Groom and bride

It is impossible to keep Love to oneself. If we are created to be receivers of His Love, then we are also created to be givers of that Love.

So God not only has in mind to create beings on whom he can lavish his love from a distance. He has in mind to create beings who can in turn release his Love, as he does. Ultimately God's desire is for us be like him in terms of his character – defined by Love. As we are filled with his Love, he desires for us to release it, like a vessel that, once filled, overflows. His desire is for us to be saturated in Love, just as He is; to live out his Love, just as he does; to be motivated by Love, just as he is.

He has in mind to create beings he can include into the circle of love that he is, into the perfect relationship that already exists between the three expressions of God. Only in this way can the created being express the love that is God! God's ultimate desire is for us to be a part of who he is, so filled with himself and his love that in a mysterious and incomprehensible way we become an extension of who He is, united and enmeshed with him, one with him as he is one, his bride!!

Relationship with God as God intended is so much more than a master - servant, or even Father – child relationship. It is actually lover and beloved, groom and bride! This image of groom and bride is a recurring theme all through Scripture.

For some people this might sit a little uncomfortably (it did with me for ages!) The claim that God wants us, wants me, to become one with him, to become part of who he is – is that not heretical and even blasphemous? Is that not saying that somehow we become God?

Let us be really clear here, lest we be misunderstood. We are not saying that we become God. We are not claiming that man becomes like God in terms of God’s power and his attributes. God is not inviting us to be omnipotent, omnipresent, or omniscient! What we are saying is that the God of Love invites us to become so full of his love, so saturated and so defined by it, that we too become defined by the Love that defines who he is. Jesus himself prays (John 17): “I pray ... that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you. May they also be in us ... that they may be one as we are one: I in them and you in me.”

It is when we begin to let the truth of this sink in that our relationship with God takes on a new meaning. Relationship with God becomes a fulfilling, exciting and utterly intoxicating adventure! 

Created for Love

If God is Love, it doesn't make sense that God first has to create a context in order to become Love or in order to be able to put Love into action. Before he ever created anything he was already Love, he was already in relationship – he already loved and was loved! The love that exists between Father, Son and Holy Spirit was already perfect and fulfilling. If that is true (and I don’t see how it can be any other way), then it follows that God did not create us because he needed someone to love or because he needed someone to love him!

If God is Love, then his reason for creating in the first instance is simply to lavish his perfect love on someone. Because God is Love, it delights God no end to allow someone else to enjoy that Love, allowing them to receive it and experience it, simply because it is good! (How often do we simply allow ourselves to soak up God’s love, for no other reason than to enjoy it?)

If God is utterly Love, then it is unlikely, in fact it is impossible, for His main purpose in creating to be that the created beings serve him or worship him. That would have made him self-serving and self-seeking. Yes, of course he enjoys our worship as an expression of our love for him. Of course it delights him when we serve him as an expression of our love for him. But that is not what motivated him to create us!

Maybe we can get a glimpse of this if we ask ourselves why we normally choose to have children. It is not in order to meet our need to love or to be loved. If it is, we will be sorely disappointed! Nor is it so that our children can serve us. Of course we enjoy it if and when they do, especially when they do it because they want to. I did not have my children so they could bring me cups of tea in bed in the mornings or do the housework! I enjoy it when they do, but that is not why I had them. We also do not have our children so they can somehow ‘bring us glory’ or make us look good. More than not our children have a wonderful knack of embarrassing us in front of other people and we become painfully aware of our shortcomings as parents!

We normally choose to have children because we want them to become part of our family, part of who we are. We want to give them the chance to enjoy life. And in a way, they become an extension of who we are. Yes, they are people in their own right. But they carry with them the hallmarks of our family identity and they become part of who we are, just as we become part of who they are.

If God is Love, then his first motivation for creating us is to be receivers of His Love, His life and for us to become part of his family.  

Being Love

Love can only be worked out or experienced in the context of a relationship. Love, by definition, requires relationship. If God really is Love through and through, then relationship has to be at the heart of who he is and what he does. Love cannot exist in a vacuum. God exists and has always existed in a wonderful and complete relationship with himself and through himself.

The Bible tells us that God is one. And yet within in One-ness he exists in relationship. He expresses himself through three different persons - God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. How God can be one, and yet three is perhaps one of the biggest mysteries there is and I doubt we can ever fully get our heads around that one as humans. I have come across a couple of helpful analogies, though I am sure they don’t completely describe it.

One is of the substance H₂0. H₂0 can be water, it can be steam and it can be ice. It is the same substance, yet it finds expression in three different ways. Another one is the make-up of a person. A person is one being, and yet he or she is made up of mind, body and soul. You can talk about a person’s mind, their body and their soul as separate things. And yet you cannot, whilst a person is physically alive, separate a person into those three elements. They are one, even though they are not the same thing.

If God is Love, if his essence is Love, the he has to exist within a relationship. It is precisely because he expresses himself as Father, Son and Spirit, that God is able to be LOVE. The different expressions and facets of his being are totally united, identical in character and in attributes - Love.

God’s character is what describes what he is like, what motivates him, what defines him, what makes him who he is. If God is indeed Love, then his motivation can only ever be Love.

God’s attributes are the things he can do that reflect his power: He can do anything he chooses to do (he is omnipotent), He can know anything he chooses to know that is knowable (he is omniscient), and He can be anywhere he chooses to be (he is omnipresent). If God really is Love, then everything he is able to do and he does do, everything he chooses to know, everywhere he chooses to be, his very power, are also saturated and defined by perfect and complete LOVE. And so he is good.

Love or loving?

There is a crucial difference in believing that God is intrinsically LOVE through and through and believing that God is capable of love or that he is loving.

A God who is only loving or capable of love, is also capable of being unloving and capable of acting apart from love, out of selfishness or for his own ambition or purposes for example.

A God whose essence is Love is, by that definition, unable to act in any other way other than in love. It is impossible for him to act out of selfish ambition or greed or out of any motivation other than pure love.

Because of life’s pain, bitter disappointments, rejection and hurts, many of us find it hard to believe that God is intrinsically and utterly only Love through and through. Most of us if we are honest tend to think of God as a benevolent sort of person, who loves us mainly because it is his duty to, having created us. Many of us accept his love, believing that as he created us therefore we somehow owe it to him to relate back to him in some way.

For many of us this also means that in the back of our minds we are cautious about his love. If there is the chance that God can act in anger or out of vengeance, perhaps if we have annoyed him in any way or if somehow our lives aren’t quite up to scratch, then there is always a chance that God might reject us.

In other words, our conclusion is actually that God’s love is conditional - conditional on our behaviour, on our merit, on somehow living in a way that pleases Him, even if that merit is achieved by someone else doing it for us.

The truth however is that God is not just loving. He is LOVE, through and through. Everything he is, everything he does is saturated by pure, unconditional, beautiful, liberating love.

If God is LOVE

GOD IS LOVE - or so the Bible claims.

If God really is a God of love, why then does God not intervene in all the suffering, hatred and pain in the world? 

How can I believe that God loves me when my own life is littered with suffering and sadness?

How is it that a God who claims he wants relationship seem to be very absent in a world that feels like it is falling apart? 

Is God really a God of Love when much of Scripture seems to present him as an angry and vengeful God? 

Sometimes it just doesn’t seem to fit together or make any sense!

I am beginning to see that for many outside the Church and for increasing numbers inside, the traditional answers to some of the deep questions we ask ourselves about God no longer really satisfy, and yet people are craving real answers to deep questions about things of God.

Perhaps at times Christians (including myself) have been guilty of producing answers from fragments of the Bible like a magician pulling a rabbit from a hat. There are also times when Christians have been guilty of pat answers that gloss over the issues, falling back on comments such as:  ‘It’s a mystery’, ‘It’s all in God’s plan’, ‘It’s all for the best’.  These answers don't satisfy and at times can seem trite to the point of being offensive. 

Some of us read the Scripture to try to find some answers, but sometimes reading Scripture can feel a bit like sitting in front of a huge jigsaw puzzle, trying to piece things together, when you are not quite sure what the picture is about in the first place!  

The last few years have been exhilarating. Out of a place of pain and  questioning I have come to a deep conviction that God really is love. It has been so life-changing and entirely liberating that, with the help of a deep-thinking friend, we have written a book. It looks at the Bible from beginning to end and paints a big picture of who God really is, what he wants with us and what on earth he is doing. As it unwraps His Story, it tries to grapple with some of the big themes that weave their way through human history. Its conclusions aren't new, but for me they are radically different to what I grew up with. I feel like I am now looking through a new set of glasses - and everything is now making much more sense!  

The aim of this blog is to let you have a look through my new glasses.

Maybe, just maybe, it will make certain things clearer for you too.