By A.W. Tozer
Our Father which art in heaven, we Thy children are oftentroubled in mind, hearing within us at once the affirmations of faithand the accusations of conscience. We are sure that there is in usnothing that could attract the love of One as holy and as just as Thouart. Yet Thou hast declared Thine unchanging love for us in ChristJesus. If nothing in us can win Thy love, nothing in the universe canprevent Thee from loving us. Thy love is uncaused and undeserved. Thouart Thyself the reason for the love wherewith we are loved. Help us tobelieve the intensity, the eternity of the love that has found us. Thenlove 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 tobe. Amen.
The apostle John, by the Spirit, wrote, God islove, 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, but 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 Gods 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 others 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, shining 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 casts out fear (1 John 4:18). 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 mothers 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 tranquility. As long as we are in the hands of chance, as long as we must 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 has torment. To know that love is of God and to enter into the secret place leaning upon the arm of the Belovedthis 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;
Gods truth abideth still,
His kingdom is forever. Martin Luther
Gods 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 Godsfriend, but God himself said that Abraham was his friend (James 2:23). The disciples might well have hesitated to claim friendship with Christ, but Christ said to them, You are my friends (John 15:15). 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 honour 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 has no man than this, that a man laydown his life for his friends (John 15:13).
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 lovedus, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins (1 John 4:10).
For our soul is so specially loved of him that is highest, says Julian of Norwich, that it overpasses 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 loves 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 has 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 Gods 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 Gods 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 endureforever; the Lord shall rejoice in his works (Psalm 104:31).
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 Gods 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 Gods delight. The Lord your God in the midstof you is mighty; he will save, he will rejoice over you with joy; hewill rest in his love, he will joy over you with singing (Zephaniah 3:17).
According to the Book of Job, Gods work of creation was done to musical accompaniment. Where were you, God asks, when Ilaid the foundations of the earth when the morning stars sangtogether, and all the sons of God shouted for joy? (Job 38:4-7).
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 race 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 commends his love toward us, inthat, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us (Romans 5:8). God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son (John 3:16).
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. Butwhoever has this worlds goods, and sees his brother in need, and shutsup his bowels of compassion from him, how dwells the love of God inhim? (1 John 3:17). 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 hearts harmonious response to the Lords 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. GerhardTersteegen