God Is Love
No one but God could have revealed that to the world, for we all see nothing but its contradiction in our own limited experience. From shattered and broken lives, from caverns of despair where fiends rather than men seem to live, come the apparent contradiction to any such statement. No wonder the carnal mind, the merely intellectually cultured, considers us foolish, mere dreamers talking of love when murder, war, famine, lust, pestilence, and selfish cruelty are abroad in the earth.
But, oh, the beauty of the Abraham-like faith that dares to place the center of its life, confidence, action, and hope in an unseen and apparently unknown God. Such faith says, “God is love,” in spite of all appearances to the contrary; it says, “Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him” (Job 13:15). Such faith is counted for righteousness.
Look back over your own history, as revealed to you by grace, and you will see one central fact growing large—God is love. No matter how often your faith in such an announcement was clouded, no matter how often the pain and suffering of the moment made you speak carelessly, this statement has carried its own evidence most persistently—God is love. In the future, when trial and difficulties await you, do not be fearful. Whatever and whoever you may lose faith in, do not let this faith slip from you—God is love. Whisper it not only to your heart in its hour of darkness, but here in your corner of God’s earth and man’s great city. Live in the belief of it; preach it by your sweetened, disciplined, happy life; sing it in consecrated moments of peaceful joy; sing until the world around you is wrought to sympathy with hopes and fears it heeded not. (Percy Bysshe Shelley)
The world does not encourage you to sing, but God does. Song is the sign of an unburdened heart; so sing your songs of love freely, rising ever higher and higher into a fuller understanding of the greatest, grandest fact on the stage of time—God is love.
But, precious as their influence may be for the time, words and emotions pass. So when the duller moments come and the mind requires something more certain than the memory of mere emotions and stirring sentiments, consider this revelation—the eternal fact that God is love.
God and love are synonymous. Love is not an attribute of God, it is God; whatever God is, love is. If your conception of love does not agree with justice, judgment, purity, and holiness, then your idea of love is wrong. In that case, it is not love you conceive in your mind but some vague infinite foolishness, all tears and softness and utter weakness.
God Is Love—In His Very Nature
Some exceptionally gifted people may derive their ideas of God from other sources than the Bible, but all I know of God I have learned from the Bible—and those who taught me got what they taught from the Bible. In all my dreams and visions I see God, but it is the God of the Bible I see, and I feel Him to be near me. I always see amid the mysteries of providence, grace, and creation “a face like my face” and “a hand like this hand,” and I have learned to love God who gave me such a sure way of knowing Him. He did not leave me to the useless imaginations of my own sin-warped intellect.
In Creation. The love of God gives us a new method of seeing nature. His voice is on the rolling air, we see Him in the rising sun, and in the setting He is fair. In the singing of the birds, in the love of human hearts, the voice of God is present. If only we had ears to hear the stars singing, to catch the glorious anthem of praise by the heavenly hosts!
In His Wisdom. God did not create humans as puppets to please a despotic desire of His own. He created us out of His overflowing love and goodness, and He made us able to receive all the blessedness which He had ordained for us. He “thought” us in the rapture of His own great heart, and lo, we are! Created in the image of God were we, innocent of evil, of great God-like capacities.
In His Power. The whole world moves to God’s great, inscrutable will. Animate and inanimate creation, the celestial bodies moving in their orbits, the globe with all its diverse issues and accompaniments, are all subservient to this end.
Yes, God is good, in earth and sky,
From ocean depths and spreading wood,
Ten thousand voices ever cry,
“God made us all, and God is good.”
(John H. Gurney)
In His Holiness. God walked with man and talked with him. He told him His mind, and showed him the precise path in which he must walk in order to enjoy the happiness God had ordained for him. He rejoiced in the fullness of His nature over man as His child, the offspring of His love. He left nothing unrevealed to man; He loved him. Oh, the joy and rapture of God the Father over man His son!
In His Justice. God showed to man that compliance with His dictates would always mean eternal bliss and unspeakable joy, life and knowledge forever—but that failure to comply would mean the loss of life with God and eternal death.
In the world’s bright morning, the stars sang together and all creation leaped in joy. Then the wild desolation of disobedience, pride, and selfish sinfulness entered, opening a great gulf between God’s children and Himself. But, as always, love found a way—God came to us and for us. Now, with chastened hearts and quivering lips and glistening eyes, yet with love deep and strong in our hearts, we say again with deep adoration, God is love.
If God exhibits such glorious love in His nature, what shall we say of the glories of the giving of His grace? It is very likely that God would have walked this earth had sin never entered. Yet sin did not keep Him from graciously revealing himself in communion with humanity. No, He still came.
The Gift of God’s Only Begotten Son
The gift of God’s only begotten Son surely reveals His love in an amazing degree—“He who did not spare His own Son” (Romans 8:32). It doesn’t matter how bad people are; if they will just lift their eyes to the cross, they will be saved. But yet so blinded and foolish have humans become by sin, they can see nothing in the life of Christ except a beautiful, good life. They see Him as the best of human beings, living misunderstood, suffering, and dying as a martyr. To meet this difficulty, love himself gave another gift—the gift of the Holy Spirit.
The Gift of the Holy Spirit
When the Spirit shines on the historic Christ, all the great, gray outlines spring into glorious relief and color and beauty, and the soul calls out in amazement, “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28).
When the Holy Spirit has begun His gracious work in your soul and heart, you see a new light on the cross—and the “martyr” becomes the Savior of the world. “Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows; yet we esteemed Him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted. But He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement for our peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed” (Isaiah 53:4–5).
It is too difficult—actually, impossible—to determine that God is love by mere, unaided human intellect. But it is not impossible to the intuitions of faith. Lift up your eyes and look over the whole earth. In the administration of God’s moral government, you will begin to discern that God is love, that over sin and war and death and hell He reigns supreme, that His purposes are ripening fast. We must by holy contemplation of all we have considered keep ourselves in the love of God—and then we shall not be able to despond for long.
The love of God performs a miracle of grace in graceless human hearts. Human love and lesser loves must wither into the most glorious and highest love of all—the love of God. Then we shall see not only each other’s faults but the highest possibilities in each other. We shall love each other for what God will yet make of us. Nothing is too hard for God, no sin too difficult for His love to overcome, no failure that He cannot make into a success.
God is love—one brief sentence, short enough to print on a ring. It is the gospel. A time is coming when the whole world will know that God reigns and that God is love, when hell and heaven, life and death, sin and salvation, will be correctly read and understood at last.
God is love—a puzzling text, to be solved slowly, by prayer and joy, by vision and faith, and, at last, by death.
If God Is Love—Why?
It is easy to say “God is love” when there is no war and everything is going well. But it is not so easy to say when everything that happens seems to prove otherwise; for instance, when a man realizes he has an incurable disease or a severe handicap in life, or when all that is dear has been taken from him. If that man says, as he faces these things, “God is love,” it means he has gotten hold of something the average person has missed.
Love is difficult to define. But the working definition I would like to give is that “love is the sovereign preference of my person for another person, embracing everyone and everything in that preference.”
Run your idea for all it is worth. People say they are materialists, or agnostics, or Christians, meaning they have only one main idea—but very few will run that idea for all it is worth. Yet this is the only way to discover whether the idea will work. The same thing is true in the idea of the Christian religion that God is love.
Nature of God’s Love
But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5:8).
The love of God is different from the love of everyone else. “God demonstrates His own love toward us”; it is not the love of a father or mother, or a wife or lover. It is of such a peculiar stamp that it has to be demonstrated to us. We do not believe God’s love.
The Foundation of God’s Love
The foundation of God’s love is holiness—“without which no one will see the Lord” (Hebrews 12:14). God’s love then must be the justification of His holiness. Remember our definition—love is the sovereign preference of my person for another person, embracing everyone and everything in that preference. If God’s nature is holy, His love must be holy love, seeking to embrace everyone and everything until we all become holy.
The Features of God’s Love
The features of God’s love—that is, the way His love as revealed in the Bible shows itself in common life—are unfamiliar to us. The average, commonsense man is completely puzzled by such a verse as John 3:16. The revelation of Christianity has to do with the foundation of things, not primarily with actual life. When the gospel is proclaimed, it is proclaimed as the foundation. The features of God’s love are that if we will commit ourselves to Him, He will impart to us the very nature of His Son. “The gift of God is eternal life” (Romans 6:23, italics added).
The Fact of God’s Love
Now all things are of God, who has reconciled us to Himself through Jesus Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation, that is, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself, not imputing their trespasses to them, and has committed to us the word of reconciliation. Now then, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were pleading through us: we implore you on Christ’s behalf, be reconciled to God. For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him (2 Corinthians 5:18–21).
These are subjects that carry no weight with us in our ordinary way of looking at things. They do not live in the same street—because they are not in the street, but in the foundation of things. When war or some other tragedy hits us hard and knocks us out of the commonplace, we are prepared to listen to what the Bible has to say. Then we discover the Bible deals with the foundation of things that lie behind our commonsense life. The Bible does not deal with the domain of commonsense facts; we get at those by our senses. No, the Bible deals with the world of revelation, facts which we only receive by faith in God.
Nations and God’s Love
“The kingdoms of this world have become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ, and He shall reign forever and ever!” (Revelation 11:15).
We talk about a Christian nation—there never has been such a thing. There are Christians in the nations, but not Christian nations. The constitution of nations is the same as that of a human being. There is a difference between individuality and personality: individuality is all elbows and must stand alone; personality is something that can be merged and blended. Individuality is the husk of the personal life; when personal life is emancipated, individuality goes.
So with nations. The kingdoms of this world have become intensely individualistic, with no love for God or care for one another. The insistence of nations is that they must keep the national peace—and look how well they have been doing it! In the confused rush of nations, such as is going on now, many people have lost not their faith in God (I never met someone who lost that) but their belief in their beliefs. For a while they think they have lost their faith in God. But they have lost the concept which has been presented to them as God, and can now come to God on a new line.
The Origin of Nations
Now the whole earth had one language and one speech. . . . Therefore its name is called Babel; because there the Lord confused the language of all the earth; and from there the Lord scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth (Genesis 11:1, 9).
According to the Bible, nations as we know them are the outcome of what ought never to have been. Civilization was founded on murder, and the basis of our civilized life is competition. There are grand ingredients in civilization—it is full of shelter and protection—but its basis is not good. We each belong to a nation, and each nation imagines that God is an almighty representative of that nation. If nations are right, which is the right one?
The Object of Nations
Where do wars and fights come from among you? . . . You fight and war. Yet you do not have because you do not ask (James 4:1–2).
The question is on the lips of people today: “Is war of the devil or of God?” It is of neither. War is of men—though both God and the devil are behind it. War is a conflict of wills, either in individuals or in nations. As surely as there is will versus will, there must be punch versus punch. This is the object of nations. They will assert their rule and independence and refuse to be downtrodden. If we cannot by diplomacy make our wills bear on other people, the last resort is war—and it always will be until Jesus Christ brings in His kingdom.
There is one thing worse than war and that is sin. The thing that startles us is not the thing that startles God. We are scared and terrorized when our social order is broken, when thousands of men are killed. Well we may be, but how many of us in times of peace and civilization bother one little bit about the state of men’s hearts toward God? Yet that—not the wars and devastations that so upset us—is the thing that produces pain in the heart of God.
The Obliteration of Nations
And there were loud voices in heaven, saying, “The kingdoms of this world have become the kingdoms of our Lord and of His Christ, and He shall reign forever and ever” (Revelation 11:15).
In these last days there is an idea that humans are going to dominate everything by a perfect alliance. Many express a view of the future that says we are heading into a federation of religions and nations when distinctions will be obliterated and there will be a great and universal brotherhood. That is a revolt which is a mental safety valve only.
The apostle Peter says that God is “longsuffering toward us” (2 Peter 3:9). At present He is giving humans an opportunity to try every line they like in individual life as well as in the life of the nations at large. Some things have not been tried yet, and if God were to cut us off short we would say, “If You had let us go a bit longer we could have realized our ideal of society and national life.” God is allowing us to prove utterly that brotherhood cannot be achieved in any other way than Jesus Christ said. It is only by a personal relationship to God through Jesus Christ, who is God and Man—One. Sooner or later, when we reach the end of our rope, we hear Jesus Christ say, “Blessed are the poor in spirit” (Matthew 5:3). If you ask God, He will give you the Holy Spirit, an unsullied heredity through Jesus Christ.
That is how the love of God comes in. It has to be such a long way round because He is “bringing many sons to glory” (Hebrews 2:10). God is not making machines, but men, clear-eyed and sensible all through. Jesus Christ never used a revival meeting to take a man off his guard and then say, “Believe in Me.” He always puts the case to people directly. Jesus even seemed to spurn men when they wanted to follow Him (see Luke 9:57–62). Did Jesus celebrate, “Another convert to My cause”? Not a bit. “Take time and consider what you are doing,” He seems to say. “Are you ready to hear what I have to tell?”
