Dear Friends of "Dial Daily Bread,"
What does the Bible mean when it says that "God is love"? I love strawberries. Is that God? Hollywood has movies that glorify something they call "love," which in reality is "barnyard" morality. Is that what God is? People love someone today, get divorced tomorrow, and hate each other; is that what God is like?
Our English language (and every one on earth) has only one word for "love," but the Greeks had more than one. The word that John uses in 1 John 4:8 isagape, a word that was little known to the ancient Greeks in New Testament times. But the apostles took that word and injected into it a meaning that blew people's minds. It turned the world upside down--that one little word, because of the tremendous meaning in it.
It's the kind of love that is never transmitted inherently by genes and chromosomes. It has to be imported from outside this planet, from heaven itself, and installed in the human heart (Rom. 5:5). Once therein, it becomes explosive, and finds expression in loving others with the same kind of love "the Father hath bestowed on us" (1 John 3:1).
Agape is: (1) a love that loves bad, ugly, mean people, even our enemies (Rom. 5:8; Matt. 5:43-48). "Impossible!"? Yes, of yourself. (2) It does not depend on the value of its object (we have none), but it creates value in its object. Read Genesis 12:2 and see what God "made" of Abraham. (3)Agape seeks the lost sheep, not vice versa (Luke 15:1-10). There is no story of a lost sheep that must go looking for its shepherd, but there is one about a Good Shepherd who went looking for His lost sheep--that's you and me. (4)Agape is the love that stepped down lower and lower (Phil. 2:5-8) until that last step, "the death of the cross," the death that involved the curse of God (Gal. 3:13), yes, the second death. It's the kind of love that sacrificed everything for us. Went to hell, in order to find us.
It's the real thing; the devil has made imitations, but there is the genuine: it's utterly beyond us to synthesize. All we can do is "look" and wonder. And when we stop to look, we begin to "comprehend" a little of what it means (Eph. 3:14-21). And then eternal life begins.
--Robert J. Wieland
From the "Dial Daily Bread" Archive: November 8, 1998.
Copyright © 2012 by "Dial Daily Bread."
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