Love Child

Dear friends, let us love one another, because love is from God; and everyone who loves has been born of God, and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God, because God is love. – 1 John 4:7-8

When Moses encountered God at the burning bush, he asked for God’s name. The Lord replied, “I Am That I Am.” It’s scary even without the uppercase most translations use to print it. God is not a being, He is the Being of Being, the Being That is Being – all verbs, I think, in the eternal present tense.

Yet as profound as that thought may be, I still seek to know who God is. It takes not only the entire Bible, but all of life and the whole of the cosmos to even begin. How can we understand all that?

God is love.

God can exist, and does exist in a state that transcends being. Love brings forth being in order to express itself. God’s being is a function of love, as is all of His creation. We are children of love. Because of Christ, we are now free to choose to walk in goodness, grace, mercy, and light, and to draw on love for our life. The everlasting life that is ours in Christ is literally one that lives on love.

Many years ago when we had a place in the country and no money at all, my wife wanted a clothesline so she wouldn’t have to use the electric dryer. I went back in the woods and cut a couple of trees to set for poles. After a few days in the damp ground, one of my clothesline poles sprouted leaves. It looked like it had life in it for a time, but soon the leaves dried up and fell away. The bark loosened and decay began. In fact, though we were there only a couple of years, I think I had to replace that pole before we left. It is the same for man apart from Christ.

Our basic biological life, set in a Christian culture and civilization, may well look like genuine life, and it may produce evidence of love and goodness. But the end is death and decay. The world’s love simply does not have any taproot into the Source to allow life to continue to flow or to produce anything significant. It often saps life rather than giving life. There are vampires: individuals whose alleged love sucks the life out of the people closest to them. There are whole groups and families where that seem to exist by feeding on one another, with no other purpose than to prolong their futile existence.

In Galatians Paul says, “The fruit of the Spirit is love …” – the Spirit-life that arises from love naturally produces fruit after its kind. Love is not something the believer does, but, as with God, it is who we are. We get angry with people; we hate injustice, ingratitude, manipulation, abuse, and stupidity – just as God does. Yet we are love, and we just can’t help ourselves.