Love, wrath and good moods.

September 18, 2007 by Pastor Dan.

“Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God.  Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.  Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” — 1 John 4:7–8

 “God is love.”

We’ve heard that plenty, and seldom let its significance sink in.  Most often, Christians express this by saying that Jesus Christ died for us upon the cross.  Jesus makes known to us the love of God.

But in my experience, people “dumb down” the idea that God is love until it’s little more than sentiment.  My suspicion is that Love itself has been dumbed down in our culture—not much more than a pleasant emotion, not a commitment of the will, an act of sacrifice, a constancy, the purest of motives.

But to say that God loves us, or God is love, is way beyond the idea that God is nice to us or kindly disposed toward us, as a sort of Divine “good mood.”

Rather God’s entire will is disposed toward us, toward all people and all creation, in love. We use the word “benevolent” or “beneficent” to enlarge our own sense of this.  There are two ideas I sometimes have a hard time putting my arms around:   the conviction that God is wholly and completely loving; and the disposition we’re told to show toward God— what we’ve always called “the fear of God”.  I think that must mean fear in the sense of awe, or a kind of “spiritual speechlessness” before The Ultimate One.  To put my arms around both of these things,  I must think of Love as that which is more all-encompassing, more complete, more overwhelming than either my fear and awe or Divine Sentiment.

In spite of the Bible’s many anthropomorphisms, God is not “moody” and does not go through emotional mood swings. God is not some sort of super-human, all powerful, but bi-polar being!  Most of all, God does not react emotionally to our behavior, our failures, or our funny attitudes and little beliefs.

The main motifs in the Hebrew Scriptures (the Old Testament) — that God created all things good, that God chose a people, that God gave these chosen people a land in which to dwell, that God blessed them, guided them, forgave them, protected them, and brought them back from exile — add up to the overwhelming conclusion that the Divine Nature is Love.  God’s love is always for our good.

And the reverse is also true.  Love is the Divine Nature.  We only partly understand or grasp the deepest meaning of Love.  But we cannot even make sense of the idea of Divine Wrath or punishment if we do not first accept that, above all, God is loving.  The factor of wrath must always fit within the equation of love.

“This is how God showed his love among us:  He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him.  This is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.”  — 1 John 4:9–10

The primary motif in the New Covenant, building upon the Old, is also elegantly said in John 3:16:  that God so loved the world as to give the Son, Jesus Christ, as Savior and Redeemer, so that whoever believes may not be lost but will live eternally.  These well-known and much-loved Bible verses are densely packed with Christian doctrine that helps to refine the mere sentiments or dumbed-down ideas about love.  But at its core, the meaning is clear:  Jesus is the evidence that God’s ultimate will toward us and for us is love.

I suppose all this seems like just so much philosophy or mumbo-jumbo, if one does not keep going to the conclusion:  As God once called a “chosen people” in ancient times, so God now, through Jesus Christ, has made a people out of the nobodies of the world —the failed, the lost, the rejected, the unloved.  And this new people are called to communicate God’s love to the whole creation, especially to others who are lost, rejected, or unloved.  We are on assignment.  We must tell the world, through all that we do and all that we are, that God is Love.

Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.  No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.  — 1 John 4:11–12

—Pastor Dan Hooper, Los Angeles

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