The attributes of God

The Love of God

An attribute of God · 1 John 4:8

The love of God means that God does not merely love; he is love, at the very center of his being. Before the world was made, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit loved one another in perfect joy, and out of that fullness God freely gives himself to us. His love is not earned by the lovely; it is set on the unlovely to make them lovely, and it is proved once for all at the cross.

He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.1 John 4:8 (KJV)

What the love of God means

When John writes that God is love, he says more than that God loves us. He tells us what God is. Love is not one activity of God among others but the very life he has always lived. Christians confess one God in three persons, and that means love did not begin when God made creatures to love. The Father has eternally loved the Son, and the Son the Father, in the Holy Spirit. God is a fountain of love that was full before the world began.

This is why God's love is free. He did not create us out of loneliness or need, as if something were missing in him. He created out of overflow, to share the joy he already had. His love toward us, therefore, is pure gift. It rests on nothing in us, and so nothing in us can exhaust it. It is the kind of love the Bible calls by a special word, a love that gives rather than gets, that seeks the good of the beloved at cost to itself.

How the Bible reveals it

From the first pages, God's love is a pursuing love. He seeks Adam in the garden, he binds himself to a wandering people, he calls them his treasure and his bride. Through the prophet Hosea he loves an unfaithful spouse and buys her back. Again and again Israel forgets him, and again and again he says, I have loved thee with an everlasting love. His love is not a mood that comes and goes but a covenant he will not break.

The New Testament brings that love to its height. God so loved the world that he gave his only Son. Herein is love, John writes, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Love is measured not by our feelings toward God but by his action toward us: while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. The manger and the cross are what the love of God looks like when it is spelled out in a human life and death.

Common misunderstandings

The most common mistake is to soften love into mere permissiveness, as if a loving God must approve of everything and correct nothing. But real love is not indifferent to the harm we do ourselves and others. The God who is love also disciplines those he loves, as a good father does, precisely because he wants our joy and not our ruin. Love that never says no is not love at all.

Another error is to think God's love depends on our performance, that he loves us more on our good days and less on our bad. Scripture says the opposite: he commended his love toward us while we were still sinners. His love is the cause of our change, not its reward. And some make love a vague feeling with no shape. The Bible gives it a definite shape: the laying down of a life. Love is not first an emotion we feel but a Person who gave himself for us.

Why the love of God is good news

If love is the deepest truth about God, then the universe is not cold. Behind all things is not blind force or indifferent law but a Father who loves. This means your life has a meaning it could never give itself: you are known and wanted by the One who made you. Nothing you have done places you beyond his reach, for his love went to the cross to find you.

And this love holds. Paul dares to list every terror, death and life, things present and things to come, and declares that none of them shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus. To rest in the love of God is to have a security the world can neither give nor take away. You are loved not because you are good but because he is, and therefore you are loved to the end.

How the love of God is seen in Jesus Christ

We would never have dared to imagine the love of God had we not seen it in Jesus. He is the love of God made visible, the Father's heart in a human face. He wept at a grave, he welcomed children, he touched the untouchable, he forgave those killing him. In him love is not a theory but a life poured out.

Above all, love is seen at the cross. Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends, and he laid his down for those who were still his enemies. There the love that is God's own being met our sin, and love won. When you want to know whether God loves you, you are not left to guess from a cloudy sky. You are pointed to a hill and a cross and a Savior with open arms. That is the love of God, and it is offered to you.

A note offered humbly and for all Christians: God is one, simple, and undivided in his being, and these attributes are not parts of him but the one God seen from many sides. His holiness is loving, his love is holy, his justice is merciful, and his mercy is just. He is also greater than all our words, and no page can contain him. What we can say, we say only because he has graciously revealed it, above all in Jesus Christ, who is the image of the invisible God.

Related: The Mercy of God · The Holiness of God · Who is Jesus? · All the attributes of God