"God Is Love" (1 John 4.16)

by R. Armstrong, Toronto | Category: Crossroads | Apr 1969

God loves because it is His very nature to love. God cannot do otherwise than love. If it were possible for God to cease loving He would deny Himself. The power of God to love is not a changing emotion as in human love, but a fixed and eternal attribute, absolute and unchangeable. Love is a constant principle in the Godhead. His righteousness, holiness, purity, truth, and all other divine attributes are unrestricted in their outgoing, and yet in perfect harmony with His love.

The outpouring of God's love is a mighty irresistible stream. Like the rising tide in its strength and fulness it reaches the utmost bounds of the universe. God's love is unending and constant because it is eternal. It is not affected by the ebb and flow of human circumstance, or by change and decay. It is outside of time. It comes from the bosom of the Father by self-revelation, and through the Lord Jesus Christ, that creatures of time might be filled and eternally blessed by it.

We share in its fulness because "the love of God hath been shed abroad in our hearts through the Holy Spirit which was given unto us" (Romans 5.5). By means of the new birth we now have the capacity to embrace divine love. We can bathe in its ocean fulness. The Lord said to His disciples, "By this shall all men know that ye are My disciples, if ye have love one to another" (John 13.35). John the apostle, who felt the very heartbeat of divine love as he reclined on the bosom of Christ, wrote, "My little children, let us not love in word, neither with the tongue; but in deed and truth" (1 John 3.18).

Because God is love, He grieves over those who have turned away from His truth, and longs after the sinner who pursues the folly of his own ways. We can be channels by which the love of God can reach them, and yet how often when someone falls, or turns aside, there is something inherent in human nature which intuitively says, "It was someone else and not I". A kind of unintentional yet secret satisfaction that it happened to someone else. Unless we grieve for others' sins as if they were our own, we know little of the love of God in Christ at Calvary.

"Now abideth faith, hope, love, these three; and the greatest of these is love" (1 Corinthians 13.13). "Love never faileth" (1 Corinthians 13.8).

R. Armstrong, Toronto | Apr 1969
Crossroads