God is love
The apostle's summit
Of all the things the Bible says about God — that he is holy, almighty, eternal, just — John reaches for three small words that go down to the very bottom: God is love. Not merely that God loves, as one activity among many, but that love is what he is, the very substance of his being.
This is only possible because God is not a solitary monad but a Trinity — Father, Son, and Spirit — an eternal community of self-giving love. Before there was a universe to love, before there was anything at all, there was love flowing between the persons of God. Love is not something God learned or acquired; it is who he has always been.
And lest we sentimentalize it, John anchors this love to a specific, bloody event. This is how the love of God was revealed: he sent his only Son into the world. The love that God is took shape, in time, as a cross.
“He who doesn't love doesn't know God, for God is love.”
— John, the apostle — 1 John 4:8 (WEB)
Rest everything on the bedrock that God is, in his very essence, love — proven at the cross.
“But God commends his own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”
We treat God's love as a mood he is sometimes in, to be coaxed out of him, rather than the ground of his being. The interior work is to let 'God is love' become bedrock beneath every circumstance — especially the hard, unreadable ones — so that when his providence confuses you, you still know the essence of the One you are dealing with.
When God's dealings feel hard or silent this week, return to the bedrock and say it: the One I am dealing with is love, and he proved it at the cross. Let that anchor hold beneath whatever you cannot understand.
When providence turns hard to read, the heart starts treating God's love as a mood — present when life is good, absent when it aches — until suffering itself feels like evidence against him. But love is what God is at the root of his being, not how your week is going, and that bedrock holds firm beneath every circumstance that does not.
If God is love at the very root of his being, then love is not a mood he is occasionally in, to be coaxed out of him on his better days. It is the ground of all his dealings with you, the constant beneath every circumstance. When his providence is hard to read and his silence is hard to bear, this remains bedrock: the One you are dealing with is, in his very essence, love.
This is the truth that the whole stage has been circling, and it is the foundation under everything still to come — the disciplines, the dark nights, the death of self. We do not surrender to an unknown power or submit to a cold sovereign. We give ourselves, at every step, to the One who is love, and who proved it, while we were still sinners, on a cross.
- Do I treat God's love as a mood, or as the ground of his being?
- When his providence is hard, do I still believe he is love?
- What would it mean to rest everything on 'God is love'?
Father, you are love at the very root of your being, and you proved it at the cross. Be my bedrock beneath all I cannot understand. Amen.