The Love of God
Roger Forster
The love of God is central to our faith. In this article, Roger speaks on the character of God, the nature of his love, and the implications for our lives.
There is a feature of church history and thought which to me has always seemed strange. It is that no major creed of the Christian church has ever included the unique Christian doctrine that God is love. Neither the Nicene nor the Apostolic Creeds nor the Westminster Confession nor the more modest Evangelical Alliance doctrinal basis of faith has any statement concerning this, which might safely be called the fundamental and exuberantly liberating good news of Jesus Christ - 'God is love and he loves us'.
Of course it may be argued that the Creeds are not concerned with so basic an issue as the Love of God, but rather are the results of doctrinal debates with the philosophical presuppositions of the world views of other generations and cultures, and their abstruse theological arguments. This response might seem reasonable, but for the fact that any philosophical construct ignoring such a characteristic of Supreme being is bound to lead to serious misunderstandings of His character and of our consequent behaviour and indeed of the content of the faith itself.
Again it might be seen that trying to define the Trinitarian nature of God, or the relationships of the divine and the human in the Son of God are exercises which lie outside the provenance of the Almighty love. However, this seems an even more deficient defence of love being absent from such formularies. Whatever else makes the Trinitarian understanding necessary, one supreme fact certainly is that God is love everlastingly. This magnificent assertion cries out for a plurality of relationships in unity for love to exist for all eternity within the Godhead. Or again, if the divine and the human are found in Jesus mingled indissolubly and indistinguishably then we have the further revelation of how the divine and the human can meet and interact in mutual knowing. This surely opens up for us the nature and reality of man loving God in God’s love.
A further factor arises as we consider current creedal statements. If these statements of our faith are repeated week by week (or indeed in any liturgical context as they are in many denominations), there is a necessity for their suitability in teaching and pastoral input. If it is the object of these services within the church and their continual creedal reiterations to produce men and women looking like Jesus, love must have a very important part to play and therefore should be found in this teaching method. If we are to be conformed to the image of the Son of God who is the very image of God - who is love - then the One who loved me and gave himself for me surely would want me to be reminded and instructed continually of his own nature and character. The apostle John in his first epistle seems to do far better than these formularies. Twice he asserts in his fourth chapter (verses 8 and 16) that God is love.
The Christian starting point for a world view must be in God and in his fundamental nature. He is love. Sometimes people have started to build their understanding of the world and its God in God’s almighty power. Of course the Bible does assert that God is almighty. But if God is almighty, He is almighty love. The word all power (in Greek) is used in Revelation 1:8 as a title of Christ.
But God is always giving things away so that although He has all power, he has delegated power (as used in the ‘all power’ above). For instance, he gave power to the devil, who is said to have the power of death. He has also given power to the apostles to overcome demons (Luke 9:1, Matt 10:1), and they had power to witness (Acts 4:33) so he who is and has all power gives it away. Of course that is what God is like – he is always giving away. He is outgoing and love is ‘a giving away’. We understand this wonderful nature of God, who is also called a consuming fire (Deuteronomy 4:25), that He is eternally burning out, giving himself away. However, like the burning bush in Exodus 3 He never burns up. So the God who is love is a give-away God who gives himself away to his universe.
That is love. But, you may ask, how can God be love throughout eternity prior to any creatures existing if there is nothing to love but himself? Such love is self-love which is no love. The Christian answer which cannot be answered in any other philosophic structure or religion is the Trinity. In the Trinity, the one God loves eternally: the Father loves the Son, the Son loves the Spirit, and the Spirit loves the Father and so forth. God did not become love, therefore, only after he had made something to love. That which has pre-eminence and priority therefore is the Love of God - he always has been, and in his nature and his activity continues to be, Love.
The greatest thought that God has ever had – it cannot be equalled – was to think, 'Let us make man in our own image'. In the image of God created he him. Male and female created he them. He couldn’t think of anything bigger or better than himself, so he implemented this triune thought (let us) into a dual expression (male and female) with a view to a resulting third party in the process (multiply). In this original two-some is the ability to choose. They had an existing nature in their being (to love) but equally they had to choose to love, just as God’s eternally existing being has the nature of love, but his tri-personal nature has had to choose to do so. Love without choice becomes meaningless; love exists in the mutually free self-giving of one to another; love must be freely given. Humans therefore, in being like God, must have free will. Although in our beings there may be every inducement to love, one must finally choose with the ‘I will’. In the sexual metaphor, un-consented love is no love at all, it is rape. Love can only be experienced and given within free self-giving. So God made humanity in his own image, as a being to love him and each other. He had to make us with this fundamental tool of free will, which of course also exists in Him.
God’s essential eternal nature is love, but therefore it can conceive of hate as its opposite. But God’s tri-unity personal existential being chooses freely to love and not hate. To try and sum it up more concisely, 'God is love', is love in his essential being but also in his existential choice, God is and chooses to be the love in his nature and reject the thought of the opposite. God's essence and existence in his essential existence and in his personal choices is love and He chooses to be love. This resolves which comes first, the chicken or the egg: is God love and therefore has to love or does God choose to be love? Both things exist at the same time and one doesn’t precede the other. I hope in the few words of this last paragraph you’ve not got lost, but have caught something of the great profundity of the God that we worship.
God could have created us like animals without ability to love and so not to be like him and not to enjoy existence as he does. However, we have the greatest gift of all: god-likeness with a will and so the ability to love like he does. He destined us not to become high-powered beasts nor supersonic angels but he created us and thought about us and destined us before creation to become conformed to the image of his son (Rom 8:29), that by the exercise of our wills we should develop from the raw material of being made in God’s image (Genesis 1:27) into the character of God’s son (Romans 8:29). This is our pre-creation pre-destiny to which, through Christ, we may still aspire by the choices of our being.
However, our choices are real ones and we may choose of the reverse of all that really is the reality - which is God eternally - and so our destiny is lost. After the tremendous excitement in the God-head - Father, Son and Holy Spirit delighting in the thought of a creature destined to become like them in character and share family with them - the joy of the God-head is shattered. The thought of the misuse of this terrific gift of choice which could make them loving creatures like God loves suddenly explodes the joyful anticipation of God. Supposing humanity chose what is not God - hate, pride, lies - what would be the consequence? God’s omniscience (all knowledge) is not having the ability to know what would happen in the future (that is far too small a thing for God) it is knowing everything that could possibly happen in the future - all possible sets of causes and effects and contingencies that could possibly come about. The mass of all such possibilities as information makes the mind boggle: 'Oh, the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are His judgments and unfathomable His ways! For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who became His counsellor? Or who has first given to Him that it might be paid back to Him again? For from Him and through Him and to Him are all things. To Him {be} the glory forever. Amen.' Rom 11:33-36.
However, with all this knowledge comes, as so often, pain, as God foresees anger, hatred, violence, war, domestic and international violence, famine, disease, Aids, children murdered in the womb and on the streets, exploitation, deceit, lies, prison camps and so forth. This project of producing a god-like loving being, looking like his son and sharing his life seemed too costly an adventure, which God was just about to abort, when the Son of God said 'I will be the lamb slain from the foundation of the world' (Revelation 13:8, 1 Peter 1:20). In other words, the one we know as Jesus chose before the world began to take all the consequences of the possible disobediences of humanity in the risky business of making a loving creature.
I feel sure, I can’t prove it, but I seem to think God would have abandoned the plan of making humanity if the Son of God had not offered to be made sin for us, to bear our sins, to take away the sin of the world.
God is love: John 4:7–11 says 'Beloved, let us one another, for love is from God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love. 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. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.'
God is love: 1 John 4:12 says 'No one has seen God at any time; if we love one another, God abides in us, and His love is perfected in us. By this we know that we abide in Him and He in us, because He has given us of His Spirit.'
'God is Love' is the beginning of everything, it is the continuing of everything as we abide in it and it is the end of everything when his love is perfected in us. Keep yourselves in the love of God (Jude 21). |
Roger Forster, 27/09/2006 |
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