The Bible tells us that God is love. The apostle John writes, “He who does not love does not know God, for God is love” (1 John 4:8). He reiterates this truth a few sentences later: “God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him” (1 John 4:16).
So What Does It Mean That “God Is Love”?
God is love means that God is the source of love; love is His divine essence. Without God, there is no such thing as true love.
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God made the world because He is love. He formed human beings because He is love. And He rules the universe in love. In other words, John is reminding us that when we think of God and the world He created, we should never forget about His love.
What Does It Mean To Say “God Is love”?
There’s a famous Gospel song that suggests if the oceans were full of ink and every human had a pen, we could never write everything that could be written about the wonderful love of God.1 The love of God is an infinite subject, but I will note seven characteristics here.
God’s Love Is Uncaused
Generally speaking, the world’s perspective on love is based on the tiny word “if”: “I love you ‘if’ [or because] you do so-and-so.” In other words, there is a condition, or a cause, for love being shown.
That’s not altogether inappropriate—it’s natural for all of us to “love” something that we see or discover in another person. But what happens if that condition or cause (appearance, talent, personality, job, financial status) goes away? Does love stop?
With God, love is uncaused. God doesn’t love us “because” of anything in us. His love is unprompted and uninfluenced by anything outside of Himself. God’s choice to love is totally uncaused. And because there is nothing we can do that causes God to love us, there is nothing we can do to cause Him to stop!
John Ortberg has said it well, “Nothing you will ever do could make God love you more than He does right now: not greater achievement, not greater beauty, not wider recognition, not even greater levels of spirituality and obedience. Nothing you have ever done could make God love you any less: not any sin, not any failure, not any guilt, not any regret.”2
God loves you! Ephesians 1:5 sums up the “cause” of God’s love: He loves “according to the good pleasure of His will.”
God’s Love Is Unreasonable
Because God’s love is uncaused, it is also un-reasoned, or unreasonable. By human standards, it would be reasonable for God to withdraw His love millions of times each day. But He doesn’t. He loves with an unreasonable love.
The General Confession of the Book of Common Prayer contains this phrase: “We have left undone those things which we ought to have done; and we have done those things which we ought not to have done; and there is no health in us.” That is true—and all those omissions and commissions are reasons God could stop loving us if His love was like ours. But it is not. His love is unreasonable love. Christ died for us “while we were still sinners” (Romans 5:8). That is certainly unreasonable by human standards.
People who say they’ll become a Christian after they clean their life up (“God couldn’t love somebody like me”) totally misunderstand the uncaused and unreasonable love of God.
God’s Love Is Unending
If God is love, and God is eternal (Revelation 1:8), then God’s love has to be eternal, too. That means that His love in the future will never be greater than His love in the past or present. His love for us simply is—it does not change with time because time is not a part of eternity. God said this plainly to the prophet Jeremiah: “Yes, I have loved you with an everlasting love . . .” (Jeremiah 31:3).
Because God’s love is eternal, God is never surprised by something we do; He never has to decide, “Do I still love David Jeremiah in light of what he just did?” God’s love is eternal and unchanging since before the time I was born.
God’s Love Is Unlimited
The Bible says God is infinite and omnipresent. And because God is love, true love is infinite and omnipresent as well. Someone put it this way: “God’s center is everywhere, and His circumference is nowhere.”
At the dedication of the temple in Jerusalem, Solomon prayed, “Behold, heaven and the heaven of heavens cannot contain You. How much less this temple which I have built!” (2 Chronicles 6:18) And the apostle Paul said, “in [God] we live and move and have our being” (Acts 17:28). Since God is love, we also “live and move and have our being” in His love. We are surrounded by the love of God, regardless of what our circumstances or feelings say to the contrary.
I’m not encouraging you to test the boundaries or limits of God’s love. But I am telling you that His love knows no boundaries or limits. The love of God is unlimited.
God’s Love Is Unchanging
To diagram the flow of love from an average human would result in something that looks like a roller coaster. Human love is forever changing based on feelings and circumstances. But God’s love is not changing. God never changes. “For I am the Lord, I do not change” (Malachi 3:6), and neither does His love because God is love (see also Psalm 33:11; 102:27).
The problem we have as humans is that we grow out of the “honeymoon” stage of love. Granted, the honeymoon stage of love is not very realistic; it hasn’t been tested very seriously. But it does have the admirable quality of being fairly constant. But in due course, when life settles in, love is tested and becomes less constant. That is, cause and conditions cause love to ebb and flow.
But not so with God. His love is constant and never-changing because He is constant and never-changing. In the last hours of Jesus’ life on earth, the love of His disciples was tested. Peter denied Him, Judas betrayed Him, several couldn’t stay awake with Him in Gethsemane, and Thomas doubted His resurrection. Yet through it all, Jesus “loved His own . . . to the end” (John 13:1). There was nothing Jesus’ disciples (then or now) could do to change His love for them.
God’s Love Is Uncomplicated
Switzerland’s Karl Barth was one of the twentieth century’s greatest theologians. His crowning achievement was the 13-volume Church Dogmatics, a theological work containing more than six million words. When Barth made his only trip to the United States in 1962, he was supposedly asked by a student to summarize the millions of words about the Bible and theology that he had written. While his audience no doubt expected to be amazed by a profound statement from the learned man, he said, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”3
That is a beautiful picture of the simplicity of God’s love. Simplicity is why John 3:16 is the most widely known Bible verse and the best summary of the Bible’s message: “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life” (italics added).
God’s Love Is Unconditional
The key word used by the New Testament writers to describe the unconditional love of God is familiar to many: agape. There were other Greek words that stood for other aspects of love, but none that represented the kind of love shown by God. So agape was imbued with that kind of meaning: unconditional, sacrificial love, and is the defining term for God’s love in the New Testament.
“Unconditional” summarizes all the previous words we’ve noted that describe God’s love. There is no cause or condition that can begin or end God’s love. God doesn’t love us “because of” but “in spite of.” And agape love is the kind of love by which we are to love one another. Jesus said the world would know we are His disciples if we love each other with the same kind of love with which He loves us—agape (unconditional) love (John 13:35). We love others out of the infinite reservoir of love God has poured into us.
Sources:
1“The Love of God,” Frederick M. Lehman, 1917, 3rd verse variously ascribed: Rabbi Mayer or anonymous. Song is in the public domain. See http://library.timelesstruths.org/music/The_Love_of_God/
2John Ortberg, Love Beyond Reason (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1998), 180.
3Mark Galli, Christianity Today, “The End of Christianity as We Know It,” accessed February 29, 2012, http://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2010/aprilweb-only/25-41.0.html?start=3]
This article is an excerpt from God Loves You.
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