After years of struggle with the truth of divine love I now have an overwhelming sense of God’s great love and mercy toward me. I have come to experience this love through Jesus Christ. He reveals the eternal God to me in trinity; e.g. in the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. I will later seek to show why the trinity, a most under appreciated and misunderstood understanding of God, is so important to what we believe and how we live in loving, faithful obedience to God. If we are to be immersed in the love of God, and then love him and others with divine love, then we must grapple afresh with this great truth of God’s being, the truth that towers above all other divine truths – “God is love.”
When I am asked to speak about God, or to pray to God, I begin with these words:
Beloved, let us love one another, because love is from God; everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love. God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him (1 John 4:7-9, NRSV).
Simply put, when I am asked who God is, I answer: “God is love.” In the past I would have qualified this answer. I would hedge it against all kinds of distortions, distortions which are quite real. (I will elaborate on many of these along the way.) But I now understand these distortions prove the truth – God is love! These distortions become subtle ways of actually moving us away from the depth of God’s true love. I often hear Christians says: “God is love but ______.” This is then followed by a list of qualifiers that all but remove the power of the startling truth: God is love.
To say that God is love is to say that God is most perfectly characterized by love. He is self-giving love, namely the eternal relationship of love shared by the Father and the Son, which overflows into the world by the Spirit. All of the attributes of God (mercy, grace, justice, wrath, etc.) are excellencies of his divine nature but love is who God is. (I have come to deeply doubt the usefulness of speaking about divine attributes in this form of language.) God is, because he is God, eternal love. This means that from his love all other loves derive their real meaning. Simply put, all other love is but a shadow, or reflection, of him. He is true love. All the good – thus all the love – that you have ever seen in this world has its source in the creator who is perfect love. The Creator made the world out of love and as the redeemer he redeems it out of love.
If this is true then being a Christ-follower, a simple disciple of Jesus, is not first the result of an ethical or moral choice, at least not at its root. It is a whole-hearted, full-on, deeply human response to being loved. It is an “encounter with an event, a person, that gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction” (Deus Caritas Est, Pope Benedict XVI. San Francisco: Ignatius, 2006, 1).
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Been reading a little of F. Schaeffer’s work on Genesis, and he opened the book with the discussion of the Trinity as a fellowship of love and communication. Before anything else was, God, in three persons, was and now is, in a completely harmonious fellowship of love. I have been thinking about and worshipping the Trinity in a deeper light all week.
John, I’m looking forward to your future posts on this topic as well as your upcoming book. Personally I’ve been drawn to a more mutual view of love these days. To be sure, it’s an accurate statement to say that God is “self-giving love”. But there is also another side that is often neglected. It is that since he is a trinity of persons, God also receives love. While I don’t think that God necessarily needs our love, he desires it because as one whose very being is defined as love, he is inherently both a giver and receiver of it. If we transfer this idea to our human relationships the principle is the same. Sometimes we possess a martyr-type attitude when attempting to love others; we sacrifice without expecting anything in return. While self-sacrifice is a biblical concept and a vital facet of love itself, we tend to take this to the extreme. Often times this manifests itself in a kind of selfish martyrdom in which we are so enraptured by our own self-sacrifice that we refuse to be loved by those we are serving. This may seem noble on the surface, but when this occurs, I’m not so sure that we’re actually imitating the God whose image we are made in.
This is true, in context, David A. Weed. But agape is “self-giving” by nature.
I spend a couple years reading about the trinity on an off and I really do think it is one of the doctrines that is very much neglected. And the social nature of the trinity is probably the most neglected part of it. But I do wonder if David is not at least partially right. I recently read Paul Miller’s book A Loving Life that was mostly a discussion in light of the book of Ruth. (my review if you are interested http://bookwi.se/loving-life/ ) While there certainly was a number of good things in the book, Miller made sacrifice and suffering love the highest form of love and encouraged people to stay in abusive and harmful relationships (he said physical abuse was a reason to leave, but not always.)
Primarily he was not talking about marriage, and highlighted cases of staying in abusive churches in silence. I know you are not promoting martyrdom within the church. But I am now leery of Miller’s type of teaching because it is so often misused.
I know we need right teaching about self-giving love to counter bad teaching and I am looking forward to reaching yours.
Did this arise from your pondering of being “in Christ”, or from some other context John?
I understand David’s point. God certainly does appreciate reciprocated love. We humans love reciprocated love. It must be true that God does not need us to love him back for any reason. The power or quality of agape love is that it is not only self-giving but also so focused on others, that it appears unconscious to its own reciprocating feelings. As I struggle for the right words to say this, I am finding it very difficult to avoid defining agape love too restrictively. God, as God, is completely outside our realm of experience. We will never fully know his nature or ways. Yet if we are given agape love for others, it is evidence of God at work in our created world, and God receives all the credit for its appearance, and he deserves worship and unspeakable gratitude for displaying it. That reciprocation is welcomed and accepted by God, and he enjoys it rather than needs it. Agape love is other-worldly. No human does it naturally.
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said simply, we love because He first loved us. We confuse the order of life events with how much God loves us, because we are finite on earth and are subject to time, we tend to measure everything. God, in His magnanimous love, does not measure, does not tally and does not react, He loves us in a river of life that we either are in or not, based on our choice. Only a pure love can let us endure difficulties because he knows that it is the refiners fire and will cause us to be perfected in His love. We also confuse the concept of sovereignty with God’s love. Sovereignty does not show i the Hebrew nor the Koine Greek. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/sovereignty This does not describe God, it does not describe His love, It describes man’s limited understanding of an authority much larger than himself who has the ability to do whatever he deems necessary. God does everything out of His love for us, He created us to be in fellowship with him and everything He has done has underscored His desire to know us and be known by us. We need to expand our understanding of His love and stop trying to explain in human terms so I agree with your premise beginning to end. Thanks for sharing
I’m of the thinking that any and all of the Love I have for God (others and His creation too) is simply a reflection of His Love… it certainly becomes mine in Christ as well as I (by grace, through faith) am beginning to be a “partaker in the divine nature”. I am now joyed when I see one of my sons (I have no daughters) loving others in a way that was the result of our love and training of them. I think it is a shadowly reflection of how it might work for God too.
great post John…really looking forward to your new book!
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Immersed in Divine Love http://t.co/zgITVhyAJF
Some good comments here for you John. I would add this from my John- In I John we do well to keep inseparable three characteristics of God’s being- LIGHT, LOVE, and LIFE. In other words, always keep the discussion anchored in the Biblical narrative itself.
Wonderful! A tear in my eye.
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I think that David A. Weed may be trying to say something like this. Real agape love is indeed self-giving. But among fallen humanity, there are all sorts of behaviors (e.g. codependency) that masquerade as self-giving love but are motivated by selfishness. These distortions of agape are very hard to detect, especially in ourselves. And they are sometimes promoted by believers and churches as true love. But over the long haul these false displays of love do not bear good fruit. In my opinion, these discussions are extremely helpful. There is no topic I can think of that is more important than this.
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Precisely, Joseph. And I think that what justifies and perpetuates this unhealthy phenomenon is a perverted view of agape as practiced within the trinity. Please humor my speculative pontification for a moment as I try to parse this out: the Godhead practices agape toward itself even. Each member of the trinity has its own unique and justifiable needs and desires and thus the members make inestimmable sacrifices to meet these for each other. The Father and Spirit collaborate to meet the Son’s need for incarnational fellowship with the creation that he had a direct hand in making; this of course came at great cost to the Father. Likewise both Son and Spirit procure, through blood-bought adoption, a people for the Father and children to call his own. Lastly but not least the Father and Son participate in building a meet and holy dwelling for Him to inhabit. I don’t know if I’m reaching theologically here, but it seems like this is the kind of love that the church ought to mull over. Jesus called us to self-sacrificially love each other, keeping our individual proclivities in mind. Furthermore, if I only give love without also receiving Christ’s tangible love from other body members or vice versa (receive love without giving) then I will not grow well as God’s image bearer. The church often promotes this kind of unhealthy love which appears to me at least to go against the very nature of the trinity.
A simple way to say it: you cannot give yourself to another unless you actually have a self to give. “Love your neighbor as yourself.” Real love for another requires a proper respect and love for oneself.
Thomas Merton writes eloquently about this in the opening pages of No Man is an Island.
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Great post by my friend @JohnA1949 “Immersed in Divine Love” http://t.co/PM8L90ZFBJ
Great post, John. Thank you much for the encouragement.
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