Blog: Max Dawson
April 4, 2016
Have you ever heard of love before first sight? Surely we have all heard of love at first sight. Do you believe in it? Some do and some don’t. My wife and I met on a Tuesday afternoon in 1963. We had our first date that evening. The next evening, on Wednesday, we decided that we would marry. While we did not wed until about seven months later, we made our decision on the second day that we knew each other.
Was it love at first sight? I’m not sure what to call it, but it is not to be recommended in most cases. In our culture it is dangerous to commit to marriage without knowing a person well.
Yet in Bible days, love was not so much an issue before marriage as it is today. It was often the case that you married the person chosen for you. That was the case with Isaac in . Rebekah had been chosen as a wife for him. It seems that he had little or no choice in the matter. In the case of Isaac, he loved the woman he married, rather than married the woman he loved. It was not love at first sight. It was sight, then marriage, then love.
But what about the possibility of love before first sight?
At first thought it seems impossible or at least improbable. But the Bible speaks of this kind of love–yet not in regard to marriage.
Do you love Jesus? If you do, then you have love before first sight. In , the Apostle Peter seems to emphasize the point in a peculiar way in verse eight. Not only had the Christians not seen Jesus when they first believed in Him and loved Him, they have not seen Him since that time either. (Maybe some false teachers were spreading a doctrine that “believing is seeing” or maybe they were teaching “a personal encounter with Jesus.”)
says, “…whom having not seen you love.”
But the key thing to note from the text is that it is the nature of our faith that we both believe in Jesus and love Him without having seen Him.
Those saints to whom Peter wrote had believed the testimony of Peter and the rest of the apostles–men who were eyewitnesses to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, the Son of God.
THE FINAL WORD
Our faith today is no different than that of those to whom Peter wrote. says “For we walk by faith, not by sight.”
Sometimes folks today claim to have personally seen Jesus. They have not. None of us in these days have seen Jesus.
But we believe. In Him. Without having seen.
And we love. We love Him. Without having seen.
And God will bless us richly because we believe and love.
We have believed the testimony God gave concerning His Son (). One day we will see Him as He is (). But until that day, it is…
Love before first sight.
–Max