I don't, however, have too much time on my hands, so in contrast to the style of my previous blogs, I'll just ponder the verse below for a while, and write my thoughts down in a (hopefully) semi-articulate fashion as they come. Hopefully the reader will glean something of value from this stream of consciousness!
"The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love." - 1 John 4:8
Initial thoughts
“What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.” - A.W. Tozer
Perhaps the most interesting question we can ask is "what is God like?", and among the most pressing questions we can have is "how can I know Him?". It is convenient, then, that this verse seems to touch on both of these in one sentence!
“What comes into our minds when we think about God is the most important thing about us.” - A.W. Tozer
Perhaps the most interesting question we can ask is "what is God like?", and among the most pressing questions we can have is "how can I know Him?". It is convenient, then, that this verse seems to touch on both of these in one sentence!
Looking at the first clause, we see that if we don't love we do not know God.
This doesn't quite tell us what we must do to know God, but rather is a kind of "test" by which we can tell if we don't know God. It seems rather negative, so let's phrase it positively; we can equivalently say that "If one knows God, one loves";
[Does this statement carry the same weight and authority as scripture now that I have tampered with it? The two statements really are logically equivalent, but maybe to italicize at this point would be to assert that God is somehow constrained by logic. I'd rather sidestep that whole debate for another time. In fact, we have the positive phrasing in the previous verse, which we can safely italicize!]
"Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God." - 1 John 4:7
We see here that if we love, not only do we know God, but we also are born of God.
This whole relationship between knowing God, and loving is wholly unobvious to me. Let us, for your entertainment if nothing else, suppose that I am not just being painfully oblivious, and try to follow the logic behind this assertion.
On the one hand, love seems to be something that one feels - or maybe more correctly, something one does - sometimes, in certain situations, in certain moods. Even ignoring (or averaging!) this explicit time dependence, it seems that the frequency at which - and extent to which - a person loves is a function of their environment, confidence, and nature. It seems to not have all that much to do with how well they know God.
Perhaps, then, we have too strong an idea of love, or too strong a notion of knowing God?
Certainly, to some extent, every human is born of God. So perhaps the verse is suggesting that because we all love, we are thus born of God, and in some sense, know God.
This is a plausible, but rather weak and unsatisfactory interpretation. Let us try again, properly.
This time, lest we be again led astray by vague concepts, let us try to define our terms well.
The words that it is crucial to unambiguise (read: "remove ambiguity from"!) are clearly know and love.
What is love?
The root of love in this context is agape. This is the highest of the four Biblical concepts of love; it is selfless, unconditional, and sacrificial. It perfectly encapsulates the love that God has for his people, and is most clearly displayed in the Calvary love of Christ for his Father.
This love is of a rather strong form, and apparently we must embody it if we are to know God.
Whom, then, is the intended object of the love that those who know God possess?
If it is intended to be God, then the statement suddenly becomes more obvious. But, I fear, it does so at the cost of its intended significance. To say that "everyone who loves God knows God" seems true, but somehow vacuously. Agape love should be more substantial than this.
Maybe the issue is with the question. Perhaps this love that is to be embodied by those born of God is, rather than prescribing how they feel or act towards a specific someone or something, describes something about them. It is not so much that they love, but rather that, in some sense, they are love.
That phrasing is familiar; we have unintentionally arrived at the second clause.
Thinking about it, we should really have started with the second half. There lies the essential substance of the verse, from which everything else should be expected to flow naturally. It was not an entire waste of time to try to understand the former clause without understanding of the latter, provided we learn through the futility of the attempt that the latter is required to make sense of the former; the for is implicative, and not a superfluous connective.
We are, then, naturally lead to the following question:
In what sense is God love?
The verse, surely, should not be taken to suggest an actual equivalence between God and love. For them to actually be the same thing doesn't really make much sense. God is very clearly presented as being far less abstract than what we think of when we think of love in general. We should not think that God is love in the sense that whenever someone loves someone else in an agape (selfless) sense that God literally is the thing the person is doing, or being. And surely the creator and sustainer of the universe is not love itself? As Russell Brand might say, love doesn't have toolkit.
What, then, does this mean? We do not seek to diminish the strength of the posited relationship between God and love at all, and it is clearly supposed to be a strong one!
We can safely say that if God is love, then God is never not loving.
In particular, as God is eternal (uncaused, logically prior to none - Genesis 1:1), and immutable (unchanging in character, and will - Numbers 23:19, Hebrews 13:8) God never has been not loving.
Thus we must view love as an essential part of Gods nature. God is constrained by his own character to love. One may wonder whether God is powerful enough to stop himself from being loving. But this doesn't even make sense as a question! God can not do that because to do it would necessitate that he were no longer God.
This is reassuring, at least in the sense that in the light of this knowledge, other areas are illuminated. For example, it can seem strange that God is described as loving, and caring for, and willing to suffer for humans. After all, even the best of us are so pathetic in comparison to him.
But now we see that God literally can not help himself!
As the Casting crowns song so beautifully puts it,
"Not because of who I am
But because of what You've done.
Not because of what I've done
But because of who You are."
Implications
Suddenly bits of scripture that were completely mind-boggling before now make sense, even though a basis for understanding why it is true does not detract from the "wow factor"! We have not done anything to inspire his love for us, to awaken his affection for us, or to add to the weight of his mercy on us. He loves us to the extent that he loves us because He is that love. Thus we see:
“But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved).” - Ephesians 2:4-5
And this unconditional nature of Gods mercy is emphasized richly, again by Paul;
“But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of deeds done by us in righteousness, but in virtue of his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal in the Holy Spirit.” - Titus 3:4-5
If it is intended to be God, then the statement suddenly becomes more obvious. But, I fear, it does so at the cost of its intended significance. To say that "everyone who loves God knows God" seems true, but somehow vacuously. Agape love should be more substantial than this.
Maybe the issue is with the question. Perhaps this love that is to be embodied by those born of God is, rather than prescribing how they feel or act towards a specific someone or something, describes something about them. It is not so much that they love, but rather that, in some sense, they are love.
That phrasing is familiar; we have unintentionally arrived at the second clause.
Thinking about it, we should really have started with the second half. There lies the essential substance of the verse, from which everything else should be expected to flow naturally. It was not an entire waste of time to try to understand the former clause without understanding of the latter, provided we learn through the futility of the attempt that the latter is required to make sense of the former; the for is implicative, and not a superfluous connective.
We are, then, naturally lead to the following question:
In what sense is God love?
The verse, surely, should not be taken to suggest an actual equivalence between God and love. For them to actually be the same thing doesn't really make much sense. God is very clearly presented as being far less abstract than what we think of when we think of love in general. We should not think that God is love in the sense that whenever someone loves someone else in an agape (selfless) sense that God literally is the thing the person is doing, or being. And surely the creator and sustainer of the universe is not love itself? As Russell Brand might say, love doesn't have toolkit.
What, then, does this mean? We do not seek to diminish the strength of the posited relationship between God and love at all, and it is clearly supposed to be a strong one!
We can safely say that if God is love, then God is never not loving.
In particular, as God is eternal (uncaused, logically prior to none - Genesis 1:1), and immutable (unchanging in character, and will - Numbers 23:19, Hebrews 13:8) God never has been not loving.
Thus we must view love as an essential part of Gods nature. God is constrained by his own character to love. One may wonder whether God is powerful enough to stop himself from being loving. But this doesn't even make sense as a question! God can not do that because to do it would necessitate that he were no longer God.
This is reassuring, at least in the sense that in the light of this knowledge, other areas are illuminated. For example, it can seem strange that God is described as loving, and caring for, and willing to suffer for humans. After all, even the best of us are so pathetic in comparison to him.
But now we see that God literally can not help himself!
As the Casting crowns song so beautifully puts it,
"Not because of who I am
But because of what You've done.
Not because of what I've done
But because of who You are."
Implications
Suddenly bits of scripture that were completely mind-boggling before now make sense, even though a basis for understanding why it is true does not detract from the "wow factor"! We have not done anything to inspire his love for us, to awaken his affection for us, or to add to the weight of his mercy on us. He loves us to the extent that he loves us because He is that love. Thus we see:
“But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved).” - Ephesians 2:4-5
And this unconditional nature of Gods mercy is emphasized richly, again by Paul;
“But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared, he saved us, not because of deeds done by us in righteousness, but in virtue of his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal in the Holy Spirit.” - Titus 3:4-5
In fact, now it becomes clear that "God is love" really underpins redemptive history.
If God we not, in essence, loving, then He could simply stop loving at any point.
In fact, from where would love have arisen, if not from God's very nature?
And without love, what could compel God to send his Son to endure the cross for a fallen creation that despised Him?
We see, then, that love being part of God's essence is a doctrine that we would do well to cling to as absolutely pivotal to our understanding of God; one that illuminates the way for us to correctly understand other attributes of God, and without which we will inevitably misinterpret the intentions of God.
But let us dwell again on the idea that love is in God's essence.
If love is in God's essence, then God has never been without love.
How, then, did this love manifest itself before creation?
In the beginning
In the beginning
One can sidestep this by saying that there was no time before creation, as God created time.
But Genesis 1:1 says "In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth", so it is clear that God at least existed logically prior to his creation. I would go further, and say that before He created time as we understand it God must have decided to create at some point. This pedantic nuance leads me to believe that God created metric (measurable) time, but that even "before" that, there were still sequences of events that could happen in order. Maybe God does in fact live in actual metrizable time, just in one causally independent to ours. But this is just dry philosophy at risk of distracting us (or, at least, me!) from the real things at play here.
The point that I am getting at, however badly I motivated it above, is that God must have loved before he created anything. In fact, if this were not the case, why would God create anything in the first place? Certainly not for personal gain, as God is self-sufficient (depending on nothing, completed by nothing - Colossians 1:15;20)
One can see the motivation for creation itself much more clearly by understanding that God is love, and that this love is life-giving, and naturally seeks objects to actualise its affections. Again, we see that Gods reason for creation, even with love correctly viewed as being in his essence, could not be for his own gain, in an objective sense.
Suppose God created simply that His pre-existing love may be realized in the expression of that love towards the created entity. But then Gods expression of his attributes is dependent on this being. Thus God would not be immutable, with the creation being the measure of his imperfection.
So, then, God must have loved before creation.
The question is how?
For a person to love the same person (ie. themselves) simply can not be agape love. How could it be self-sacrificial? Indeed, if it were, it would not be beneficial for the object of the affection, and so would not be love!
The trinity
The trinity
Aha! We arrive, necessarily, at a God who must consist of multiple persons.
What, then. of 1 Corinthians 8:6?
"Yet for us there is but one God, the Father, from whom all things came and for whom we live..."
I suggest that finishing the verse may be illuminating;
"...and there is but one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom all things came and through whom we live."
And there we have it; two distinct persons, both divine, and yet indistinguishable in nature. Of course, in Christian theology we also have the third component of the trinity - the Holy Spirit.
But the trinity is for another time, it was just nice to properly motivate it from the idea that God is love.
God takes the form of a Father, of a Son, and of Spirit. Before creation, they were all engaging in endless, boundless agape love. All of creation was a creative overflow of this pre-existing love. Gods love for His creation stems from the Fathers love for the Son, and the Sons willingness to endure the cross came from his obedience to the Father, rooted in the agape love they shared.
Any feelings or actions resembling love that we can muster up are a mere reflection of this agape love existing between the three persons of the Godhead. This explains the ubiquitous obsession that humanity has had with love for millenia. It really is a big deal! But we would do well to base our understanding of it on a correct view of Gods love for us.
Theology
Theology
Love, being part of Gods essence, is necessarily to no extent conflicting with any of his other attributes. In particular, with His Justice. This is why the cross was necessary. Because God could not simply overlook our sins, as it were, for free. This would violate his Justice.
The anger we feel when justice is not carried out - the idea that child molester can sometimes go uncaught, for instance - is well-founded, and morally good. It is just that, due to having dimmed consciences as a result of our own imperfections, we sometimes fail to see the same blemishes and violations of Gods holiness in ourselves, and in other people. But it is there all the same.
The world is a messed up place, but the only way we can hope to view God in light of this is by firmly grasping, first and foremost, that God is love. When we look at the world in despair, He feels the same pain far more vividly than we do. He knows the extent of the worlds problems infinitely more accurately than we could ever, and He is emotionally invested in the well-being of humanity far more deeply that we ever will be.
The Biblical view of God is not of a passive supreme being letting people suffer, but of a loving, compassionate God. A Shepherd searching for lost sheep in his flock (Luke 15:1). A husband pursuing an imperfect bride (Hosea). A mother nursing her child (Isaiah 49:15). A Father longing for his children to come home (Luke 15:11).
Filling in the gaps
From the understanding that God is by very nature love, the first section of 1 John 4:8 becomes a lot more transparent.
Suppose we do not love, by the standard of our original verse.
This is equivalent to saying that we are not replicating the kind of love that Christ displayed for us (1 John 4:19).
Thus we are not conforming ourselves to the likeness of Christ, and are therefore not living in Gods will (1 John 2:6).
Then we are being disobedient to God, and so do not love Him (1 John 5:3)
And thus we are not serving our own good, as God work all things to the good of those who love him (Romans 8:28)
But who would not work for their own good?
There is a modern view that, somehow, to anticipate a reward for doing a good deed somehow diminishes the goodness of the deed.
This is not, in my opinion, a biblical view.
Why did Christ endure the cross? For the joy set before Him (Hebrews 12:2).
Why did Paul endure persecution? Because his present suffering he considered nothing compared to the future glory to be revealed in him (Romans 8:18).
Why are we to love our enemies? Because our reward shall be great (Luke 6:35).
Why are we to sacrifice things for Jesus? Because we will receive a hundredfold back in the age to come (Mark 10:29).
We are, after all, commanded to love our neighbors as ourselves (Mark 12:31), which seems to presuppose that we love ourselves. I argue that we all do love ourselves, in the sense that we ultimately serve our own good. We want ourselves to be happy, content, satisfied, joyful, etc. even if this takes strange forms like self-flagellation, suicide, or doing a law degree.
Thus the only conclusion to make, if we are causing our own detriment, is that we are doing so accidentally; if we do not love, we have not understood Gods love.
But love is part of Gods essence, so if we don't understand His love, we don't know Him at all!
Phew. Now that verse makes sense!
At least to me. For now.
Application
How, then, should we respond to this (hopefully somewhat) fresh understanding of Gods character?
It is clear that we are to love. But what does that look like?
Well, quite simply, it looks like Christ.
The gospels account of Christ are by far the best resource we have for understanding how to love.
To conform our lives to the image of Gods will for us is exactly to live as closely as we can a life like that of Christs, adapted for our circumstances, guided by wise friends and our own consciences.
In particular, we must make sure that we substitute nothing for love.
This is crucial because, as love is part of Gods nature, it simply has no substitute!
If we do good deeds all of our lives, but do not love, we are nothing. Works will never be sufficient;
"If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing." - 1 Corinthians 13
So I guess the next step on this journey is to focus wholeheartedly on applying principles we see in Jesus' life into our own situations. And that's something we all need to pursue, to some extent at least, on our own.
Hopefully I'll do more of these in the near future, I've certainly enjoy this one.
I'd love to chat with anyone reading this about this (or anything else tbh) at any point, feel free to grab/message me at any time!
Jeff
"For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life." - John 3:16
Filling in the gaps
From the understanding that God is by very nature love, the first section of 1 John 4:8 becomes a lot more transparent.
Suppose we do not love, by the standard of our original verse.
This is equivalent to saying that we are not replicating the kind of love that Christ displayed for us (1 John 4:19).
Thus we are not conforming ourselves to the likeness of Christ, and are therefore not living in Gods will (1 John 2:6).
Then we are being disobedient to God, and so do not love Him (1 John 5:3)
And thus we are not serving our own good, as God work all things to the good of those who love him (Romans 8:28)
But who would not work for their own good?
There is a modern view that, somehow, to anticipate a reward for doing a good deed somehow diminishes the goodness of the deed.
This is not, in my opinion, a biblical view.
Why did Christ endure the cross? For the joy set before Him (Hebrews 12:2).
Why did Paul endure persecution? Because his present suffering he considered nothing compared to the future glory to be revealed in him (Romans 8:18).
Why are we to love our enemies? Because our reward shall be great (Luke 6:35).
Why are we to sacrifice things for Jesus? Because we will receive a hundredfold back in the age to come (Mark 10:29).
We are, after all, commanded to love our neighbors as ourselves (Mark 12:31), which seems to presuppose that we love ourselves. I argue that we all do love ourselves, in the sense that we ultimately serve our own good. We want ourselves to be happy, content, satisfied, joyful, etc. even if this takes strange forms like self-flagellation, suicide, or doing a law degree.
Thus the only conclusion to make, if we are causing our own detriment, is that we are doing so accidentally; if we do not love, we have not understood Gods love.
But love is part of Gods essence, so if we don't understand His love, we don't know Him at all!
Phew. Now that verse makes sense!
At least to me. For now.
Application
How, then, should we respond to this (hopefully somewhat) fresh understanding of Gods character?
It is clear that we are to love. But what does that look like?
Well, quite simply, it looks like Christ.
The gospels account of Christ are by far the best resource we have for understanding how to love.
To conform our lives to the image of Gods will for us is exactly to live as closely as we can a life like that of Christs, adapted for our circumstances, guided by wise friends and our own consciences.
In particular, we must make sure that we substitute nothing for love.
This is crucial because, as love is part of Gods nature, it simply has no substitute!
If we do good deeds all of our lives, but do not love, we are nothing. Works will never be sufficient;
"If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing." - 1 Corinthians 13
So I guess the next step on this journey is to focus wholeheartedly on applying principles we see in Jesus' life into our own situations. And that's something we all need to pursue, to some extent at least, on our own.
Hopefully I'll do more of these in the near future, I've certainly enjoy this one.
I'd love to chat with anyone reading this about this (or anything else tbh) at any point, feel free to grab/message me at any time!
Jeff
"For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life." - John 3:16
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