Wednesday 24 June 2009

some thoughts on the love of God ...


Well I finally reckoned it was about time I got a blog, or started one, whatever the proper jargon is. I doubt anyone will read it, but we all need some way to vent the stuff that builds up inside us, and people tell me I have a lot to say. If your brave enough to read this, I hope you get something out of it, the posts are probably gonna take the form of loose ramblings and thoughts; the different things God's taught me along my journey with his son (i'm gonna try and avoid corny sentiments like that from this point on!)


... So I wasn’t sure what to start with, but then I was reminded of something God had taught me not that long ago, I suppose it's one of those great lessons we all have to start learning at some point; it was about his love. The Apostle John wrote saying, “God is love”. It’s an often quoted, and equally as often abused verse, yet recently I've come to embrace it as perhaps the most pure-and-precious treasure to be found in the whole bible. I hope you’ll learn to understand, as I have, that if we let this simple truth, that God in a very real sense is love, frame everything else we know about his nature, his plans and his purposes, that our walk with Jesus will grow ever sweeter, and our usefulness in building the Kingdom will increase as our love impacts the fallen-love-forsaken world around us (always remembering, of course, that we can only show love because he has first loved us). If you read either John’s gospel or his letters its obvious that he was a man who had been reprimanded by the sheer power of divine love; it permeates everything he wrote. The hymn-writer talked about “love that wilt not let me go” (not Tomlin lol, but a Scottish-born blind preacher called George Matheson, wee bit of a legend!). G. K. Chesterton was a man who knew something about the love of God, he described it as being caught in a “reckless raging fury”. St. Augustine thought of the Holy Spirit as God’s love personified, whose job is to bind believers with the sweet cords of brotherly love. My hope for our generation and, for our communities at large, is that we will, like these men before us, be caught up in that reckless raging fury of emotion we glibly call the love of God; something wholly different from our soap-opera-valentine brand of love; infinitely greater than that soppy brand of teen romance we see acted out (poorly) in Neighbour’s or Hollyoaks. Divine love is a raw and untamed force, it means ultimate sacrifice even when there’s no reciprocation of the loving act. If you were to ask me what the apex, the summit, the highest height of God’s revelation to us is – the thing that lies behind everything; Calvary, grace, judgement, the act of creation, and all the other stuff - I reckon it could be summed up simply by those three words: God is love.



All of creation and all of history have been an outworking of God’s creative and then redemptive-love. We were made to love and to be loved. Love is the only active attribute of God. His Justice, his Wrath, all those other characteristics of God we talk about are only passive. They have to be kindled, evoked to be seen. Only love seeks and saves. Only love acts first; must act first. It cannot be earned like treasure, or imputed like righteousness. It is not deserved like justice, nor can it be bought like redemption was bought, through sacrifice. God’s love is saturated with gracious intent, yet precisely because it is holy love and because we are unholy we see these other, ‘less desirable’ traits portrayed in God; All these other attributes, far from lessening God’s love are the consequence of God’s love, they are inseparable from it. If we start talking about God’s holy-judgement (i.e. hell and all that stuff) without understanding it to be the result of holy-love we end up with a dangerous and distorted image of God, very hard to reconcile with our ‘Father in Heaven’. To put it simply, if God loved us without punishing us, correcting us and redeeming us the hard way, his love wouldn’t be pure at all, it would some sort of selfish niceness. God would be no more than some weak willed grandfather who didn’t rebuke his granddaughter after she kicked her dog across the room, just because he couldn’t cope with her crying.


Knowing firstly the nature of God’s love the second great truth we need to embrace is the extent of his love. To be loved is the default state of all men, the irrevocable condition of every son and daughter of Adam, and the urge to be loved and accepted the most powerful of human desires. Where love is lacking we fill up on that which will ultimately destroy us. But praise God, we cannot switch of his love for us; we can turn our back on the great light of divine love, in so doing casting a long shadow before us, even to the extent where the whole world lies in darkness, but though we can choose to ignore this great love - though we can wander so far from it we are completely unaware of it - we cannot make it cease to be. Neither can we stop love’s plans and purposes to make itself known to us!


In fact everything worthwhile is the outworking of divine love - right from the beginning. All God’s actions are for loves sake – and he demonstrates the infinite magnitude of his love towards us in that while we were willingly, egotistically ignoring so great a truth as his love (the only bread that satisfies men’s souls) and actively disobeying him, he gave his own son over to death to be the propitiation for our sins; our Passover lamb. Men speak of the divine ego, a glory hungry God who wills all things for his own exaltation, and there may be truth here, even if it’s a shadowy parody of proper biblical-truth. I do agree that ‘man’s chief end is to glorify God’, yet the only true way to give glory to God is to sincerely love as he loves. Love is a byword for the glory of God. Only what is prompted and achieved by love will last. Anything coming from anywhere else other than love’s tender root is in essence corrupt and will invariably decay and be forgotten in the age to come. Love holds the universe together, it holds men’s souls together, and it is the for rejection of such great love that hearts are broken and lives destroyed and precious loved souls eventually find themselves in the inescapable void Jesus’ called the outer darkness. I suppose once we pass from this world (through death) we can no longer catch a glimpse of the light of the world. Yet it is true that even in the outer darkness in the midst of the weeping and gnashing of teeth, though utterly unseeable, God’s love will be there. Can hell itself be anything less than loves desperate last resort?


So, what more can I say, except that in light of such truths let us learn how to love, in likeness of our Master; our Lord and Saviour; King Jesus, the blessed lover of our souls, who commanded us to love as he loves us. We are here by grace for one purpose; to labour in keeping that one eternal commandment; love; to love God with our whole being, and to love our neighbours as we love ourselves.



Place me like a seal over your heart,
Like a seal over your arm;
For love is as strong as death,
Its jealousy as unyielding as the grave,
It burns like blazing fire, like a mighty flame.
Many waters cannot quench love; rivers cannot wash it away
If a man were to give all that he owned to try and buy love
He would be utterly despised
(Song of Songs, 8:6&7)