What is God's Love?

We think of God as love and the commandments as expressions of how to love (I J 5:3; II J 6), but if God can’t even keep the commandments (see http://gordon-feil-theology.blogspot.ca/2017/05/does-god-keep-his-own-commandments.html), then perhaps the love which defines him consists of something else.  We’ll explore that later: first, let’s consider sin.

Romans 14:22 tells us that “whatever is not from faith is sin” and suggests that sin is all from lack of faith.   Paul is consistent.  He says that whatever is not of faith is sin and he tells us that Abraham believed God and it was counted for him as righteousness (Galatians 3:6). Psalms 119:172 tells us that God’s commands are righteousness.  Yet the demons believe (James 2:19) and they are not righteous, so clearly one can believe and sin.  One could argue that the discrepancy is explained by the object of the belief in one case not being the object of the belief in the other, but I don’t think that is the solution.

I want to suggest that there is something else going on behind sin.  I like to describe three levels of motivation (addictions actually) as security, sensation (pleasure) and power, and I do this using Eve’s temptation, the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness, the thorns (Lk 8:14) found in the parable of the sower and seed, and John’s statement about what motivates us (I J 2:16).

Security is the basic drive to keep alive.   This is why the tree being good for food is appealing.  This is the “lust of the flesh” John speaks of.  This is the first temptation (food) of Y'shuah in the wilderness.  This is the “worries” of Luke 8:14.

Sensation or Pleasure is the drive to have the senses pleased.  This is why the tree was “pleasing to the eyes”.  This is John’s “lust of the eyes”. This is the second temptation of Jesus in the wilderness (the thrill of jumping off from a 400 foot height).  This is the “pleasures” of Luke 8:14.

Power is the basic drive to be influential.   This is the appeal of the tree being desired to make one wise.  This is the “pride of life” John refers to.  This is the third temptation (rulership) of Y'shuah in the wilderness.  This is the “riches” of Luke 8:14.

Each of these three motivations acts as a filter on our consciousness, so that when are operating from the security center of consciousness, we blow the security aspects of any situation out of proportion and we feel emotions such as fear.   When we are operating from the pleasure center, we feel boredom, frustration, and disappointment. Whenever one of these 3 filters are triggered, we feel emotions that tend involve us rejecting the here and now of our experience.  Some people call these “separating emotions” for that reason.  

When the Bible says that our sins have separated us from God (Isaiah 59:2), what is happening is that the motivation behind our sins, the security, pleasure and power motives, are separating us from him.  Not only that, but they separate us from other people and also from reality as we have distorted perceptions of what is really going on.  We cannot and do not operate out of love when that happens because we are turned into ourselves and the lack of fulfillment of those basic drives is painful to us.  Who finds fear, boredom and irritation pleasurable?  No, they distract us and get in the way of love and lead us into sin.

The loving person has moved beyond these motivations.  The first fruit of God’s spirit in us is love (Galatians 5:22), and perfect love casts out fear (I John 4:18), so when you have the love of God shed abroad in your heart (Romans 5:5) you aren’t worried about things.  You don’t have fear standing between you and God, between you and other people and between you and your here and now.   The second fruit of God’s spirit is joy (Ga 5:22) and when you have that joy, the pleasures of life are not a big deal any longer.   Likewise, the third fruit, peace, renders power something you would just as soon other people had.

Our sins separate us from God in another way and on another level too.  One would think that if we stopped sinning, the sins would be gone and we could now experience unity with God ---- no need for separation.  That’s because we think linearly with respect to time. God inhabits eternity.  For him all that ever existed exists in his Now.  For him, even as you read this, his son is being crucified, and your great, great grandchild is being born.  He has the whole tapestry of time and space before him and he beholds it all at the same time.  The tapestry needs to be washed (Is 1:16, 18) in the blood of the Lamb (Rv 7:14).

Keeping God’s law in the spirit is only possible when we are centered and not being pulled this way and that by our separating emotions.  We have to operate from a Love centre of consciousness.  It is there that we can accept instead of reject and dwell in the present instead of the regrets of a dead past or the wishes of an unknown future.  As Eric Fromm taught, "Love is primarily giving, not receiving" and "Love is the overcoming of human separateness, the fulfillment of the longing for union."

To get to this place requires understanding:  comprehension of God’s love for us which was so great that he did everything to remove the separation, including sending his only begotten son.  This is why Y’shuah says of non-believers that IF they understood they would repent (Mt 13:15). By the way, one day all the unbelievers of history shall come up again and this time they shall understand because the scriptures shall be “open” to them (Rv 20:12). When we have the understanding God gives us, then we can move from being motivated by security, pleasure and power to being motivated by love, and that is provided we believe him, so it comes around again to faith, or does it?  Because once someone understands, wouldn’t he necessarily believe?