What is "Love Picture" about?

When God designed people, He could have made us any way He wanted. We could have breathed water. We could have photosynthesized. We could have had ten legs and three arms. We could have lived among the stars. The fact that we are "made in His image" has less to do with our physical bodies than with our eternal souls.

God deliberately chose to make us as we are, and that includes the way we reproduce. In more poetic terms: love. Sex serves the biological purpose of shuffling our DNA; love serves the spiritual purpose of demonstrating God's relationship with us.

God often speaks in Scripture of loving His people like a man loves a woman. Israel (in the Old Testament) and the Church (in the New Testament) is the bride and God is the groom. God loves and pursues His people, and our unfaithfulness is compared to adultry. But He is purifying us for a great Wedding Day in heaven.

Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless.
--Ephesians 5:25-27

The Scripture above draws a conclusion: since Christ loves the Church selflessly, our romantic love ought to be a reflection of His love. Romantic love should be a picture of God's love. That, I believe, was God's intention from the beginning.

Boy, do we mess that up. Love, in our society, is a commodity, an accessory to life. It's a lure to put on billboards and sell shaving cream. It's an inconvenient bump on the way to sexual fulfillment. We have replaced sacrifice with selfishness. We have taken what is sacred and made it a spectacle.

This picture in the magazine, this picture in our lives, is not the picture God wanted love to be.