God is Love

The Difficulties In Understanding The Love Of God

1. If people believe in God at all today, the majority hold that ‘this God, however he, she, or it may be understood, is a loving being.’ This belief in the love of God is most often set within some matrix other than biblical theology. Their view of the love of God It is not considered or understood within the framework of Scripture.

2. We live in a culture in which many other and complementary truths about God are widely disbelieved. The result is that “the love of God” in our culture has been purged of anything the culture finds uncomfortable. God has been sanitized, democratized, and above all sentimentalized.

Today, if you tell people that God loves them, they are unlikely to be surprised. They say, “Of course God loves me; He’s like that, isn’t He? Besides, why shouldn’t He love me? I’m kind of cute, or at least as nice as the next person.”

In addition, too many sermon messages today depict a God whose behavior is regular, patterned, and predictable. He is narrowly portrayed in terms of the consistency of His behavior, and conformity of His actions to the single rule of “love.”

3. Some elements of postmodernism provide much confusion into the problem of understanding the love of God. Many people believe that all religions are fundamentally the same. Therefore, it is thought to be not only rude, but profoundly ignorant and old-fashioned to try to win someone to your beliefs since implicitly that is announcing that theirs are inferior.

4. Christians have sometimes been swept along to the extent that we have forgotten that within Christian confessionalism the doctrine of the love of God poses its difficulties.

For example, With all the evil and war in the world, how is God’s love tied to God’s justice?

Too often the church has failed to think through the fundamental questions that enable us to maintain
a doctrine of God in biblical proportion and balance.

5. The doctrine of the love of God is also sometimes portrayed within Christian circles as much easier and more obvious than it really is. This is achieved by overlooking some of the distinctions which the Bible itself introduces when it depicts the love of God.

Different Ways the Bible Speaks Of the Love of God

1. The peculiar love of the Father for the Son, and of the Son for the Father (John 3:35), (John 5:20), (John 14:31). This is the intra-Trinitarian love of God.

2. God’s providential love over all that He has made. By and large the Bible veers away from using the word love in this connection, but the theme is not hard to find. God creates everything, and before there is sin, He pronounces all that He has made to be “good” (Genesis 1). Jesus said that the Father even sees the sparrow and cares when it falls. If this were not a benevolent, loving providence, then there would
be reason to doubt if God would provide for His people.

3. God’s salvific stance toward His fallen world. God so loved the world that He gave His Son (John 3:16).

4. God’s particular, effective, selecting love toward His elect. The elect may be the entire nation of Israel, or the church as a body, or as individuals.

5. God’s love is sometimes said to be directed toward His own people in a provisional, conditional way, based on obedience. Jude 1:21 Keep yourselves in the love of God, looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life.

We Must Proceed with Caution When Talking About the Love of God

It is easy to see what will happen if any one of these five biblical ways of talking about the love of God is absolutized and made exclusive, or made the controlling grid by which the other ways of talking about the love of God are relativized and diminished.

GOD IS LOVE

John writes this in his first letter (John 4:8,16). The biblical writers treat the love of God as a wonderful thing, wholly admirable and praiseworthy, even surprising when the objects of His love are rebellious human beings!

How Not to Attempt to Define the Love of God

In the past many have tried to assign the love of God and, derivatively, Christian love to one particular word group.

How to Correctly Define the Love of God

What we must do is study passages with great respect for their contexts, and themes in the Bible with great attention devoted to their place in the unfolding drama of redemption.

We have been privileged beyond measure to be saved by God’s love, shown and informed about His love, and to know the mind of God. It is our responsibility to seek to understand God’s love and to pass it on to others who need to understand it, so that in understanding it, they can also receive His love.