Recap: In the previous couple of posts, I made some general observations about false gods and posed the question: At what point does a deity become other than the God of Scripture?
For the next few posts, we'll be looking at the only nouns that are used in the Bible to define God: God is love. God is light. God is truth. We'll be looking at these divine distinctives through the lens of God's goodness, with the understanding that even if a deity claims to be love, or light or truth, without goodness, he/she/it is an imposter.
Today we'll look at God's self disclosure that He is love.
God is Love
"Did you know that God/Jesus loves you?"
During the Jesus Movement (1960s-70s), that question was a common evangelical approach to initiate a conversation about the gospel - God's plan to save the world through his Son, Jesus Christ. I confess that whenever I was approached by one of these "born-agains", my typical response at the time was something like, "Who wants to know?" I hoped that between the flippancy of my retort and the hostile, annoyed look on my face, the "holy-roller" would simply go away . . . and most of the time, it worked like a charm.
While "Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so." is a catchy hook for a children's song, it is not, strictly speaking, a theologically accurate statement. The Bible nowhere states such. Yet the implication that God/Jesus loves us can be inferred from the simple biblical statement, "God is love," a phrase that is offered twice in the scriptures.
Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. (1 John 4:8 ESV)
So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him. (1 John 4:16 ESV)
Let's begin by admitting that no one really knows what that means; God is love. We might have some understanding of what it means to feel love, or to be loved, but not to be love.
I propose that the reason we cannot fully fathom what God means when he says "I am love" is because what we sense as love is not the thing itself, but is really just "the scent of a flower we have not found, the echo of a tune we have not heard, news from a country we have never yet visited" (C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory). And if the love we experience is only an "echo" of the real thing, we reason that somewhere out there must be the original "shout." The best we can do is understand that the thing we know and cherish as "love" was conceived by God, embodied by God and graciously embedded into each of us through his divine creative decree. We can only conclude that God is the source of the "shout" that we receive and experience as love.
God in Us
We love because [God] first loved us. (1 John 4:19 ESV)
The love with which God has enabled us and which emanates from God is transcendent. Just as a song, or a piece of art, or a certain aroma, might transport us to another time and place - a momentary wisp of nostalgia - the love that God has placed in us has the power to move us beyond ourselves and into a realm more akin to the heavenly. The fact that we have been enabled to love is evidence that God has placed in each of us some truly remarkable part of himself, the God who is love.
Paul wrote the following to the Church of Ephesus:
[I pray that you] may have power, . . . to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge--that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God. (Ephesians 3:18-19 NIV)
To fully comprehend the notion that God is love requires divine enablement and supernatural power. This informs us that the thing we know and cherish as love is likely just a diluted serving of the pure divine nectar - a love so wide, so long, so high, so deep, so as to be mostly unknowable until we are one with Him who is love. But, lest we think that the love God grants us to experience - while not the full measure of the powerful force that is God's love - is weak and ineffective, rest assured that it is perhaps the most poignant expression of God's goodness we humans can manage.
Love and Goodness
God's love is imbued with his goodness (or vice versa, if you like). The writers of Scripture go to great lengths to express to us the benevolence of God's love. The Hebrew word used most often to describe this benevolent love is hesed - variously translated in the pages of Scripture as compassion, or mercy, or lovingkindness.
Paul expresses the important link between love and goodness in his letter to the church at Colossae.
Put on then . . . compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience, bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against another, forgiving each other; as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. And above all these put on love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony. (Colossians 3:12-14 ESV)
Compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, patience, forgiveness. Paul tells us that these acts of "goodness" - that is, benevolence toward others, when saturated with love, become bound into a perfect expression of divine grace.
Love always reflects goodness and benevolence because the true God - the God who is love - is good and benevolent. Love and goodness are inseparable, indivisible, bonded together. They are part of the irreducible complexity that is the true God.
Final Thought
An important implication we can draw from God's self-disclosure that He is love is this; with God, there is only love or there is Godlessness. If what proceeds from a deity is other than benevolence steeped in love - that is, a passion for the well-being of all human kind - that deity is not the true God.
I have "great sorrow and unceasing anguish in my heart" when I contemplate the possibility that one day, those who have placed their faith in an unloving imposter will stand in front of Jesus on judgement day and he will sadly say to them, "What was it about 'I am Love' that you didn't understand?"
Next Post: God is Light (1 John 1:5) Here's a link: https://www.bibleinsights.net/post/post-46-a-different-god-god-is-light
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