Valentine’s Day use has made business at Union Mills bakery busy with all the cookies and cakes. Close to 4,000 cookies have been made this week.
I know the history or some of it by reading the Wikipedia, which you can read if you would like. Interesting story about the man named Valentine.
The first time the day became associated with romantic love was in the 14th century, when the tradition of courtly love flourished. Then in the 18th century England, it evolved into an occasion in which lovers expressed their love for each other by presenting flowers, and sending greeting cards (known as “valentines”) .
Remember from the first grade getting “valentines” for every one in the class.Oscar Wilde is reported to have observed: “Everything in the world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power.” Which is the same as to say that everything in the world is about power. And Mr. Wilder was certainly right in his assertion, though he was right in a way he could not have imagined.
The reality is that we live in a world of symbol and sacrament, wherein everything points to something else.
EVERYTHING POINTS To Christ
John 4:7-14…
John 4:31-34
Mark 8:11-21
Hardly are the blind given sight or the lame strength without the Lord perceiving deep spiritual significance in the act.
And when Jesus was on the edge of one of His greatest miracles of all, the raising of Lazarus from the dead, He is still not content to let the miracle merely stand on its own two feet. But Jesus insists on making that act, too, a symbol of something greater: “I am the resurrection and the life” John 11:25.
Why it is, after all, that Jesus is so adept at teaching in parables, but that He sees life as supremely parabolic? Were Jesus to respond to Oscar Wilde, we might imagine Him saying: “Obviously everything in the world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about me.”
JESUS IS ROMANTIC: (If we might use that term in a good sense)
Everything in the world is surly about Jesus: every story in the Bible leads to Jesus, every event significant in proportion to its proximity to the great Event; every holiday, sacred or secular, is holy precisely became it is a day. And certainly romance is included in the scope of everything in the world that is about Jesus Christ the Lord.
Yes I said “romantic” and all that is included under that term belong to that divine lover (Biblical term if I might add) Can I say that all the red roses, all the red cookies, all the red hearts, in a sense should be in symbol of the Lord Jesus Christ. (Christ is the One whom we should love and give our affection to the most)
All our affection toward Christ as He is the One who not only invites us to Himself, but by His Spirit sovereignly draws His beloved to Himself.
I know it seems to be a little uneasily with us to use the image of Christ as a romantic person. But if you will note we have been well instructed in its companion image of Christ as a husband from Ephesians 5. Where we are informed of a marriage between us and Christ. This romantic courtship is biblical if we just drop the worldly view of sex, and romance. The intimacy that has so been blurred by the world, but in the spiritual sense is just what we as believers should have with Jesus Christ as our Lord and Savior.
Of course there is the Song of Solomon which is all about sex and romance and in a sense is a few of our true love for the Lord Jesus Christ.
Note if you will the romance of Jesus at the wedding at Cana, see Jesus acts in a sense of Valentine, when He filled the empty cups with wine. Some would say that the wine was really not important but only the wedding vows. But we must say that there is nothing secondary with what Jesus did that day. Everything in the world is about Jesus.
If we see deep enough, we see that Jesus sees the truth more clearly than anyone, He once again employs again that habit of seeing the world symbolically (a habit learned, no doubt, from the Father), as He perceives in the wedding feast a dim reflection of His own eternal romance. This romance, will be seen in time with the reality of Jesus death on the cross and the price of our redemption paid for my the wine of the new covenant, His blood.
So maybe if we who are Believers who really love the Lord in a very special way, should see that maybe this event that we all seem to get caught up in, see it as a day that we might remember the romance that our Lord was engaged in when He God became man and lived and died and rose again for our redemption.
Hosea 2:14 “Behold, I will allure her, and bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her.” That does sound like a little romance, don’t you think.
And February 14th this year of 2016 does fall on Sunday, and what a wonderful day to show a romance to a lovely Lord Jesus Christ.
