The I Love You Virus

During the year of 2000 millions of computers were been ravaged by the "I-Love-You" virus, with losses in the billions of dollars. It would be money well spent if we humans could learn from the disaster a simple lesson: "Don't believe everybody who tells you 'I-love-you.'" For example, a young woman (or teen) knows the deep inner, God-given, yearning to be loved and appreciated; she has come from a dysfunctional family (whose family isn't that in some way?); a predator tells her "I love you!" and she clicks on it, and the next thing is she's pushing a pram on the sidewalk and buying cheap layettes at K-Mart, while the one who sired the inhabitant of the pram is telling some other victim "I love you." (Newsweek said there were 905,000 teen pregnancies in the U.S. in 1996, half of them with births). And it's vice-versa, too: a long section in God's inspired book of Proverbs warns boys and men against believing the "I-love-you" of a seductress, "the flattery of the tongue of a strange woman," "neither let her take thee with her eyelids" (6:23-35). How can we humans learn not to fall for the subtle deception of false love? In the same Newsweek Stephen Lyons tells how the original split of his parents ended up with 12 marriages in his family, 7 of which ended again in divorce. "Few people I have met have not been touched [translation: wounded] by divorce." Somebody fell again and again for false "love." Is there something helpful in the Bible? Shockingly, we never read God saying those exact words, "I love you," although we speak of the Bible as a love-letter. What we DO read is that He says, "I HAVE loved you with an everlasting love," past tense with continuing results (Jer 31:3). The best defense possible against some charlatan's deceptive "I-love-you"! God's emphasis is always historical: "I have loved you" ever since you were born, He says; open your eyes and see this historical evidence in your own personal life. Even the pains and sorrows you have known have been My "whom the Lord loves He chastens," He says (Heb 12:6). "As many as I love I rebuke" (Rev. 3:19). The historical reality of "I HAVE loved you with an everlasting love" is seen where God revealed it in sharp detail at the cross. Every human has been bitten by Israel's "fiery [love-bug] serpents" in our "wilderness," and healing is found (and is only found) in looking at the serpent "lifted up" upon the tree (Jn 3:14-16). The satanic "love-bug" virus is powerless against the person whose mind and soul is etched with a sharply defined vision of what happened on the cross where Christ took our sins upon Himself. Look and live.