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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.

1 John 4:10

Love is one of the defining characteristics of God’s nature. John states very simply, “God is love” (1 John 4:8). The Bible insists that God is one (Deuteronomy 6:4; 1 Corinthians 8:6) yet also reveals that He exists in three eternal and equal persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. While we cannot fully grasp this Trinitarian nature of God, it can only be said of a Trinitarian God, “God is love.” A “solitary-person-God” would have had no one to love before creation; but the Trinitarian God of the Bible eternally enjoyed harmony and fellowship within the Godhead and wanted to share this love with others. So, God didn’t create us because He was lonely but because He is loving.

It is one thing to verbally express our love but it is another thing to demonstrate that love through actions. That is why the apostle John tells Christians, “My little children, let us not love in word or in tongue, but in deed and in truth” (1 John 3:18). Sadly, while Christians do not always demonstrate their love as they should, God manifested His love towards us by sending His only begotten Son into the world knowing we would hate Him and put Him to death; yet He died that we might live through Him (1 John 4:9).

God was the One who took the initiative to love us. We would never have loved God unless He had shown His love to us in this sacrificial way because our natural tendency is to love our sin and hate God. Most of us would not be as honest as Martin Luther who was so overwhelmed by the chasm between his sin and God’s holiness that he said, “I was myself more than once driven to the very abyss of despair so that I wished I had never been created. Love God? I hated him!” John explains why: “And this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil” (John 3:19).

But because God loved us, He sent His one and only Son “to be the propitiation for our sins”. This word, propitiation, means that God’s wrath against our sins has been satisfied by Jesus offering Himself as a sacrifice. Those who respond to the love of God through faith in Christ are brought into the wonderful fellowship of this Trinitarian God and love Him in return. “So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him” (1 John 4:16, ESV). Friend, have you come to know and believe that love?

DNW

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