God Is Love - Love Is God

This truth I believe is straight, word for word, from The Book. (I John 4:8) It’s also a phrase touted by the hippie freaks.  It’s also used by Universalists.  It’s quoted to support license and to refute belief in God.

Misuse of the truth does not nullify the strength of it.  Perhaps to be more clear to my point, I should have said that Love is God.  Love is so mis-defined in our culture and so hard to un-learn.  We take our mistaken understanding of Love, hear this truth that God is Love, and apply our broken understanding of love to wrongly understand and explain God.

Love seems to be something more tangible than God and something with which we have more experience.  If we think that Love should act in one way, then we expect God to act in accord with that. The problem with that line of thinking is that we should define Love in terms of who God is rather than determine who God is in term of our incomplete and misguided understanding of love.

Love personified in truth is displayed in the life of Christ.  Love unending and nearly incomprehensible is displayed in the continual offering of redemption to the whole human race.  If you read through the whole Book, you will find that God offers love, deliverance, and relationship and meets with selfishness and rebellion time and again.  It amazes me not that bad things happen, but that God has left the human race to continue so long in its determination to mock and reject Him after such great sacrifice and deliverance for our sake.

God is love.  All His acts are in accordance with His nature.  He is just and He is love.  He cannot stop being one to be the other like we do.  This seems impossible at times, but is never the less true.  Again, we are unable to see the whole picture and therefore don’t get it.  This injured sight doesn’t change the facts.  We need to re-learn love.  We need to define love acts in terms of God’s acts.

This is how we lay down our lives for our loved ones.  We sacrifice our comforts so someone can have a need met.  This is how we discipline our children when we don’t want to.  This is how we stop enabling people to sin.  This is how and why we confront sin.  We do all of this because we love like God loves.  Or rather that’s the goal…our selfishness always creeps in and ruins it.  We lay our lives down again, come to the cross again and look at real love, go back and ask forgiveness again….and keep learning love.

God is love.  We can rely on that more than our understanding of either love or God. 

It’s in The Book.