V Indicates Scripture or other reference

The whole difference between Biblical Christianity and everything else is the love of God. No other religion has anything like the love of God in its scriptures (except for Judaism, which is the Biblical basis of the Christian faith). No philosophy, no university, no worldly institution of any kind, has a level of morality that can be compared to the love of God. There is only one God. He has revealed Himself in only one set of Scriptures: the Holy Bible. And those Scriptures are dominated by the theme so clearly stated in 1^st John 1:8: God is love.

So far, we have used those three little words – God is love – to explain who God is. But this book is also about your relationships with this loving God. To see how God’s people (and only God’s people!) can enter in to all the relationships God has to offer us, let’s look at the full text of 1^st John 4:7,8: 

Beloved, let us love one another: for love is of God; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God. He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love.

This Scripture calls us not just to receive, but also to share, the love of God. If we do not do this, we obviously do not know God. If we do not know God, we cannot have any meaningful kind of relationship with Him. So the two major questions that we have to face right now are:

•  What is “the love of God?’; and

•  What is the difference between the love of God and all the
             other loves of this world?

Modern English cannot explain the difference. When we say “God loves you,” we have to use the same word the TV commercials use to sell their products: “You’ll love this candy-coated popcorn cereal!” The Greek language is somewhat better, because it has several different words for different kinds of love. The Greek word that means  “the love of God” in the New Testament is agape. Here is one good definition of this word:

 

Love. Agape is a word not found in classical Greek, but only in revealed Christian religion. It is often translated (in the King James Version of the Bible) as “charity,” meaning “benevolent love.” Its benevolence, however, is not shown by doing what the person who is loved desires, but by doing what that person needs. Example: “For God so loved the world, that He gave....” What did He give? Not what man wanted, but what man needed: His Son, who alone could bring forgiveness to man. God’s love for man is God doing what He knows is best for man. But for man to show love for God, he must first appropriate God’s agape love, for only God has such an unselfish love.

Spiros Zodhiates

Lexical Aids to the New Testament

But even that definition doesn’t begin to explain the love of God. For one thing, it only reaches the intellect, not the heart. For another thing, as Dr. Zodhiates points out, agape is a Biblical word that was not used by anyone outside the Christian Church. It had to be explained to the Greeks of New Testament times the same as it has to be explained to us today. That is one of the reasons why, when the Apostle Paul came to preach the Gospel in the Greek city of Corinth, he was forced to admit,

And I, brethren, when I came to you, came not with excellency of speech or of wisdom, declaring unto you the testimony of God. For I determined not to know any thing among you, save Jesus Christ, and him crucified. And I was with you in weakness, and in fear, and in much trembling. And my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man's wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power: That your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.

                                          1st Corinthians 2:1-5

“Jesus Christ, and Him crucified” – that is the picture of the love of God that the Apostle Paul shared with the Greeks, the Jews, the Romans, and all the other people he preached to. And why not! The Bible often speaks to God’s people in pictures. The Passover lamb was a picture of the Crucifixion of Jesus that God gave to the JewsV1 – and the Crucifixion, in turn, has become the clearest picture that we can have of the agape love of God.

In Paul’s day, everyone in the Roman Empire could see this picture as he described it to them, because the Romans publicly crucified criminals all over their empire. When Paul told those people that God allowed His own Son to be crucified for their benefit, their automatic response would have been, “Oh! How He must love us!”

Would you like to see just how much God loves you? Then take a moment to read this word-picture of “Jesus Christ, and Him crucified”:

The Roman crucifixion process always began with a public whipping with a leather cat-o-nine-tails that had a flesh-tearing iron or bone weight tied into the end of each tail. This whipping was accompanied by whoops of laughter, sneering insults against your most cherished beliefs, and every other kind of humiliation the crowd could come up with. You went to the cross so beaten down – physically, mentally and emotionally – that you really didn’t want to, let alone have the strength to, fight for your own life.

But you had to.

On the Roman cross, your arms were stretched wide and nailed to the crossbeams, and your body sagged down against the rugged wood upright. Your own body-weight crushed the air out of your lungs. You choked for air. Your chest burned for want of air. Every part of your being screamed for air. And your legs involuntarily pushed your body upward to take the weight off your lungs so they could get air. You didn’t want your legs to do it. You knew you were going to die anyway, and all you really wanted by that time was to get it over with. But the Roman cross would not allow it. The Romans knew that we don’t have any way to control our heart’s beating, our lungs’ breathing, or the mindless drive of every muscle in our bodies to come to the aid of our heart and lungs when they are in distress – and so they designed the crucifixion process to make the worst of our God-given survival systems. They designed the cross to force you to make a fool of yourself trying to ease your torment, if only for a moment. You did it for hours, sometimes for days. And all that time, the sun was beating down on you, and the crowd was laughing at you and shouting insults at you, and everyone was telling you, in his or her own way, “Better you than me!”

Of all the men ever put to that long and tortuous death on a Roman cross, only One ever agreed with the laughing, jeering crowd. Only Jesus, the Lamb of God, said in His great heart, “Yes; it is better that I die ... so you won’t have to.”

And it’s true: no one in that hateful and heckling crowd of sinners had to die for his or her own sins any more. Neither does anyone else in the world. And neither do you. Because, as the bleeding and humiliated Son of God hung gasping and struggling on that Roman cross, the Father poured out all His wrath against sin upon His own SonV2. All His wrath against your sin, against my sin, against all the sins of everyone who ever lived in this world, was hurled down from Heaven upon the Lamb who had gone so gently and so obediently to the slaughterV3. It was only through the sacrificial death of Jesus that any of us could ever be forgiven for our sins against God.

It is only because Jesus was obedient unto death on that Roman crossV4, that all of us can now behold the love of God.

                     Norman Saville

                     Why will ye die, O house of Israel?

This, then, is the love of God: Jesus Christ, and Him crucified.

How do we receive this love? By faith. By repenting of our unbelief, and confessing that Jesus did give His life on that Cross to pay for our sins.

How do we walk in this love, share it with other people, and become living examples of it? Don’t even try to do it on your own – it’s just as impossible to “get” the love of God by our own efforts, as it is for us to pay the price of our own sins. As we’ll explain our next chapter, you can only “get” God’s love by spending (actually, by investing) time with God’s beloved Son, Jesus.

Until you do have the agape love of God in your heart, you will not know God on the heart-to-heart level ... you will not be able to enter in to a heart-relationship with God ... and you will not be equipped to show forth the glory of God.

The Apostle Paul explains the direct relationship between the love of God and the revealed glory of God in his first letter to the Christian church at Corinth. In this passage, some versions of the Bible translate agape as “charity,” others as “love.” We translate it here as “the love of God.”

1  Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not the love of God, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.

2  And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not the love of God, I am nothing.

3  And though I bestow all my goods to feed the poor, and though I give my body to be burned, and have not the love of God, it profits me nothing.

4  The love of God suffers long, and is kind; the love of God envies not; the love of God vaunts not itself, is not puffed up,

5  Does not behave itself unseemly, seeks not her own, is not easily provoked, thinks no evil;

6  Rejoices not in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth;

7  Bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.

8  The love of God never fails.

1^st Corinthians 13:1-8b

Verses 1 through 3 assure us that no matter how hard we may try to imitate the glory of God, we simply cannot do it apart from the love of God. God is love – and He will never reveal His glory to (or through!) anyone who does not choose to walk in His loveV5.

Verses 4 through 7 tell us that the Love of God – all by itself! – is enough to overcome all the obstacles that the world and the flesh and the devil may throw in our way. Impatience. Unkindness. Envy. Pride. Arrogance. Selfishness. Anger. Revenge. Lies. Doubting the revealed Truth of God. They all go down like dominos before the power of God’s love at work in your life.

And that is why, when you walk in agape love, the devil is utterly defeated. Not “going to be defeated” ... he is defeated by the love of God. He cannot touch this highest kind of love. The devil can touch the intellect and influence our decision-making process. He can get at us through any of the hateful emotions mentioned above in 1^st Corinthians 13:4-7. But he cannot touch the agape love of God. That is why the Apostle Paul is so free to say, The love of God never fails.

The love of God will never fail you, all the days of your life on this earth, now matter how many or how miserable the devil’s obstacles may be. And the love of God will not fail you when you enter in to eternal life either. Because, at the final Judgment, the love of God will overcome the final obstacle that the devil can hold over anyone: death. The Apostle Paul says, in 1^st Corinthians 15:26, The last enemy that shall be destroyed is death. And the Apostle John says, in 1^st John 3:8b, For this purpose the Son of God was manifested, that he might destroy the works of the devil.

The eternal works of the devil were destroyed when Jesus died on the Cross to take away the sins of the world. And the “local” works of the devil will be destroyed when the Son of God comes into your life to show forth the love of His Father. The devil is defeated, and his works are destroyed, every time God’s people choose to walk in the agape love of God.

 

V1  See chapter 3 for an explanation of how the Passover lamb gave the Jews a prophetic picture of the sacrificial death of the Lamb of God.

 

V2  2^nd Corinthians 5:21

For he (God the Father) hath made him (Jesus) to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him.

 

Also Isaiah 53:6 

All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord hath laid on him the iniquity of us all.

 

V3  Isaiah 53:7

He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth: he is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so he openeth not his mouth.

 

V4  Philippians 2:5-11

Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: Who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: But made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: And being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. Wherefore God also hath highly exalted him, and given him a name which is above every name:  That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; And that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.