Focus: Behold Your God! (Pt.3)

Text: Isa.40:9

"Say to the cities of Judah, Behold your God!"

We continue today our line of thought from yesterday's lessons on God's essential nature. Let's keep on beholding our God!

The next point is the fact that God is love.

God loves because He is love. He can't afford not to love. Love is the motivation of all of God's actions. He spanks His children with love in His heart. The writer of Hebrews says, "For whom the Lord loveth he chasteneth, and scourgeth every son whom he receiveth" (Heb.12:6). When He seemingly punishes His sons, He is simply polishing them. The word 'chasteneth' means training, teaching, or disciplining. It is like the Greek or Roman slave whose job it was to take a child to school and ensures that he is properly trained. He engages the rod of discipline if the need be. He applies the rod to avoid spoiling the child. The buffetings result in blessings. The child grows up into a responsible, responsive, and respectable adult. The chastising is not motivated by anger, but by love. 

God says to David concerning Solomon, "I will be his father, and he shall be my son. If he commit iniquity, I will CHASTEN him with the rod of men, and with the stripes of the children of men" (2Sam.7:14). To the church in Laodicea, Christ says, "As many as I love, I REBUKE and CHASTEN…" (Rev.3:19). 

Everything God says and does is love-motivated, regardless of whether it makes sense to us or not, at any given time.

John tells us that "he that loveth not knoweth not God; FOR GOD IS LOVE" (1Jh.4:8,16). John links together loving and knowing God. No one can truly love who has yet to know God by experience and rebirth. Sin damaged man's capacity to love as God. We are strangers to God's kind of love. Man loves selfishly; God loves selflessly. Man loves for gain; God loves for the benefit of the one loved. God is not needy as man is. There is nothing God wants that He does not have within Himself. In fact, love, as God knows it, loves for the good of the other. Where there is love, there must be another to love. Love in its outflow always has an object or company. Love flows from one person to another. To say that God is love means that there is another to love. Hence the three persons of the Godhead. Jesus Christ says, "For the Father loveth the Son… For thou lovedst me before the foundation of the world… Thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me… That the love wherewith thou hast loved me may be in them, and I in them… For the Father himself loveth you…" (Jh.3:35; 5:20; 16:27; 17:23,24,26). 

You never read of the Father or the Son loving Himself, but of the Father loving the Son, loving us, and loving the world, and also, of the Son loving us. And concerning the Spirit, we read in Rom.5:5, that "the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us." He is the Spirit of love. He makes the divine attribute of love communicable to us. He is the Spring or Fountain of love within the believer. 

Why is the Spirit pouring the love of God into the heart of the believer if not that the believer is incapable of loving like God? The Spirit imparts the love of God to us to enable us love like Him.

John says, "Beloved, let us love one another: FOR LOVE IS OF GOD; and every one that loveth is BORN OF GOD, and KNOWETH God" (1Jh.4:7). Love is of God, not of man. When God loves, He is being Himself. He doesn't force it. He doesn't fake it. Love is authentic or original with God. John also tells us that God is a radical lover. He says, "Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins" (1Jh.4:10). His love changes our destiny. His love for us is not prompted by our love for Him. His love is our bailout. John says again, "We love him, because he first loved us" (1Jh.4:19). This verse of Scripture is powerful. In the original it reads, "We love…,"not, "We love him…" The word 'him' was added. So what this Scripture is saying is that we are capable of loving at all, because God first loved us. In other words, we are unable to love until we encounter the love of God firsthand. 

God's kind of loving is inspiring, motivating, and propelling, and by looking at how God loves us, we are stirred and empowered to loving others.

Our hearts beat for love because God put it there. God has given us a perfect example of true love and set the standard by way of the cross.

God has made dying central to loving. To truly love, I must die to self. Love of others is indeed love of self, but love of self is love of others imperiled or jeopardized. Paul tells Timothy that one of the evils of the last days is that "men shall be LOVERS OF THEIR OWN SELVES…" (2Tim.3:2). He gives us a list of evil things of the last days, one of which is that men shall become "lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God" (2Tim.3:4). So we can see the evils of loving self and pleasures as opposed to loving God and people. When we put self in front of love, we miss the point and the goal.

Jesus Christ came to earth to show us real love. Concerning the rich young ruler, Mark writes, "Then Jesus beholding him loved him" (Mk.10:21). In John's Gospel, we read, "Now Jesus loved Martha, and her sister, and Lazarus," and further down, we read, "Then said the Jews, Behold how he loved him" (Jh.11:5,36). The Jews saw and felt the love Jesus had for Lazarus. Love manifests in visible and tangible ways.

God's love is the best thing that ever happened to us. Jesus Christ says, "As the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you: continue ye in my love" (Jh.15:9). His love transforms our lives and changes our story. John says furthermore, "Unto him that LOVED us, and WASHED us from our sins in his own blood" (Rev.1:5). O the radical love of God! It is love beyond human logic. It is love with heavenly rhythm and lyric, melody and harmony. God's love is indeed sweet music to the believer's ears and a melody to his heart. It is an ocean to swim in and a wing with which to fly and soar. May this love flow in you, and overflow from you! Behold your loving God! He is love.

We'll continue tomorrow.

by Bishop Moses E. Peter