As I thought, I’m going to end this series with this third commentary on the subject of God’s love. We say that God is love, but then we live our lives as though He spent His fortune on everyone else. While we have separated ourselves from God, my view of God is that the divide is never complete. Never! Regardless of how dimly we may see His love, and regardless of how defective our response is to that love, there’s still a thread that holds us, and will never let us go. Read Romans eight again. The church has so marginalized the power of God’s love and made concepts such as the Atonement, a mechanical, transactional, legal, and juridical event rather than a personal, relational, and love action.
The chief causative agency in the world is not POWER- but LOVE!
God will not ultimately be defeated. I simply cannot see the One who created me as abandoning me, allowing my free will to be greater than His will, or birthing me into a no win situation. What god would do that? And why would He do that? God’s not going to win my love by coercion, but as a result of His competence in how He designed and created me (we are talking God here, right?). How does love work? Do we really know? What claims does love make? And, what reach (and power) does love have towards those who have never experienced genuine, godly love?
It was God’s purpose that we would be sons and daughters- not slaves!
God is omnipresent. He is everywhere in all things, before Jesus and after Jesus, in the most remote mountains, and barely inhabitable wastelands of the North and South poles. Where God is love is! And, God is EVERYWHERE! Those who have experienced genuine love, and practiced it (where civilization is not known), but not associated it with the name of Jesus, having never heard that name, still have experienced God. And where they have responded to that love with their love, who are we to say or state what will become of their souls? What gives us such a right to judge those hearts?
In John 13:1 we find an interesting statement that’s too easily overlooked. Jesus loved them to the END! He’s the picture of God, who also loves us to the END, and that end is not until the complete this physical cycle on earth. The phrase is “eis telos” which means to full completion, totally fulfilled, without failure. It doesn’t mean just on the part of one party, but both.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon, (1834 – 1892) was a British Reformed Baptist preacher who reminded us that, “To feel God’s love is very precious, but to believe it when you do not feel it, is the noblest. He may be but a little Christian who knows God’s love, but he is a great Christian who believes it when the visible contradicts it and the invisible withholds its witness.”
Test the waters! View ALL theological arguments through the eyes of love- with the filter of love. Love is the heart of all valid religious doctrines. Without the heart, there really is no life.
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