God Is Love

Some people deny the wrath and justice of God by announcing, “My God is a God of love.” Today, R.C. Sproul explains the words of 1 John 4:8—“God is love”—and shows what this statement actually teaches about the character of our Creator.

The Bible puts so much emphasis on the manifestation of God’s love, that it even says in the New Testament, for example, “God is love.” What are we to make of that statement? God is love. I’ll tell you what a lot of people make of that. They say if God is love, then He can’t be just; He can’t be holy; He can’t be wrathful; He can’t do any of these things that we’ve already talked about that we seem to think are inconsistent with the love of God. In other words, they want to construct a hierarchy of attributes within God, that love becomes at the apex of this hierarchy and everything else is subsumed under this concept of love.

I’ve talked about people who come to me when I talk about the wrath of God or the sovereignty of God, and they’ll protest and they’ll say, “But my God is a God of love.” And I’ll say: “Where did you ever get the idea that God is a God of love? From a cancer ward? At the scene of an automobile accident? At a murder scene? You wouldn’t draw that inference from those tragic situations.”

But we get the idea that God is a God of love from the message of the Scriptures. But the Scriptures give us the whole counsel of God with respect to His self-revelation. The Bible, the same source that teaches us that God is love, that same source tells us that God is just and holy and sovereign and all the rest. So, we cannot allow God’s sovereignty to be swallowed up by His love, or His righteousness to be swallowed up by His love.

And the worst mistake, I think, is looking at this statement “God is love” and seeing it as a tautology. That is where the subject “God” and the predicate “love” are linked by an equal sign in the sense that God equals love in the same way that love equals God, where there’s an identity between subject and predicate. And if that were the case, we would be able to say that the opposite is also true. Love is God. There are such things as tautologies. We can say a bachelor is an unmarried man, and you don’t lose anything by turning it around and say an unmarried man is a bachelor. Although, an unmarried man could also be a widower. But in any case, we don’t want to make the mistake that love is divine in the sense that we worship love. The human experience and the human manifestation of affection and feelings that we have, we exalt love as that which makes the world go round and it becomes a God for us.

Now, we have to understand what this statement means, “God is love,” in light of the biblical concept of God and in light of the biblical concept of love. And it doesn’t really mean, as the grammar here says, “God is love,” to the Hebrew. What that means is God is loving. In fact, when the Hebrew talks in this manner, he is saying that God is so loving, love is so identified with His character, that we can say He is love. Just as we can say He is truth. He is life itself.