In a recent online discussion I was having, the idea of “God is love” came up, with the intention of showing that a particular doctrine I was holding could not be true, because “God is love.” I’m thankful for conversations like these because they cause me to dig into what Scripture actually teaches, and I find that usually, the problem is not that we don’t go to our Bibles for our doctrine, but that we import so many definitions into the doctrines we find there. Since the focus of Everyday Emmaus is to discover the many ways our God reveals Himself in the works of creation, I would like to take this article to explain how the universal contempt for selfishness testifies to the reality of our Tri-Personal God, and in the process, hopefully, understand a little better what it means to say that He is love.
Selfishness is bad. This is a universal sentiment. Well, it’s universal when it comes to our practical interactions with one another. We may sing with Whitney Houston that “learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all,” but we take exception to this concept when another’s self-love causes them to cut in line in front of us. Indeed, this is the fundamental problem with the human race, its inward bent toward self. Give a wordless infant a toy to play with and then watch as his neighbor, a few moments later, decides that he’d rather have it. The righteous indignation of the first regarding the finer points of private property policy will be vigorously expressed and usually with sudden explosiveness! And but for his tiny frame, there would likely be bloodshed. This altercation discloses two salient facts – we don’t need to learn how to love ourselves and we don’t like it when another’s self-love interferes with ours. Self-love is the deadly loop in which all of humanity is willfully and woefully wandering. How can we escape it?
Enter the Gospel of the One who “is love.” What does it mean to say that “God is love,” and how does this really help us? When we say, “God is love,” we usually assume the focus of that love is directed primarily towards us. Often the adoption of a particular religion is little more than the co-opting of some deity’s help in our personal project of self-fulfillment. We even memorialize such sentiments in our worship songs, with lyrics like, “He thought of me, above all…” But when Scripture says that God IS love, it’s first and foremost describing the nature of the self-contained delight within the eternal community of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The love of God, in other words, is primarily the love of those within Himself. But how is this not a case of cosmic selfishness, of infinite and ugly self-centeredness? If this is accurate, why would it not be true to say that the foundation of reality is some twisted form of tribalism, some self-consumed deity, intent on having everything his own selfish way? Ah, but here’s where the glory of the Triune God is highlighted and His uniqueness compared to the hosts of counterfeit gods is on full display. His essence isn’t tribalism, since there were no other tribes to hive off against for endless eons. “…before Me there was no God formed, nor shall there be after Me.” (Isa. 43:10) Nor is it selfishness, since each distinct Person within the One true God is eternally delighting in Another. His self-love is communal bliss.
When we turn to the opening pages of Scripture, we don’t find a solitary god, cooking up his little plans for creation all by himself. It does not say, “Let me make man in my image…” No, it says, “Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness…” (Gen. 1:26) Our very being and that of all creation is the outflow of the communal love shared between the Persons of the Trinity. Proverbs 8 beautifully describes the fellowship between the Father and Son in the making of the world around us. “The Lord possessed me at the beginning of His way, before His works of old. I have been established from everlasting, from the beginning, before there was ever an earth, when there were no depths I was brought forth. When there were no fountains abounding with water. Before the mountains were settled, before the hills, I was brought forth. While as yet He had not made the earth or the fields, or the primal dust of the world. When He prepared the heavens, I was there. When He drew a circle on the face of the deep, When He established the clouds above, When He strengthened the fountains of the deep, when He assigned to the sea its limit, so that the waters would not transgress His command. When He marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside Him as a master craftsman; I was daily His delight, Rejoicing always before Him. (Pro. 8:22-30, NKJV )
From this, we can see that the very fiber of reality was formed by the fountain of God’s loving delight within Himself. He did not create out of a need for fellowship or any other lack. Creation is the overflow of His own unfettered fullness! How different is this from all other world religions! We do not live in a universe created by the lonely Allah, who existed without company for untold ages till he made the worlds. Nor are we here through the divisive actions of warring gods, separated by their very natures. No, we feel the intrinsic cohesiveness of the world around us because it was made by the eternally cohesive God. Why is selfishness wrong? Why is isolation the pursuit of fools? (Pro. 18:1) Because the very foundation of reality is corporate, the essence of creation flows from the society of God. We recognize the heinousness of selfishness because we are made in the image of the Triune God whose focus has always been on Others – the Others who have eternally been within Himself. This is why it can only be said of our God that He is eternally Love.
When we come to the unbeliever, therefore, and tell him “God is love,” it is not an invitation for him to bring one more source of pleasure into the orbit of himself. No, it is calling him to leave his own self-love and to join in with the eternal love of God. And it is the Spirit of the eternal God alone who can make this happen. He untwists our inward gaze and turns it to the glory of the Father and Son that He has been enraptured with forever. And when we hear the Son say of the cup His Father gives Him, “Not My will, but Thine be done,” (Luke 22:42) we recognize that our very salvation is wrapped up in the Son’s focus, not on us, but His Father’s will, a will that would bring “a multitude which no man could number” (Rev. 7:9) into this love divine. And wonder of wonders, captured by this new focus, we find we are leaving the deadly loop, and like the One who saved us, are overflowing to the others all around us.
