If I handed you a glass of water and told you it was pure, you would assume nothing else was in the glass but pure water. If the glass contained anything other than water, even in small traces, I wouldn’t be honest calling it pure water.
Is God pure love or not? Of course He is.
If anything that contradicts love were present in Him, we couldn’t truthfully say that He is pure love. We would have to say He is part love and part something else. The very idea is a scary thought.
What if God were part love, but other aspects of His character contrasted with love, as some theological constructs suggest? How would we know that at any given moment, we might see a side to God that we don’t want to see? How could we ever rest in peace about our relationship to Him? How could we be sure that we would be only the objects of His love and not the targets of things that came from a place other than love? Can you imagine a deity dealing out something that didn’t come from love? It’s the kind of thing you might find in horror movies.
My whole life was revolutionized the day I sincerely and irrevocably believed that God is love.
Until then, my confidence in the constant expression of His love could be so easily shaken. My circumstances occasionally made me wonder. Sometimes an Old Testament verse tripped me up and caused me to doubt. At other times I saw things going on in the world around me that I couldn’t reconcile with the existence of a God who really is pure love.
The time came, however, when I put my eyes on Jesus. We have seen that He is the “exact representation of [the Father’s] nature” (Hebrews 1:3). Because that is true, the question is, did Jesus leave out part of who His Father is? If He did, and if His Father has a dark side that Jesus didn’t bother to mention or show us, that was a big omission! Reasonable people could even say it would have been dishonest to leave out such information while telling us, “He who has seen Me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). Jesus didn’t do that. You can count on it.
There is no other side to God that Jesus didn’t reveal.
Don’t let anything other than Jesus Himself be your source for understanding who the Father is. “God, after He spoke long ago to the fathers in the prophets in many portions and in many ways, in these last days has spoken to us in His Son, whom He appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the world” (Hebrews 1:1-2). Even insights gained from the Bible are rightly understood only through Jesus. He came to show us the Father, and what He has shown us perfectly and clearly is that our Father is love. That’s it—nothing more, nothing less.
To suggest that focusing exclusively on the love of God as the totality of His being leaves out something is to insult Divine Agape. Love is His fundamental makeup. Everything that can be known of Him must be seen through the lens of agape, or we end up presenting a god with a multiple personality.
Jesus proved that God is pure love by coming into this world.
The day came when “the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14) to communicate this divine love, which would not be squelched. Rejection didn’t still it. Death didn’t stop it. Even hell couldn’t stall it. The only thing left is for us to receive it—to receive Him.
PS. If you’d like to go further studying just how great this love is, you’ll love my series called ‘Extravagant Love.’ Check it out here.
