GOD IS LOVE
Today’s post is all about God’s love.
Apostle John’s description of God is both concise and profound: God is love.
The founder of Taize community (in France), Brother Roger, adds a poignant twist by saying, “God is nothing but love”. This deeply resonates with me.
I also resonate with the song, Ubi Caritas that says, “where love is, there is God also.” This love is not the self-centered kind, but one that is self-emptying. This self-emptying love is the very nature of God and He cannot deny the very existence of Himself. God cannot not love. God cannot choose to love. God loves because He is love.
This love is never possessive or controlling. Love never compromises or interferes with His will to grant us complete freedom. The only way to receive love is to respond to Him in freedom and open cooperation. Imagine a picture of Jesus knocking on our soul’s door (Rev. 3:20).
He never forces His way in. Apostle Paul writes (1 Corinthians 13:4-8, ESV):
Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.
In his letter to the Romans (8:37-39, ESV), he remarkably sums it up this way:
No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Love is the beginning and the end. Love never gets distracted or altered. Even when God disciplines, He disciplines out of perfect one-sided love, neither punitive nor retributive. Love bears all things. Because He cannot not love, He does not withhold His love at any time. He must pour out His love constantly.
This unending love is what governs the universe. It has to if (but really because) God is love.
The most eye-opening book I’ve read in the last couple of years is written by Ilia Delio, titled The Unbearable Wholeness of Being: God, Evolution, and the Power of Love. It blew my preconceived notion of God and began to allow me to integrate things that I didn’t know how to put together.
Listen to Delio’s words:
Creation is not merely gift of God; it is being-in-love with God. . . God is not the supernatural being above but the supranatural center of everything that exists. . . That is, we are not rescued from the world by divine grace; rather, we are saved or made whole in and through the world by cooperating with divine love. . . Because divine love is totally other-oriented, the whole cosmos is a theophany, a revelation of God’s glory (69)
God does what God is—what is true to God’s nature and thus what is divine—love. (71)
Yes, God does what God is—love. Love is the essence of who God is, and all of God’s actions are governed by love. No action of God deviates from love. Sin is like saying no to this love. Sin is “resistance to love,” as Delio puts it.
I also believe that the theme of the entire Bible is love. The prevalent Old Testament (the Hebrew scriptures) theme of hesed (חֶסֶד) depicts God’s loving-kindness, goodness, and mercy. (My wife and I were so captivated by this concept of hesed that we named one of our sons, Hesed). The life and death of Jesus Christ is the ultimate demonstration of God’s unending love for the world. Jesus also made sure that we, as His followers, continue living out this divine love by loving God, loving ourselves, and loving our neighbors (which includes loving all peoples—including our perceived enemies).
To experience union with God through Christ is to cooperate with God’s unpossessive and self-emptying love. As we cooperate with God’s very nature of love, we bring God’s kingdom to this earth to “fill it, subdue it, and to have dominion over all things in it.”
REFLECTION QUESTION
What word or phrase resonates with you or challenges you?