There are three things told to us in the New Testament concerning the nature of God. First, “God is spirit” (John 4:24). To say, “God is a spirit” would deviate from the Scriptures and be most objectionable for it would place Him in a category with others whom He created. God is “spirit” in the highest sense. Because He is spirit, He is intangible in the natural sense and fills heaven and earth.
Secondly, “God is light” (1 John 1:5), the opposite of darkness. In the Bible, darkness represents sin, evil, and death while light stands for holiness, goodness and life. God is light being the sum of everything excellent and good. This light was never kindled, nor can it ever be extinguished. “And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not” (John 1:5). The darkness can neither understand it nor put it out because darkness is nothing, the absence of light which is, with love, the spiritual and holy substance of God’s Sprit. Ultimately, those that reject light, reject the love of God.
Thirdly, “God is love” (1 John 4:8). It is not simply that God loves, but that He is love. Love is not merely one of His attributes, but His very nature. God is love, but love is not God. Therefore this is descriptive, not definitive. Equating love with God is a great mistake. If John declared that love is what God is, we would be forced to assume that God is what love is. This false conclusion would lead us to worship love as the only God there is. The remaining attributes in the personality of God would be destroyed. When we say of a man, “He is kindness,” we do not mean that kindness and that man are identical.
If love alone and love itself was God, there would be no place for God’s hate, another essential aspect of God’s nature that comes forth from His perfect love. God is love, therefore God hates. Because God is love and God is good, God must hate evil. “These six things doth the LORD hate: yea, seven are an abomination unto him: A proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, An heart that deviseth wicked imaginations, feet that be swift in running to mischief, A false witness that speaketh lies, and he that soweth discord among brethren” (Proverbs 6:16-19). Because I love the truth, I must hate lying. “And let none of you imagine evil in your hearts against his neighbour; and love no false oath: for all these are things that I hate, saith the LORD” (Zechariah 8:17). If we are filled with God’s Holy Spirit, we too, will hate that which is evil and love that which is good. “Hate the evil, and love the good, and establish judgment in the gate: it may be that the LORD God of hosts will be gracious unto the remnant of Joseph” (Amos 5:15). I love children, therefore I hate abortion. I love all people, therefore I hate racial discrimination. I love peace, therefore I hate war and killing. Though God has demonstrated His love to all the world unconditionally, it is upon conditions of repentance from sin that we enter into an obedient, love, faith relationship with Him. “For thou art not a God that hath pleasure in wickedness: neither shall evil dwell with thee. The foolish shall not stand in thy sight: thou hatest all workers of iniquity” (Psalm 5:4,5).
“God is love” means that love is an essential attribute of God that is involved in all of God’s thoughts and acts. According to the Scriptures, God has feelings and affections. The special revelation God has given us declares His love as strongly as His existence. Love is the highest characteristic of God, the one attribute in which all others harmoniously blend together. All of God’s attributes such as holiness, mercy, grace, goodness, justice, and faithfulness are a product of His love. “God is love.” It can therefore be said to be inadequate to speak of love as a divine attribute because the Scriptures make no equivalent statements with respect to qualities of the divine nature. God never suspends His love in order to exercise His justice, or His sovereignty.
Because God is self-existent, His love had no beginning and will have no end because He is eternal. Because He is infinite, His love has no limit. Because He is holy, His love is the embodiment of all spotless purity. Because God is immense, His love is incomprehensibly vast and bottomless. Self-sufficient as He is, He wants our love and will not be satisfied until He receives it. Free as He is, He has let His heart be bound to us forever.
God’s love for us is free, uncaused, uninfluenced and undeserved. “But after that the kindness and love of God our Saviour toward man appeared, Not by works of righteousness which we have done, but according to his mercy he saved us, by the washing of regeneration, and renewing of the Holy Ghost” (Titus 3:4,5). There was nothing whatsoever in you or I to call God’s love for us into existence. We did not cause or influence God’s love toward us. Apart from the working of the Holy Spirit, the love which one creature has for another is because of something in the object. But the love of God is free, spontaneous and uncaused.
One described the Trinity as a revelation of love—the Father, the loving One, the Fountain of love; the Son, the beloved one, the Reservoir of love in whom the love was poured out; and the Holy Spirit, the living love that united both and then overflowed into the world. It is absolutely marvelous that God who is so infinitely above us, so inconceivably glorious, so ineffably holy, would not only notice such worms on the earth, but also set His heart upon them, give His Son for them, send His Spirit to indwell them, and so bear with their imperfections as never to remove His love from them. The reality and power of this love of God can only be properly understood by the influence of the Holy Spirit. “The love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us” (Romans 5:5).
God’s children are often troubled by the accusations of our conscience. There is nothing in us that could attract the love of One as holy and just as God. Many think of God as far removed, gloomy and mighty displeased with you just waiting for an opportunity to smite and punish with sickness, calamity and death. This unhealthy trepidation breaks God’s heart because it is not who He has declared Himself to be. God does hate sin and cannot look upon iniquity with pleasure, but where people seek Him, He genuinely responds with affection. We will never be worthy of His love. Never! We cannot trust in what we are, but in what He has declared Himself to be! Dear brother or sister in Christ, it doesn’t matter if you feel loved. You are loved because He is love as His own word declares. His love proceeds to us by promise, so we should never despair. “For I know the thoughts that I think toward you, saith the LORD, thoughts of peace, and not of evil, to give you an expected end” (Jeremiah 29:11). We are assured that, “Yet the LORD will command his lovingkindness in the daytime, and in the night his song shall be with me, and my prayer unto the God of my life” (Psalm 42:8).
When the Bible says, “God is love” (1 John 4:16), the word used in Greek for love is agape which means brotherly love, affection, good will, love, benevolence. God’s love naturally compels Him to desire our everlasting welfare and His power and sovereignty enables Him to secure it. “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28). We know that love manifests itself as good will. “Yea, I will rejoice over them to do them good, and I will plant them in this land assuredly with my whole heart and with my whole soul” (Jeremiah 32:41).
If Love, Why Hell, Evil and Fear?
Some find this glorious attribute of God’s love irreconcilable with hell, evil and fear. “How could a loving God send a soul to hell?” “How could a loving God allow evil?” and, “Perfect love casts out fear,” they protest. We can only briefly address these contentions here.
First of all, the Person and work of Christ is a defense of God’s love and makes sense when we believe in a literal hell. The doctrine of hell provides a loving justification for the cross of Christ: For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son because there is a place called hell. Also, out of love for His children, God will remove all abominable things and persons from their presence in the new creation so it and they are not plagued with sin (Revelation 21:8).
Love demands liberty. Thus, God designed man to be the master of his own will. God is not the author of sin, but His gift of free will to humanity has been abused in their voluntary apostasy. Man’s liberty alone is responsible for the fault it committed itself (James 1:13). Nevertheless, in God’s divine providence and love, the problems of evil such as death, disease, disasters and temptation are allowed for His good and useful results in the lives of those He loves (Romans 8:28).
The Bible says, “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom” (Psalm 111:10). The Bible also says, “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casteth out fear: because fear hath torment. He that feareth is not made perfect in love” (1 John 4:18). Some interpret these as a contradiction, or that a Christian graduates from fearing God when they come to perfect love. These two opinions couldn’t be further from truth. 1 John 4:18 must be read in its context of the Judgment. The preceding verse says: “Herein is our love made perfect, that we may have boldness in the day of judgment: because as he is, so are we in this world” (1 John 4:17). Thus, a Christian who fears the Lord will not fear the Judgment because as Jesus is, so are we in this world. Even Jesus, the divine Son of God, feared God the Father. Jesus, in the days of his flesh, when he had offered up prayers and supplications with strong crying and tears unto him that was able to save him from death, and was heard in that he feared (Hebrews 5:7). We fear God because He is love. God’s infinite love and goodness is perhaps humanity’s greatest problem with which we must reckon.
God’s Love Manifested in Jesus Christ
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16). When we finally get to heaven and understand the incredible gap, the great distance that God bridged by becoming a Man in His Son Jesus Christ, we will exclaim in ecstasy and exuberance, “God so loved the world!”
“But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). “But God, who is rich in mercy, for his great love wherewith he loved us, Even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, (by grace ye are saved;)” (Ephesians 2:4,5). “And all things are of God, who hath reconciled us to himself by Jesus Christ, and hath given to us the ministry of reconciliation; To wit, that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself, not imputing their trespasses unto them; and hath committed unto us the word of reconciliation” (2 Corinthians 5:18,19).
The love of Christ is the sole cause of His assumption to the office of Mediator. “Hereby perceive we the love of God, because he laid down his life for us” (1 John 3:16). Jesus “loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood” (Revelation 1:5). “In all their affliction he was afflicted, and the angel of his presence saved them: in his love and in his pity he redeemed them; and he bare them, and carried them all the days of old” (Isaiah 63:9). It was required of Jesus Christ that He should pity us until He had none left to pity Himself when He stood in need of it. It was required of Jesus Christ that He should pursue His delight and passion to save us until His own soul was heavy and sorrowful unto death; that He should relieve us from our own sufferings by suffering our deserved punishment in our place.
He was mocked and ridiculed. The Scriptures do not even go into the unnecessary details of how he was shamefully treated and despised by men. He was beaten and scourged until His body was ripped open. His face torn and His beard ripped out of His cheeks. A crown of thorns was pierced deep into His scalp. He was drug through the streets and spit upon. The Scripture says, “his visage was so marred more than any man, and his form more than the sons of men” (Isaiah 52:14). Even in brokenness, swelling bruises, and His body soaked in His blood, He willingly laid down His hands and His feet to that cross in love.
Why else, God, would You come to earth and let fallen creation spit in Your face, scourge You and mock You on a cross when it was in Your power to destroy it all and recreate it again? His response was not in the least discouraged or sorry by this affliction for He says, “I, Lo, I come (in the volume of the book it is written of me,) to do thy will, O God” (Hebrews 10:7). At any moment hanging on the cross God could have said, “Enough of this!” and annihilated all the universe. Rather, He did this in His care and passion for us and our well-being until it was finished. “When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, It is finished: and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost” (John 19:30). God so loved the world. He purposely surrendered Himself for you because He is love. It was His delight to do it for you. This is an inexpressible, unmeasurable and inconceivable act of love exercised in God through Jesus Christ.
Glory to God! Love was the primary motivation of the triune God in the redemptive plan of salvation by grace through faith in Christ who redeemed our souls from sin and death, ransomed us from the enemy, triumphed over all principalities and powers against us, and satisfied the justice of God by bearing the penalty for our sins. God does not save people because of some divine need, or because of people’s inherent worth or because some noble deed of merit that they might have done. Rather, God was moved to save us from our sins for the great love with which He loved us and for the praise of His own glory.
A mutual relationship can only begin with God upon the condition that a person receives God’s love by receiving His Son Jesus Christ and all of His sayings to be true. Jesus said, “He that hath my commandments, and keepeth them, he it is that loveth me: and he that loveth me shall be loved of my Father, and I will love him, and will manifest myself to him. . . If a man love me, he will keep my words: and my Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with him” (John 14:21,23). “For the Father himself loveth you, because ye have loved me, and have believed that I came out from God” (John 16:27).
It is upon repenting of our sins and coming to Jesus Christ not only as our Savior but as the Lord of our life, that we are washed of our hopeless and blemished past and declared legally perfect and righteous in the eyes of God and able to come boldly before His throne of grace. His justice prevents Him to have fellowship with us, but in the Person and work of Jesus Christ, God’s love has found a way to commune with us by reconciling the world to Himself by His own blood. By fulfilling the righteous and perfect requirements of the law and offering up Himself as a sacrifice for the punishment of wicked sins, God has remained perfectly loving and “just, and the justifier of him which believeth in Jesus” (Romans 3:26).
“What shall we then say to these things? If God be for us, who can be against us? He that spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall he not with him also freely give us all things? Who shall lay any thing to the charge of God’s elect? It is God that justifieth” (Romans 8:31-33). This love can be known and experienced by you and I today. We have to be fools to turn down this overture of God’s love in Jesus Christ towards us.
He Loves Us As He Loves His Only Begotten Son
Jesus declared the perfect love which His Father had toward Him, “For the Father loveth the Son, and sheweth him all things that himself doeth: and he will shew him greater works than these, that ye may marvel” (John 5:20).
“And all mine are thine, and thine are mine; and I am glorified in them. I in them, and thou in me, that they may be made perfect in one; and that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me. And I have declared unto them thy name, and will declare it: that the love wherewith thou hast loved me may be in them, and I in them” (John 17:10,23,26). God loves us perfectly even as He loved His only Son Jesus Christ who walked in sinless perfection and complete fellowship with the Father God all of His days. Of whom it was said, “Thou art my beloved Son; in thee I am well pleased” (Luke 3:22), the same delight and satisfaction is displayed toward those in Christ.
Though only taught once in all of Scripture, that God the Father loves Christians even as He loved the only begotten Son of God, this fact alone (the revelation of God’s perfect love toward the one who trusts in Jesus Christ) has changed the Christian walk of many souls who were once under bondage to a misconception of God’s character.
How did Jesus declare the name of the Father to His disciples? In love. How did Jesus show us the Father? In love. The Son of God responds, “Have I been so long time with you, and yet hast thou not known me, Philip? he that hath seen me hath seen the Father; and how sayest thou then, Shew us the Father?” (John 14:9). We see the essence of loving relationship in the Son’s lifestyle on earth. Upon hearing of Lazarus’ death and seeing his friends weep, Jesus also shed tears with those who were His friends. The Jews responded, “Behold how he loved him!” (John 11:36). Tears are special in that they cannot be planned or forced, but only birthed out of a true care and a proof of real love. Jesus wept over Jerusalem.
Behold how God loves us to call us His friends. God’s loving heart is to have us laying on his chest as a child, intimately close to our Lord, just as the disciple whom Jesus loved. It says, “Now there was leaning on Jesus’ bosom one of his disciples, whom Jesus loved” (John 13:23). May we be known as the disciples Jesus loved and remember this transforming truth. God’s love for us is an everlasting friendship. He will never leave us nor forsake us for the disciple whom Jesus loved wrote in his gospel that Jesus, “having loved his own which were in the world, he loved them unto the end” (John 13:1).
Dear saint, as long as you abide in Jesus Christ, there is nothing you can do that will make God love you any more or any less. A misguided zeal for God, that is, without the knowledge of His love, will only lead to frustration and defeat. However, a true understanding of His love will lead us to repentance which is only the beginning of a beautiful and eternal rest in the assurance of who God is and how He desires His children to come to Him. Jesus said, “Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not: for of such is the kingdom of God” (Mark 10:14); “Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 18:3).
Let this love and goodness of God be known and sink into our hearts as an everlasting reality and awareness of who He has declared Himself to be. Not to believe in this love is to call God a liar. Do not just have the right notions of the love of God in your mind unless you can also attain a taste and encounter in your experience in this life. In this love, He is glorious!
When we gaze upon the wonder and glory of God’s love, we cannot help but cover our eyes because it is too much for us criminals to behold, too high for our finite minds to attain, too vast to ever exhaust, too holy and unspeakable for any man to lawfully utter. Yet this very love of God is for us to encounter and experience daily through Jesus Christ, the risen Lord of glory who is love. No more can we fully understand this perfect and holy love than to imagine an eternity of eternities to search out and know this infinite love. Though the Scriptures have declared His love, it will require a deep revelation of the Holy Spirit to teach us His love, the love of God may be shed abroad in our hearts.
“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known. And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity” (1 Corinthians 13:12,13). Even though salvation be by grace through faith (Ephesians 2:8) and we are “we are saved by hope” (Romans 8:24), one might be inclined to emphasize the importance of faith and hope over love, but the Apostle declares that the greatest of these is love!
God loves you, dear saint in Jesus Christ. “Finally, brethren, farewell. Be perfect, be of good comfort, be of one mind, live in peace; and the God of love and peace shall be with you” (2 Corinthians 13:11). “Keep yourselves in the love of God, looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life” (Jude 21).
