The love of God is a vast topic and it can be discussed endlessly. There is always more to learn and know about it. In fact, the more you learn about it, the more you realise you do not understand. Paul in the book of Ephesians tells us that it is high, wide, deep, long; in a nutshell, you cannot fully comprehend it, there is always more to it (Ephesians 3:18). Man’s understanding of love is so far-fetched and so alien to God’s understanding of love, at least based on what we see in our society and on what can be inferred from the bible. The two ways of thinking are diametrically opposed. God’s love produces sacrifice, man’s love produces selfishness. God’s love shelters and protects, man’s love destroys. It is simply fascinating. Once again, I would like to ponder on the love of God even as we get closer to Easter where we celebrate God’s biggest expression of love to us by sacrificing His One and Only son Jesus on the cross for us. Particularly, let us look at the expressions of God’s love that are so foreign to our expressions of love and see where we fall short in the hope of growing more in our understanding and actions.
The first expression of the love of God that I would like to highlight is its availability to anyone. This love is available to the worst of sinners. It is available to your worst enemy, it is available to the person that annoys you, it is available to your cheating spouse, it is available to your unrepentant child, it is available to the rapist, it is available to the thief, it is available to the murderer, it is available to the child molester, it is available to the human trafficker, you get the picture. As hard as these examples can be, the truth of the matter is that the love of God is available to all sinners before they even repent. The love of God is not dependent upon their repentance to reach to them but it is there for them as much as it is there for you and I. This is a hard truth to grasp as it might seem unfair at times but I believe this is part of the depth and breadth of the love of God Paul talks about in Ephesians. Moreover, if we saw each one of us as a sinner before a Holy God we would not have a hard time accepting that the love of God is available to another sinner because it was available for me as well. This humbles us into understanding that there is nothing we did to fuel the love of God, nothing we can do to increase it or decrease it for us. We can simply accept or reject it. This might be a cliché but I believe the fact that God’s love exists and is available shows us that there is hope for us. This means, we do not have to continue to wallow in sin; we do not have to continue to hate our brother or sister; we do not have to continue to step on each other’s toes to win in life, etc. We can simply run to the One who can fill us with His love, the love that satisfies us for eternity.
The second expression of the love of God that I would like to highlight is its humility. This is probably the biggest one for me because it always leaves me speechless. The Most High God, the One who is self-sufficient, the One who existed before time, the One who exists outside of time, the One who has no equal, the One who has no rival, the One who is omnipotent, the One who is omniscient, the One who is omnipresent loved us while we were still sinners. Not only did He loved us in that horrible state, He pleaded with us to come to Him, to reason with Him, to choose the right path. In Isaiah 1 and 2, we see God calling the Israelites back to himself although the Israelites have spurned His face, they have despised Him, they have been idolatrous and have spat on the face of God so to speak. The Israelites desecrated the temple of God where He resided, they defiled God, traded the Creator of the universe with gods made with human hands. Unlike us, God does not get mad, He does not get “worked up”, He does not cast us out of His presence (although doing so would be justified), He does not banish us forever, instead, He pleads with us and makes a way for us to come to Him. The one who has been offended, the one who should be receiving justice, the one who has been oppressed is the one seeking to make amends (Isaiah 1:18). This, baffles me all the time and it does remind me of the popular 1 Corinthians 13 passage on love which says “Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.” (1 Corinthians 13:4-8). The power in the love of God is its ability to be above whatever is thrown at it. God’s love endures any and everything. For God to be able to patiently wait for sinners to come to repentance or to even offer them a way to repent is truly beyond comprehension.
Finally, the last expression of the love of God I would like to highlight is its transformative power. Indeed, no one that has tasted the love of God has remained or could remain the same. Those of us that are now in Christ can attest to this. When the love of God reached out to us we were in a horrible shape, but it slowly but surely brought us into these renewed creatures we are now. To say that the love of God transforms us might seem too much but that is what it does. When I think of the word transforming, I think of a metamorphosis, a bit like what the caterpillar has to go through to become a butterfly. This is what the Lord does to us through His love when we accept Him and yield to Him. One of my favourite thing to witness in church is baptisms because they are often packed with encouraging testimonies of the power of God’s saving grace. It is in such moments that we are able to see the transformative power of the love of God to sinners. It was the same with patriarchs in the bible and it is the same with us today. He bids you come but you can never remain as you are. Our Father is so so so good. No wonder words fail us to describe Him and honour Him the right way. Thank you Father for your love that is beyond comprehension, thank you for your love that is available, thank you for your love that is humbling and thank you for your love that transforms. Alleluia!
A Word Aptly Spoken 