God is Love.

“…God is love.”
-1 John 4:8
As Valentines’ day quickly approaches, love is in the air. How are we to think about love? As 1 John 4:8 makes it very clear, love is not just one of his attributes it is his very nature. Many people like this attribute of God the best, and speak of it often. The tragedy is that many of those who speak of God’s love have no clue what they are talking about. I have often heard it taught that God loves in a special way, and there was a word invented to talk about this type of love: agape love. This is not the case agape is the transliteration of the Greek work for love. Agape simply means love. It is not from the word itself that we can gather any special information, but from the context of the Word of God. I would like to draw out three very important aspects of this attribute of God.
First, God’s love is uninfluenced. By this I mean that there is nothing in the objects of his love to call it into exercise, nothing in the creature to attract or prompt it. We love on another because of different reasons, we are attracted to one another physically, a person we love is like us, etc… In each case there is something that prompts us to love someone else. We see in Deut. 7:7-8, one sees that God chose to love Israel in spite of who they are, the fewest in number.
Second, God’s love is sovereign. That is since God himself is sovereign (meaning under obligations to none, a law unto himself, acting always according to his own pleasure.) God is God and He does as He pleases. Since God is sovereign and since he is love, it follows that his love is sovereign. So God loves whom he pleases. We see this in passages like Romans 9:13 where is says “Jacob have I love, but Esau Have I hated”. There is no more reason to love Jacob over Esau. Both were born at the same time to the same parents and it was written before either had done anything good or bad.
And finally, God’s love is holy. The fact that “God is light” (1 John 1:5) is mentioned before “God is love” (1 John 4:8) in 1 John. God’s love is not regulated by impulse, passion, or sentiment, but by principle. His holiness overshadows all his attributes. God does not wink at sin, even in his own people (Heb. 12:6). If God did wink at sin, Christ died for no reason. God has gone to great lengths to manifest or show his love for us.
Let’s not forget that God’s love is also eternal (Jeremiah 31:3), infinite (Eph. 2:4), immutable (James 1:17), and gracious (John 3:16 & 34). I recommend The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God by D.A. Carson for further study on this matter. God bless you all and have a Happy Valentine’s Day.