Of the beliefs that Christians hold, or ought to if they are biblically oriented, is that the nature of God is love. Love in its pure meaning must not be lost in counterfeits of it, or even legitimate facets (forms) of it in human life and relationship. When appropriated, divine love accomplishes unexpected miracles perhaps unheralded in our lives. It can, for example, provide antidote for loneliness in the life of a Christian, and is often invoked by devoted elderly persons to carry them through their days during the closing period of their mortal days. We are young many times but old only once. One of the great errors of mankind is to lose the experience of the love of God by evaluating it through the mortal lenses of mankind. Even the vagaries of weather, bad news, circumstances like poverty or ill health, and the like may rob us of an awareness and power of the love of God that takes the faith person through the problems, but does not remove or attenuate them except in the context of God’s will to use love as a factor of solution. (I felt strongly the love of God in the loss of my wife to death, a period of great sorrow for my family.)
Agape love with its power emanates from the nature of God. Love, like life, is an evidence of God. Love was a factor in the creation of the life of mankind, partly summarized in the concept of the image of God. Problems may be lightened, even removed, and that from the compassion of God, and primarily activated through prayer, and God’s ministration – love maintained through all circumstances. It is a sustaining factor that sweetens faith through all the contexts of our lives, even when we have been recalcitrant with God. His faithfulness to his children as spiritual Father is a consequence of his love. The confidence of his love to ultimate benefit is presumed to carry us through in what is identified as the victorious life. The victorious life is not under the circumstances but above them. All this is registered in the method of God who by the Holy Spirit works in us from inside out, not outside in. It is cast in such statements as Christ indwelling the Christian life. Related to faith, this has a further value to the person of faith seen in personal experience registering in conscience. All this is a Christian right and the Christian knows it – or ought to. It is admitted that many do not give sufficient attention to the matter to experience the details – context.
The love of God, as broad as it is and meaningful in the course of life for Christian pilgrims is most simply cast as a base for Hope. Hope in the New Testament refers to immortality. God so loved mankind that he gave himself for rescue. If we did not live through this experience, and engage it in both good and evil context we would not gain from freedom and love the gifts that God reserved for his children born of the human race. We might have found some other status with God, say angels or seraphim, but he wanted something closer, another genus born of his love identified not with his power, but with his love. The concept seems simple to affirm, and yet so exotic, that we may miss it. God wanted a closer relationship than angels, and he wanted that relationship born in something more than his power of miracle, like creation competency. That new birth of spiritual society was to make something different than had ever appeared in his magnificent works to share his reality with others so to give another meaning to God in purpose. All this is found in biblical verses like John 3:16, 5:24, and many others from the list of biblical authors. In this is the accent of love, and that love so great that God would share with mankind so to experience humanity in Jesus Christ. For those who prevail in the redemptive love experience of Christ, there is Hope that person will share immortality in God’s eternity, with residence in the Kingdom of God. That relationship of love, guaranteed in the redemptive plan of God, will reach its ultimate fulfillment and register in the conscious experience for all those included in the redemptive story. God woos us. That story is not easy for earthbound humanity to accept easily, especially because it challenges the pride of the race, and disregards the fact that without the love of God there would be no escape from the condition of weakness (sin condition) – to offer an escape designed for dying mortals. In the humility of that condition, there is acknowledgment of inability to account for self, the individual offers penitence, accepts a faith context in the promises of God, serves in proof of that faith. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020