Our Father which art in heaven, we Thy children are often troubled in mind,
hearing within us at once the affirmations of faith and the accusations of
conscience. We are sure that there is in us nothing that could attract the love
of One as holy and as just as Thou art. Yet Thou hast declared Thine unchanging
love for us in Christ Jesus. If nothing in us can win Thy love, nothing in the
universe can prevent Thee from loving us.
Thy love is uncaused and undeserved. Thou art Thyself the reason for the love
wherewith we are loved. Help us to believe the intensity, the eternity of the
love that has found us. Then love will cast out fear; and our troubled hearts
will be at peace, trusting not in what we are but in what Thou hast declared
Thyself to be. Amen.
The apostle John, by the Spirit, wrote, “God is love,” and some have taken his
words to be a definitive statement concerning the essential nature of God. This
is a great error. John was by those words stating a fact, hut he was not
offering a definition.
Equating love with God is a major mistake which has produced much unsound
religious philosophy and has brought forth a spate of vaporous poetry completely
out of accord with the Holy Scriptures and altogether of another climate from
that of historic Christianity.
Had the apostle declared that love is what God is, we would be forced to infer
that God is what love is. If literally God is love, then literally love is God,
and we are in all duty bound to worship love as the only God there is. If love
is equal to God then God is only equal to love, and God and love are identical.
Thus we destroy the concept of personality in God and deny outright all His
attributes save one, and that one we substitute for God.
The God we have left is not the God of Israel; He is not the God and Father of
our Lord Jesus Christ; He is not the God of the prophets and the apostles; He is
not the God of the saints and reformers and martyrs, nor yet the God of the
theologians and hymnists of the church.
For our souls’ sake we must learn to understand the Scriptures. We must escape
the slavery of words and give loyal adherence to meanings instead. Words should
express ideas, not originate them. We say that God is love; we say that God is
light; we say that Christ is truth; and we mean the words to be understood in
much the same way that words are understood when we say of a man, “He is
kindness itself.” By so saying we are not stating that kindness and the man are
identical, and no one understands our words in that sense.
The words “God is love” mean that love is an essential attribute of God. Love is
something true of God but it is not God. It expresses the way God is in His
unitary being, as do the words holiness, justice, faithfulness and truth.
Because God is immutable He always acts like Himself, and because He is a unity
He never suspends one of His attributes in order to exercise another.
From God’s other known attributes we may learn much about His love. We can know,
for instance, that because God is self-existent, His love had no beginning;
because He is eternal, His love can have no end; because He is infinite, it has
no limit; because He is holy, it is the quintessence of all spotless purity;
because He is immense, His love is an incomprehensibly vast, bottomless,
shoreless sea before which we kneel in joyful silence and from which the
loftiest eloquence retreats confused and abashed.
Yet if we would know God and for other’s sake tell what we know, we must try to
speak of His love. All Christians have tried, but none has ever done it very
well. I can no more do justice to that awesome and wonder-filled theme than a
child can grasp a star. Still, by reaching toward the star the child may call
attention to it and even indicate the direction one must look to see it. So, as
I stretch my heart toward the high, shilling love of God, someone who has not
before known about it may be encouraged to look up and have hope.
We do not know, and we may never know, what love is, but we can know how it
manifests itself, and that is enough for us here. First we see it showing itself
as good will. Love wills the good of all and never wills harm or evil to any.
This explains the words of the apostle John: “There is no fear in love; but
perfect love casteth out fear.”
Fear is the painful emotion that arises at the thought that we may be harmed or
made to suffer. This fear persists while we are subject to the will of someone
who does not desire our well-being. The moment we come under the protection of
one of good will, fear is cast out. A child lost in a crowded store is full of
fear because it sees the strangers around it as enemies. In its mother’s arms a
moment later all the terror subsides. The known good will of the mother casts
out fear.
The world is full of enemies, and as long as we are subject to the possibility
of harm from these enemies, fear is inevitable. The effort to conquer fear
without removing the causes is altogether futile. The heart is wiser than the
apostles of tranquillity. As long as we are in the hands of chance, as long as
we look for hope to the law of averages, as long as we must trust for survival
to our ability to outthink or outmaneuver the enemy, we have every good reason
to be afraid. And fear hath torment.
To know that love is of God and to enter into the secret place leaning upon the
arm of the Beloved - this and only this can cast out fear. Let a man become
convinced that nothing can harm him and instantly for him all fear goes out of
the universe. The nervous reflex, the natural revulsion to physical pain may be
felt sometimes, but the deep torment of fear is gone forever.
God is love and God is sovereign. His love disposes Him to desire our
everlasting welfare and His sovereignty enables Him to secure it. Nothing can
hurt a good man.
The body they may kill:
God’s truth abideth still
His kingdom is forever.
Martin Luther
God’s love tells us that He is friendly and His Word assures us that He is our
friend and wants us to be His friends. No man with a trace of humility would
first think that he is a friend of God; but the idea did not originate with men.
Abraham would never have said, “I am God’s friend,” but God Himself said that
Abraham was His friend. The disciples might well have hesitated to claim
friendship with Christ, but Christ said to them, “Ye re my friends.”
Modesty may demur at so rash a thought, but audacious faith dares to believe the
Word and claim friendship with God. We do God more honor by believing what He
has said about Himself and having the courage to come boldly to the throne of
grace than by hiding in self-conscious humility among the trees of the garden.
Love is also an emotional identification. It considers nothing its own but gives
all freely to the object of its affection. We see this constantly in our world
of men and women. A young mother, thin and tired, nurses at her breast a plump
and healthy baby, and far from complaining, the mother gazes down at her child
with eyes shining with happiness and pride. Acts of self-sacrifice are common to
love. Christ said of Himself, “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man
lay down his life for his friends.”
It is a strange and beautiful eccentricity of the free God that He has allowed
His heart to be emotionally identified with men. Self-sufficient as He is, He
wants our love and will not be satisfied till He gets it. Free as He is, He has
let His heart be bound to us forever. Herein is love, not that we loved God, but
that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. “For our
soul is so specially loved of Him that is highest,” says Julian of Norwich,
“that it overpasseth the knowing of all creatures: that is to say, there is no
creature that is made that may know how much and how sweetly and how tenderly
our Maker loveth us. And therefore we may with grace and His help stand in
spiritual beholding, with everlasting marvel of this high, overpassing,
inestimable Love that Almighty God hath to us of His Goodness.”
Another characteristic of love is that it takes pleasure in its object. God
enjoys His creation. The apostle John says frankly that God’s purpose in
creation was His own pleasure. God is happy in His love for all that He has
made. We cannot miss the feeling of pleasure in God’s delighted references to
His handiwork. Psalm 104 is a divinely inspired nature poem almost rhapsodic in
its happiness, and the delight of God is felt throughout it.
“The glory of the Lord shall endure forever: the Lord shall rejoice in his
works.”
The Lord takes peculiar pleasure in His saints. Many think of God as far
removed, gloomy and mightily displeased with everything, gazing down in a mood
of fixed apathy upon a world in which He has long ago lost interest; but this is
to think erroneously. True, God hates sin and can never look with pleasure upon
iniquity, but where men seek to do God’s will He responds in genuine affection.
Christ in His atonement has removed the bar to the divine fellowship. Now in
Christ all believing souls are objects of God’s delight. “The Lord thy God in
the midst of thee is mighty; he will save, he will rejoice over thee with joy;
he will rest in his love, he will joy over thee with singing.”
According to the Book of Job, God’s work of creation was done to musical
accompaniment. “Where wast thou,” God asks, “when I laid the foundations of the
earth. . . when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted
for joy?” John Dryden carried the idea a bit further than this, but not,
perhaps, too far to be true:
From harmony, from heavenly harmony,
This universal frame began:
When nature underneath a heap
Of jarring atoms lay,
And could not heave her head,
The tuneful voice was heard from high,
“Arise, ye more than dead!”
Then cold, and hot, and moist, and dry,
In order to their stations leap,
And Music’s power obey.
From harmony, from heavenly harmony,
This universal frame began:
From harmony to harmony
Through all the compass of the notes it ran,
The diapason closing full in Man.
From “A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day”
Music is both an expression and a source of pleasure, and the pleasure that is
purest and nearest to God is the pleasure of love.
Hell is a place of no pleasure because there is no love there. Heaven is full of
music because it is the place where the pleasures of holy love abound. Earth is
the place where the pleasures of love are mixed with pain, for sin is here, and
hate and ill will. In such a world as ours love must sometimes suffer, as Christ
suffered in giving Himself for His own. But we have the certain promise that the
causes of sorrow will finally be abolished and the new face enjoy forever a
world of selfless, perfect love.
It is of the nature of love that it cannot lie quiescent. It is active,
creative, and benign. “God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were
sinners, Christ died for us.” “God so loved the world, that he gave his only
begotten Son.” So it must be where love is; love must ever give to its own,
whatever the cost. The apostles rebuked the young churches sharply because a few
of their members had forgotten this and had allowed their love to spend itself
in personal enjoyment while their brethren were in need. “But whoso hath this
world’s good, and seeth his brother have need, and shutteth up his bowels of
compassion from him, how dwelleth the love of God in him?” So wrote that John
who has been known to the centuries as “the Beloved.”
The love of God is one of the great realities of the universe, a pillar upon
which the hope of the world rests. But it is a personal, intimate thing, too.
God does not love populations, He loves people. He loves not masses, but men. He
loves us all with a mighty love that has no beginning and can have no end.
In Christian experience there is a highly satisfying love content that
distinguishes it from all other religions and elevates it to heights far beyond
even the purest and noblest philosophy. This love content is more than a thing;
it is God Himself in the midst of His Church singing over His people. True
Christian joy is the heart’s harmonious response to the Lord’s song of love.
Thou hidden love of God, whose height,
Whose depth unfathomed, no man knows,
I see from far Thy beauteous light,
Inly I sigh for Thy repose;
My heart is pained, nor can it be
At rest till it finds rest in Thee.
Gerhard Tersteegen
