With St. Valentine’s Day approaching, our thoughts turn to love. Many thinkers have offered opinions on the subject. Ambrose Bierce said it is “a temporary insanity.” Jeremy Taylor described love as “friendship set on fire.” It is “a hole in the heart,” wrote Ben Hecht. John Ciardi said love is “the word used to label the sexual excitement of the young, the habituation of the middle-aged, and the mutual dependence of the old.”
It is “not getting, but giving,” said Henry Van Dyke. Peter Ustinov described human love as “endless forgiveness.” Ralph Waldo Emerson said love is “a synonym for God.”
Perhaps Emerson was alluding to the New Testament where we read that “God is love” (1 John 4:8, 16). Love may be the most basic of the moral attributes of God by which we understand and define him. Love is God’s eternal self-giving, self-sacrificing action.
I believe that the love of God is one of the best evidences for the Trinity, or the tri-unity of God. Love, to be expressed, must have an object, or recipient. So in eternity, before time and creation, God was love. The Father loved the Son and the Spirit. The Son loved the Father and the Spirit. The Holy Spirit loved the Father and the Son. Each of the persons of the Godhead reciprocated in the giving and receiving of pure, joyful, eternal love. For this giving and receiving God needed nothing and no one outside of himself. God was love before there were any created beings.
The act of creating the heavens and the earth was an act of self-giving love. “The earth is full of his unfailing love. By the word of the Lord were the heavens made. . . . He spoke and it came to be; he commanded and it stood firm. . . . But the eyes of the Lord are on those who fear him, on those whose hope is in his unfailing love” (Psalm 33:5-6, 9, 18).
To say that “God is love” is not to say that “love is God.” Love is much more than abstract thought or mere emotion. C. S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity, “The words ‘God is love’ have no real meaning unless God contains at least two Persons. Love is something that one person has for another person. If God was a single person, then before the world was made, he was not love.” Lewis went on to describe the eternal love of God as “a dynamic, pulsating activity, a life, almost a kind of drama. Almost, if you will not think me irreverent, a kind of dance.”
The giving and receiving we call love is possible for and in us because God loved us first. “This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we ought to also love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.
“This is how we know that we live in him and he in us; He has given us of his Spirit And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in them and they in God. And so we know and rely on the love God has for us” (1 John 4:9-16).
There it is, the self-giving, sacrificial love of the Trinitarian God. The act of sending his Son Jesus into the world to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins was an act of God’s self-giving love. Those who receive his love in receiving Jesus Christ, are said to be capable of giving Christian love to others. “We love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19).
On St. Valentine’s Day as we give and receive expressions of love, let’s remember where love originated.
Pasto Randy Faulkner