In our unending quest to understand who God is, we must look at the attribute most tied to God. It is God’s most popular attribute, especially among unbelievers. For Christians, it is used mainly to show how God’s choice of us is based on love (Deuteronomy 7:7-11). Thus, He is the manifestation of love itself, with John 3:16 being the most obvious example. For unbelievers, this phrase is mainly used to undermine any form of criticism from Christians concerning their way of life. In short, unbelievers mostly use it as a blanket covering for sin.
God’s Love and Hate
Sadly, most Christians lack the wisdom to respond to such claims from unbelievers. The truth is, however, that in the same way God loves, he also hates. If you love your family, you’d hate for anything bad to happen to them. If that can be true of us, then why do we quickly assume it isn’t true of God? If God is truly love, as many people, including unbelievers, rightfully say he is, then it stands to reason that anything that doesn’t fall in line with the standard he has set, he will rightly be inclined to hate.
John 3:16 and Romans 5:8 show that he loves us and created us to do good works for his glory (Ephesians 2:9-10). However, because we rebelled, God had every right to hate us as stipulated in Psalm 5:5-6, “The boastful shall not stand before your eyes; you hate all evildoers. You destroy those who speak lies; the Lord abhors the bloodthirsty and deceitful man.”
A Holy Standard
He will hate anything that falls short of the standard of his holiness. That doesn’t just include the action of sinfulness but even the sinner. We have to remember it isn’t sin which will suffer the wrath of God and go to hell. Rather, it is sinners who will go to hell (Matthew 13:41-42, 47-50). If God just hated sin and not sinners, then Christ’s death on the cross would have been an act of cosmic injustice. As Romans 5:8 shows, Christ died not for sins but for sinners and bore the wrath of God for sinners (Isaiah 53).
The point of this article isn’t to spew doom and gloom. Instead, my hope is to show you that the statement, ‘God is Love’, rightfully true as it is, shouldn’t be used as the world does. It isn’t a blanket statement that can be used as an excuse to live however we want. By contrast, this statement should make us yearn to be more like Christ.
What Embodies God as Love
What does it mean for God to be ‘love’? To understand that and why the world and most Christians are wrong about it, we must understand what it embodies and its characteristics. For that, we head to 1 Corinthians 13. The Apostle Paul, as he was in the middle of his treatise concerning the gifts of the Spirit, seemingly decides to go on a tangent about it. However, as he points out, nothing we do matters in the grand scheme of things without love, not even the gifts that the Corinthians had placed an ungodly emphasis on (1 Corinthians 13:1-3).
He then expounds on what love is and what embodies it as if, by some divine providence, he knew that this concept would be grossly mischaracterised in the future. So what does love entail? According to Paul’s text, love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails (1 Corinthians 13:4-8).
I won’t get into the nitty-gritty of every characteristic written here, as we would have to turn it into a series or book. These five verses alone are some of the richest in the entire Bible. However, we will take a cursory glance at only two of the characteristics mentioned.
Love Doesn’t Rejoice in Unrighteousness but in Truth
This characteristic highlights what I have been trying to explain: that the statement ‘God is Love’ cannot and shouldn’t be used as a blanket statement to excuse sin. This characteristic completely refutes and emphasises that if we are to live in light of God’s love, we must understand that his kind of love doesn’t rejoice in unrighteousness but in truth. Also, the truth being talked about here is not based on the lie of ‘my truth’ as the Bible vehemently opposes such a concept (Romans 1:25). Instead, it is the truth found in God’s word (2 Timothy 3:16-17). It is the truth that equips us for every good work.
Love Never Fails
The verse that brings this into its actual context is Romans 8:38-39: “For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing, will be able to separate us from the love of God.” From this, it becomes evident that once God calls us his own, as is the theme of Romans 8, nothing, not even ourselves, can separate us from his love (Romans 8:35). The reason for this steadfast love isn’t that we have done anything special. The last part of verse 39 declares that it is because of “…the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” Jesus was the manifestation of God’s love for us, and not only that, he bore the hate that we deserved (Isaiah 53).
In the same vein, 1 John 4:7-11 expounds, from verse 9, that “In this, the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”
As saints, may we always remember that God’s love was manifested through Christ living the life we couldn’t, one without sin (Hebrews 4:14-16). Not only that, but he also became sin he who knew none so that we might become the righteousness of God in him (2 Corinthians 5:21). Since we believe these things, let’s love as God does and love what he loves (1 Corinthians 6:19-20). Only in this way will we be able to live in true understanding of “God is love”. Shalom.
