Perfect Lover

“They keep telling you, they keep telling you, it’s just  fascination. Why don’t they listen, no one listens to what I am sayin’ … There’s a perfect lover running through my head” so the Kansas song goes. Is a perfect lover possible or not? And what does perfect love even look like? Well, this blog does not explore romantic love, but, far more importantly, what I want to do is take a closer look at the greatest love there is – the love of God.

This is the last of a series of blogs I began in September that all deal with themes in 1 John, and love is probably the biggest topic in the book. No other New Testament author ties love to God like John when he claims, “God is love” (twice in chapter 4, in verses 8 and 16). Wow! What does that even mean? This is actually a pretty popular idea about God when it comes to our pluralistic society that’s all about tolerance and acceptance. Funny the same society has a 50%+ divorce rate, absent fathers (and sometimes mothers), an abundance of ethnic prejudices and a political divide as deep as the Mariana Trench. It might be wise to distinguish between the popular take on this statement and the Bible’s meaning. So, come with me to the Bible and let’s explore the love of God.

As we open up our Old Testament, let me just preface this by saying that there’s no way to do a comprehensive study of this in a blog. It will be fruitful for you to study this beyond what I have here, but I can get you started. Let’s just consider first, what does God say about Himself when it comes to love? In Exodus 34, Moses is given the chance of a lifetime to “see” God. It’s too powerful a vision for God to give even Moses the whole picture, but He does agree to a limited viewing. And at that moment God recites His name and proclaims this about Himself: “Yahweh is a compassionate and gracious God, slow to anger and rich in faithful love and truth, maintaining faithful love to a thousand generations, forgiving wrongdoing, rebellion, and sin. But He will not leave the guilty unpunished, bringing the consequences of the fathers’ wrongdoing on the children and grandchildren to the third and fourth generation” (verses 6-7) Almost every Hebrew word associated with love is used here. This is a defining paragraph for God, intimating His two timeless and key essentials of His being: love and holiness. The holiness means that something must be done with man’s sin for relationship with this God to take place. The love means something will be done.

The refrain of the first few lines is repeated several times in the Old Testament. Check out 2 Chronicles 30:9; Nehemiah 9:7; Psalm 86:15; Psalm 103:8; Psalm 111:4; Psalm 145:8; Joel 2:13 and even poor Jonah’s frustration with it in Jonah 4:2. In the nearby account of the Ten Commandments, command #2 repeats the last half of God’s proclamation (Exodus 20:4-6). This shows the readiness of a God, jealous for our undistracted affections, to show abundant love. But He brooks no rivals.

Though that was the case, the people whom God brought under His love and care (ancient Israel) chose many rival gods. And you would think a God as holy as the one portrayed in the Old Testament would just abandon such people and start over. That’s just not what happens, though. What you see is a God who gets angry, but who won’t (can’t?) forsake His children. Hosea 11, which I mentioned in my last blog, is a key passage verifying this. But check out God’s love in Psalm 103 – a love as high as the heavens are above the earth! See His New Covenant promise  in Jeremiah 31 – He loves with an everlasting love. And even at the destruction of Jerusalem when one might have concluded that God had walked away, Jeremiah says through his tears: “Because of the Lord’s faithful love we are not at an end, because His mercy never comes to an end” (Lamentations 3:22, my translation). Regardless of how painful it was to watch the rebellion of His children and punish them, the love of God has been a fixed point throughout history.    

When we get into the New Testament we see Jesus called the Beloved by the Father in audible statements made directly from heaven, first at His baptism (Matthew 3:17; Mark 1:11; Luke 3:22) and then at His transfiguration (Matthew 17:5; Mark 9:7). The Son speaks of the love of the Father, too. In His prayer in John 17:24-26, Jesus says the Father loved the Son before the foundation of the world. The love of God pre-dates all other love. There was love between the Persons of the Trinity that was perfectly given and received, displayed in mutual honor, respect and glory. Check out John 3:35; 5:20 and 10:17 and you find reasons why God loves the Son that correspond to actions of respect and honor on Jesus’ part. Incredibly, in that same prayer of Jesus in John 17, just prior to the verses above, Jesus prays that God would invite us into that kind of love relationship. Perfect love to be received from God, returned to Him, and shared among each other. It makes sense then, that Jesus would call the greatest commandment the command to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul and mind (Matthew 22:37-39; from Deuteronomy 6:5) followed with a command to love your neighbor.

In Romans chapter 5, Paul is excited about the fact we can have peace with God through the Lord Jesus Christ. In verse 5 he tells us that God has poured His love on us by giving us the Holy Spirit so our hope is totally secure. He then says in verse 8 that God loved us while we were still sinners, expressed dominantly in the fact that Christ died for us. If the Father and Son extend such sacrificial love, what can separate us from that love? That sums up the beautiful ending of Romans 8. Paul writes his great poem on love to the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians 13. Notice the attributes of love there which correspond to God’s statement about Himself in Exodus 34 and what we find in Psalm 103. Love is patient and kind, it’s not provoked and it keeps no record of wrongs. Love never ends. It rejoices in the truth. It’s enduring and bears great weight with care. Notice verse 6 – it finds no joy in unrighteousness. Though the sacrifice of Christ opens the way of salvation freely to those who believe, God has never replaced His holiness with love or decreased holiness to make room for more love. He is the same as He has ever been and sin is still a problem that must be dealt with. He doesn’t wink at or laugh it off. We come to Christ with the understanding that God is holy and we must be forgiven. We love Him because He first loved us and we return to Him the honor and respect He is due, recognizing sin as the joy-stealer in any of our relationships.

God is love. Perfect and wonderful love that can’t be matched. Eternal and unfailing, expressed to us in a myriad of ways with intentionality and to our advantage and His glory. But there are other loves that would distract us. One New Testament Greek word for love (phileo) is often used together with other Greek words and so we have the love of man (our word, philanthropy, comes from this), the love of money (2 Timothy 3:2), the love of pleasure (2 Timothy 3:4), the love of strife (1 Corinthians 11:16); the love of being first (3 John 9); the love of one’s own wisdom (our word, philosophy, Colossians 2:8); and the love of self (2 Timothy 3:2). Running after any of these things is cheating on God, our Perfect Lover. To show love is God’s great desire. And so I ask myself, is it my great desire to love God? How can I return His love and show it to others? These questions are excellent prayers to start with as we open each day and as we study God’s word. Lord, teach us to love.