What is Love?

When I was a young man, a co-worker did what we believe all men in their twenties do. Somewhere along the line he too must have wondered if there was more to life than what he knows. So he asked me what is love? I told him that was an easy question to answer, “God is love.” He was offended that I with no college education would think I know something, that he didn’t learn in college.   

  Love is not something you find in a bar, on a Saturday night. Getting drunk and picking up someone for a one night stand. It’s not in drugs making you feel so high that you don’t have to feel the pain that you are carrying around inside. It isn’t in movies or your next relationship, fast cars, or even in your talents.

These are escapes from the emptiness you feel inside. They’re fun for a while, it seems all sin is fun for a while, but when the feeling of fun wears off. Then the pain becomes real again. We try stronger drinks or drugs, change relationships or buy something new. Maybe try to master a new hobby or talent.

But sooner or later we find ourselves asking the same question, What is love? Love is very simple. God is love and God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. ‭‭Romans‬ ‭5‬:‭8‬ ‭NKJV‬‬

Paul describes what love is and what love is not in 1 Corinthians 13: 4-8. You can take the word love and replace it with God, and you have not changed the meaning of these scriptures. You will notice that these are God’s characteristics. 

Love suffers long ( God is long suffering with us, waiting for our salvation) and is kind; rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails.

Love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity. ‭‭I Corinthians‬ ‭13‬:‭4‬-‭8‬ ‭NKJV‬‬ 

Today in my sixties I would answer that question differently. I would of course say that God is love, because that is who God is. But I would explain all that God has done for us. What a Holy Triune God did for us sinners to have a relationship with all of us.   

If only we really understood God’s love, if only we knew something about it, then most of your problems and difficulties would immediately vanish.

Our fundamental difficulty, our fundamental lack, is the lack of seeing the love of God. It is not so much our knowledge that is defective but our vision of the love of God. Our greatest object and endeavour should be to know Him better, and thus we will love Him more truly. Once we love God we will love our neighbor.

Apostle John says that the love of God can only be understood in the light of certain vital truths, and those truths are highly theological. John who explains the love of God in doctrinal and theological form.

Now the Bible teaches us that God has manifested Himself and His love in different ways. 

1. Creation 

2. Providence Matthew 5:45

3. The Lord Jesus Christ His greatest gift toward us. The Old Testament is a book that looks forward to the coming Messiah. The New Testament is an account of how the Messiah came and what He did. The love of God can only be finally understood and appreciated in the Lord Jesus Christ.

In this the love of God was manifested toward us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him. In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. 1John 4:9,10

If you want to know anything about love, you must realise these truths, because it is in this way that God has manifested His wondrous love to us. Apart from these truths you know nothing about love.

that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and depth and height—to know the love of Christ which passes knowledge; that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Ephesians 3: 17-19 

1. Depth- God has loved us who were dead in trespasses and sins Eph 2:1

We lived a life of existence fulfilling the lust of the flesh, and the mind, children of wrath. Enemies of God

2. Height- God has sent His only begotten Son into the world. The central  message of the whole Bible is Jesus the only begotten Son. The original reads like this: In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him. His Son-His only begotten Son. Jesus has a unique kinship with God. The eternal Son of God, co-eternal, equal with God, dwelling in the bosom of God, the brilliant radiance of God, one with God, the second person of the blessed Trinity.

Jesus was sent by God. He existed before the world was created. We were born into the world. This is another way of estimating the love of God. God has manifested His love towards us in that He, there in glory, has sent from Heaven, with its eternal bliss and absolute perfection, into this world His only begotten Son. We cannot fathom this-it escapes us.

If you are uncertain about the person of Christ, you have no love of God in you-you are fooling yourself. Understanding the person of Christ is absolutely essential to understanding the doctrine of the love of God.

3. Depth-God sent His only begotten Son down into this world. Hatred towards God and one another, selfish in thought and deed, self-centered world in which everyone is out for himself. All the malice, envy, hatred, and bloodshed. Poverty, treachery, scheming, deserted by His own disciples, the mock trail, the crown of thorns, beaten, and then crucified. 

Can you imagine what it must have meant to Jesus to look at the ugliness of evil and sin and see it face to face? The shame of it all and the foulness of it all! How could He do it for thirty-three years. In all His purity and holiness into the world we are living? To demonstrate the Love of the Father towards us and to demonstrate the love that He had towards the Father.

4. But more, God sent Jesus we are told to be the propitiation for our sins. What does this mean? The doctrine of the atonement, Jesus became the sin offering for us. God hath made Jesus to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him 2 Corinthians 5:21

It means that Christ Jesus is the not only priest, but He is also the offering, the propitiation, the sacrifice offered. Jesus knew it would involve a separation from the face of His Father. Jesus endured all of this so that we can be saved. God justice was satisfied and He through Christ Jesus can now forgive us, therefore, if you do not understand the doctrine of the Atonement you can not understand God’s love.  

5. Heights-Resurrection. Through Christ Jesus God’s love is manifested towards us in the truth that we are pardoned, forgiven, peace with God, reconciliation, life anew. We begin to live in a new world, see new possibilities like a worldwide great awakening, God mighty working in us and the power which operates in us is His love. Why did God do all this for us? God is love and He loves us and was moved by nothing but His own self-generated love. God’s great heart of love, in spite of all that is in us, unmoved by anything save itself, has done it all.

May we study God’s love and study His Bible until our hearts are broken and we feel the love of God possessing us wholly. Love is so amazing, so divine, demands my soul, my life, my everything.     

So if you want to find the true meaning of love. Then you must go to God. For God is the one who created us, and understands us better than ourselves. Only in Him can you find the answers we are looking for. Only God can take and fill that emptiness inside. So forget about those other things that take your pain away momentarily, and turn to God for God is eternal. These three shall remain: Faith, Hope, and Love. But the greatest of these is Love. For God is Love.