The Love of God

Definitions are important. If I tell my children “I am going to make this fair” they want to know what “fair” means. When they get a splinter and I tell them it will hurt to take it out, they want to know what “hurt” means. More specifically, they want to know “What does the definition mean for me?”

Some of us learn early on that God loves us. We proclaim, as we find our salvation in Christ, that we love Him. But unless our theology contains a working definition of God’s love we can become disillusioned by the incongruencies between our own definitions of His love and the definition of His love as defined by the Scriptures and reiterated to us by the working of His Spirit.

As I read the Psalms it strikes me that David, and most certainly Christ Jesus whom many Psalms foreshadow, had really good working definitions of "the love of God". Thus God’s love held them even when they felt despised and forsaken. The bible is full of stories and poetry which unpack God’s love for us in the form of intellectual understanding, sacrifice, and emotion. The stories build upon one another, in a Divinely inspired manner, unveiling the love of God. Even so, words are inadequate to touch the deep places of the heart created for the indwelling of God’s love. God’s love may be precise, but we are far from capable of precisely defining it. For us, painting a word picture of the essence of God’s love is more arduous than explaining the world to a newborn in just one sentence. But to know God’s love, even a morsel of it, is to be compelled to clarify what we do know of it. What do we mean when we say “God is love” and that God loves us? Indeed knowing that God is love and that He loves us is the very bedrock of our faith; our understanding of what we stand on must be solid if we hope to stand, especially when the winds blow. A working definition of God’s love is not something we uncover once and for all. Rather it is something we uncover facet by facet as we read and study the scripture and spend time in prayer.

The next time you sing “Jesus Loves Me”, do not just sing it. Meditate on it, wonder of it, search the scriptures and list all the places it shows up. Today is a good day to get grounded, to stay rooted, in the unquantifiable, inexpressible, infinitely wanting to be made known Love of God.

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