I would guess that no matter which denomination of Christian
faith you belong to the statement ‘God is love’ would be fairly fundamental to
your beliefs. I’ve heard many preachers over
the years talk about this and many have gone on to say that love is the
fundamental nature or character of God, that it’s the very core of his identity,
that he loves us because that is who he is; and not because we’ve earned that love
in some way either through our faith or our religious acts. I’ve also heard quite a few sermons dealing
with the nature of humanity talk about our requirement to choose to follow
Jesus, to love God and to submit our will to his. All fairly normal Western Christianity so far,
I think you’d agree?
But imagine your wife, husband, life partner,
significant other, boyfriend or girlfriend on the day you first met arriving on
the scene automatically and unthinkingly loving you. They had no say in it, they were just programmed
that way. Would that be meaningful? It might satisfy you temporarily, especially
if you’d not experienced much in way of love prior to that point, but for the
long haul? Could you honestly derive any
satisfaction from their love, would it even feel real if they had no choice? Clearly not.
No one wants a robot to love them.
What makes being loved so wonderful is the knowledge that someone, who
clearly had a choice, of their own free will chose you!.
I think the same must be true of God. God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy
Spirit have a choice. They are God, the
supreme all-powerful, all-knowing, all-in-all.
But they have decided that love is the best way. They chose love to be
their defining characteristic, to love each other. The triune God choosing love not strength, or
might, or power, or force or anger or hate or logic or fear to be the bedrock of their
interconnectedness. They chose, or perhaps,
choose constantly to love us. Certainly,
the way humanity has behaved and continues to behave towards the planet and towards
each other this choice can’t be an easy one.
Jesus in the garden, when wrestling with what he knew was ahead of him
on the cross, is recorded as saying ‘not my will but yours’. He chose the way of love, just as God the
Father had chosen it.
So remember that the next time you feel
unloved. God loves you. Not because she’s* an automaton, unable to
act against her in-built nature, no, God loves you, knowing you inside and out,
beginning from end, because she sees all that you are and all you could be and
makes a choice to love and always will.
* I’m using both traditional gender pronouns for
God deliberately as all gender characteristics are in the image of God and we
have to stop thinking of God as a solitary bearded elderly white man on a cloud!
