5 (2018.4)

Homecoming

Though there a sad chapters in the love story between humanity and Divinity, overall it is a happy story.

There is no ending to this tale. An endless adventure of discovery awaits us.

Deity plays the infinite game, the one that goes on forever. As our creator, God desires to have a relationship with us without end, just as you do with your children.

This life, amazing and terrifying as it is, represents just the opening chapter of our future-eternal love story.