This truth can only be found in the God of the Christians and Jewish ethnicity. When the tri-faith movement attempts to make the God of Christians, Jews and Muslims the same God there is definitely a serious disconnect. We will wade into only the shallow waters of this issue for there is much that can be written on the attribute of God’s love.
In 1 John 4:8 and 16 in the New Testament it states very clearly that “God is love.” Not that God has love or shows love or that it is part of Him, but that God is love. God did not take on love at some time in His eternal existence but is love from eternity past or He is love at all times. This truth of God being love is foreign to most religions in the world. Most religions “fear” their god who uses this emotion to keep them in line. But in the tri-faith movement only two of the three belief “systems” have love as an attribute of God.
Probably the most famous verse for the love of God which is found in the New Testament is John 3:16: “For God so loved the world that He gave His one and only Son, that whoever would believe in Him would not perish, but have eternal life.” What is this love and what motivated God to do what He did through His Son?
Dr. Tony Evans gives a good definition of this love we call agape; “The love of God is His joyful self-determination to reflect the goodness of His will and glory by meeting the needs of mankind” (Our God is Awesome: Encountering the Greatness of Our God; p. 253). We see this self-determination even in the Old Testament in Deuteronomy 7:6-8. “For you are a people holy to the LORD your God (Jews). The LORD your God has chosen you to be a people for His treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth. It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the LORD set His love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples, but it is because the LORD loves you and is keeping the oath that He swore to your fathers, that the LORD has brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.”
God chose Israel to be His people simply because He loved them; they did not have anything special that was inherent in them. He loved them without cause. This is the same love we read in John 3:16. God determined in eternity past out of His own sovereign grace that He would show His love to His created world through sending His Son to reconcile the world back to Himself.
But this love came at an extraordinary cost. It was extravagantly shown through the death of Jesus Christ upon the cross. Not only the cross but when Jesus rose again from the dear three days later. Jesus literally loved us to death, the death on a cross. Why would God do this?
We are given insight by A. W. Tozer on why God does what He does: “All God’s reasons for doing anything lie inside of God. They do not lie outside of God to be brought to bear upon Him. They lie inside of God – that is, they are what God is. And God’s reasons for doing what He does spring out of what God is. Nothing has been added to God from eternity. And nothing has been removed from God from eternity. Our God is exactly what He was before a single atom was created. He will be exactly what He is when the heavens are no more. He has never changed in anyway, because He is the unchanging God.
“God, being perfect, is incapable of either loss or gain. He is incapable of getting larger or being smaller. He’s incapable of knowing more or knowing less. God is simply God…He is the Author of all laws, and acts like Himself all the time” (The Attributes of God, pp. 61-62). God chose to love us because He wanted to.
So God’s self-determination and His desire to do good to fallen man and especially His passion to show His glory – Jesus went to the cross. It is where the blood of the Lamb was spilled and where God’s eternal love showed forth in its brightest splendor. When we read the great love chapter of the New Testament in 1 Corinthians 13 and find out what love is and isn’t we must first remember it was exemplified in Jesus Christ going to the cross in our place for the sins we committed against a Holy God. But the love of God triumphed by the Son volunteering in eternity past to take your place and mine upon the Ol’ Rugged Cross.
“What then shall we say to these things? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare His own Son but gave Him up for us all, how will He not also with Him graciously give us all things? Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. Who is to condemn? Christ Jesus is the one who died – more than that, who was raised – who is at the right hand of God, who indeed is interceding for us. Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or danger, or sword? As it is written, ‘For your sake we are being killed all the day long; we are regarded as sheep to be slaughtered.’ No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us. For I am sure that neither death nor life, nor angels nor rulers, nor things present nor then things to come, nor powers, nor height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 8:31-39).
So God is love, this is what the Bible teaches. And there can be no rational way to think that God is the same God of Christians, Jews and Muslims based upon the truths of the inerrant word of God written in the Old and New Testaments of the Bible.
Thanks to our Guest Contributor:
Pastor Ray Peters
Harvest Alliance Church
