Thoughts

What is love? Baby, don't hurt me...

I was reading through an article about love/relationships and the thought struck me that love is more fleeting than the vapor of life. How is this possible? Isn't love forever? Simply put, if love is contained inside our lives and we are not always in the act of loving, then love is more temporary than our finite existence. When we say, "Until death do us part," we are recognizing the situation of mortal love and that it is affixed upon another being only as long as we ourselves exist.

Then I thought about God. 1 John 4:16 says that He is love. Unlike temporal man, who can only express shades of love, He is its essence. Since God is the progenator of all good things, when it says, "God is love," it refers to His interaction with man. This is obvious since the audience of Scripture is man.

Since God is endless and boundless, His love knows no limitation. He is eternal, with no beginning or end, thus is His love. Romans 5:8 says, "but God demonstrated His love for us while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." Also in 1 John 4:19 the author declares, "We love because He first loved us." These two passages act as a bridge in explaining the path of the believer versus the non believer.

In effect, the writers are saying that God's love was demonstrated by Christ's death, which according to Scripture was the very cornerstone of our existence, and that the believer is simply embracing the action of being loved as a receptor to God's omnipresent love. Those who reject the testimony of Christ and therefore the love of God, reject God.

Love is the reason for the relationship. God is love, His love was demonstrated by Christ's death. Those who accept and reciprocate this love are then deemed Abraham's seed and therefore heirs according to the promise (Galatians 3:29). Love was the physical force that perpetuated our existence. Without existence we would be unable to choose to reciprocate because of our non-existent state.