The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love.
1 John 4:8
In this quest to understand who God is through His attributes, we are now at the attribute that is most tied to God by not only Christians but I would argue mainly by unbelievers. For Christians, it is used mainly to show how God’s choice of us is based on love and thus He is the manifestation of love itself with John 3:16 being the most obvious example. For unbelievers, this phrase is mainly used to undermine any form of criticism from Christians in regard to their way of life in short unbelievers mostly use it as a blanket covering for sin.
The thing is most Christians actually barely have the strength to respond to such claims from unbelievers because to do so would be to claim that God actually hates as well because whether we like it or not love and hate are inseparable. Let’s say you love your family then that obviously means that you’d hate for anything bad to happen to them because of that love for them. If that can be true of us, then why are we quick to assume that it isn’t true of God as well? If God is Love as many people including unbelievers rightfully say He is then it stands to reason that anything that doesn’t come from the standard, He has set then He will rightly be inclined to hate. The reason He loves us as John 3:16 or Romans 5:8 shows is that He created us to do good works for His glory (Ephesians 2:9-10). However, because we have rebelled in doing these good works that He has created us for then it stands to reason that He would hate us as stipulated in Psalm 5:5-6;
The boastful shall not stand before Your eyes;
You hate all who do iniquity. You destroy those who speak falsehood;
The Lord abhors the man of bloodshed and deceit.
Anything that falls short of the standard of God’s Holiness He will hate and that doesn’t just include the action but even the people doing said action because we have to remember it isn’t sin which will suffer the wrath of God and go to hell, it is sinners who will go to hell. Not only that if God just hated sin and not sinners then Christ’s death on the cross was an act of cosmic injustice because as Romans 5:8 shows Christ died for sinners and bore the wrath of God for sinners (Isaiah 53).
The point of this article isn’t to be all doom and gloom but rather it is to show you that the statement ‘God is Love’, rightfully true as it is, shouldn’t be used in the way most of the world including genuine Christians do. It isn’t a blanket statement that we can use to live however we want but rather this statement should make us yearn to actually be like Him. I am sure that this statement is true for most of you reading this: I love my country thus I want to embody all that my country stands for. Then the same sentiment you’d have in regards to your country should be equally applied to God in that because He is love then He should want to embody everything that He as love stands for and these include His righteousness, holiness, and justice just to cite a few. Which means that everything that He doesn’t embody He will rightfully despise.
What Embodies What He is as Love
To understand what it means for the Lord to be Love itself and why the worldly understanding, which sadly includes most Christians as well, is extremely weak and flawed we have to understand what it embodies or rather what are its characteristics. For that, we head to 1 Corinthians 13 in which the Apostle Paul as he was in the middle of his treatise concerning the gifts of the Spirit seemingly decides to go on a tangent about it. However, as he points out in the first three verses of the chapter that nothing we do matters in the grand scheme of things without love, not even the gifts that the Corinthians had placed ungodly emphasis on.
He then expounds on what love is and embodies it as if by some divine providence he knew that this concept would be grossly mischaracterized in the future, just saying. So what does love entail, well;
Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails.
1 Corinthians 13:4-8
I won’t get into all the nitty-gritty of each and every characteristic written here as we would have to turn it into a series or even a book as these 5 verses alone are some of the richest in the entire Bible however, we will take a cursory glance at two of the characteristics mentioned.
Doesn’t Rejoice in Unrighteousness but in Truth
What this characteristic shows us is what I have been trying to show throughout this treatise and that is simply that the statement ‘God is Love’ shouldn’t be used as a blanket statement to cover sin and to mean that we can live our lives how we want as this characteristic completely refutes and says that if we are to live in the light of His love then we have to live with the understanding that it doesn’t rejoice in unrighteousness but in truth. Also this truth is not the lie of ‘my truth’ as the Bible vehemently opposes such a concept (Romans 1:25) but rather it is the truth as found in the word of God (2 Timothy 3:16-17). It is the truth that equips us for every good work.
Love Never Fails
The verse that brings this into actual context is Romans 8:38-39;
For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God
From this, we realize that once God calls us His own as is the theme of Romans 8 we come to understand nothing and absolutely nothing not even natural calamities can separate us from it (Romans 8:35). The reason as to why isn’t because we have done anything special but as the end of verse 39 shows it is because of the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord. His Son was the manifestation of His love for us and not only that He bore the hate that we deserved as stated in Isaiah 53. Thus even as the verses that talk of God being love in 1 John 4:7-11 they come to show from verse 9 that by this the love of God was manifested in us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world so that we might live through Him. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
So let’s live our lives with the understanding that God is Love can only be manifested through Christ leaving the life we couldn’t (one without sin) and not only that but He also became sin who knew none so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him (2 Corinthians 5:21).
Shalom.