Love, love, love…

Valentine’s Day causes an annual frenzy of card buying, chocolate purchasing, and emotional sentiments. At the greeting card rack, I could scarcely pass through the crush of husbands and boyfriends soberly pondering the proper card for that special person.

Recently, at a church in which I spoke, I received a question from an 11-year old boy. "What is love?" he asked -three words requiring a lifetime here and eternity to come to understand and explain. My answer was simple. I quoted him a three-word answer from a short New Testament book that mentions love 41 times. "God is love." It's from 1 John 4:16, which says in full, "And we have known and believed the love that God has for us. God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him."

Generally love is defined in three aspects. First is "eros," from which we derive "erotic" or "erotica." It’s a passion thing, not necessarily bad or good, but usually thought of in raging lust of some sort. Eros is not found in the New Testament.

Second, "phileo," which is found in the New Testament, is defined as "friendship love" or "affectionate love in the finest sense." Christ is described as showing this toward Lazarus at his grave. "Jesus wept. Then the Jews said, ‘See how He loved him!’" (John 11:35-36). It is also a factor from and to God regarding His redeemed children. "For the Father Himself loves you, because you have loved Me, and have believed that I came forth from God" (John 16:27-28).

The term for love most often found in the New Testament is "agape" love. It is exemplified in John 3:16. "For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life."

Agape love is not, however, always God’s love as seen in John 3:19. "And this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil." This love is love for its own sake. When it is used of God’s love, it means He has extended His grace towards us in Christ based on nothing but His own initial redemptive plan. No mushy sentiment moved Him in our direction. As Romans 5:8 puts it, "But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us." And in John 4:19, we read "We love Him because He first loved us."

The point is that God’s love in Christ originally was a one-way street—loving the unlovely, the rebellious, the obnoxious, the sinner! His agape love saw us for what we were and uniquely planned to make us what we could become—newborn lovers of Him out of sheer gratitude.
The Gospel song "The Love of God" best tells it:

Could we with ink the ocean fill,
And were the skies of parchment made,
Were every stalk on earth a quill,
And every man a scribe by trade;
To write the love of God above,
Would drain the ocean dry;
Nor could the scroll contain the whole,
Though stretched from sky to sky.

Dave Virkler