He Loved First
With this article, I would like to begin a series exploring the nature of God's love for us. I want to understand His love for the purpose of knowing what it means to us, but also desire to gain a better grasp of what it means for us to love others. God is the source of all love, and the supreme example of what love looks like. Since the Love of God is such a broad topic, I will address some aspect of His love in each article, beginning in this article with the fact that He loved us first.
To begin, let's look at one of the familiar verses from Scripture that support this statement:
We love, because He first loved us. – 1 John 4:19 NASV
This verse makes the assertion that God's love predated ours, but it also helps to show the relationship between God's love for us and our love for Him. The relationship is that of initiator and responder, like the relationship between a suitor and the one he pursues, or the relationship between a parent and a child.
It is not uncommon for us to see ourselves as being the initiators of our relationship with God, but the fact is that even when we pursue Him, we are doing so in response to a prior action on His part. Even in the times when we are tempted to cry out and ask why God doesn't hear us, we need to know that we wouldn't be asking that question if He hadn't previously spoken to us.
Before moving to the next reference from Scripture, let's take a moment to look at what it would mean to us to have this kind of love for one another. It is a very human tendency to protect ourselves from risk, and because of this, we like to have other people show their love to us before we decide to love them without reservation. In some cases, we seem to be able to get away with this kind of behaviour, but there are times when our reluctance to go first can be damaging to relationships where selfless love is vital.
An example of this is in the marriage relationship. Marriage is often a series of mountains and valleys, and fallen human beings have the ability to betray one another's trust in small or large ways. In order for the marriage to recover from these betrayals, someone needs to be the first to extend the olive branch. If we wait for the other one to be the first, it seems safer, but if we are hoping to honor God's example of love, we will be willing to show love first.
Our reluctance to reach out to another is sometimes the result of the pain that comes when we feel we have been betrayed. This idea can lead us to another facet of the idea of God's love preceding ours:
But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. – Romans 5:8 NASV
This statement shows that God's love for us didn't result from some quality in us that was sweet and lovely. We, as a human race, shoved aside the paradise that He created for us, and chose to break the only commandment given to us. After the fall, we went quickly to the situation at the time of Noah, where our thoughts were only evil continually. Even in God's wrath and sorrow, He preserved a remnant in Noah's family.
Even back at the Garden of Eden, and before, God knew what it would cost to redeem the human race. When Christ died, it was at a time when we were still in our sins. It was these sins that caused the Father to turn His face away as Jesus died on the cross. And yet … and yet in spite of the noxious stain that you and I carried, God still chose to love us.
To put this in a concise and somewhat understated way, we did not earn God's love. There is simply no way that we could have. In spite of this fact, God did love us. One result of this love was the gift of His Son. Our acceptance of this gift is the thing that cleanses us from our sin. Why would God show us such love? I feel that part of the reason is the fact that God was able to see us as we would become as a result of His love.
In a similar way, I believe that we can, by faith, look at those around us through the eyes of God: seeing them, not as they are, but as they can be. It is a fact, after all, that those that we struggle to love are recipients of God's love just as much as we are. When we love those who are easy for us to love, we are actually acting as conduits of the love of God. The same can be true for those who have hurt us or are difficult to love for other reasons. Our love for them is a miracle, it is true, but certainly no more of a miracle than God's love for us.
I would like to re-quote one of the passages above, but this time I will include the verse that follows:
But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Much more then, having now been justified by His blood, we shall be saved from the wrath of God through Him. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son, much more, having been reconciled, we shall be saved by His life. – Romans 5:8-10 NASV
This passage, beginning with the "Much more", is one of the most comforting passages in Scripture, to me. Again, we are reminded of the fact that we did not earn the love that God has for us. As we continue, however, we are reassured that God's love is not capricious. I think of the times that I might have said in my heart, "Look what I've done now! How can God continue to love me?" And yet, He does continue to love. His love, which brought us from our place of sin to where we are now will continue to shine upon us until His work is complete.
We certainly desire to please God with our lives, but let us not fear the loss of His love when we stumble. The entire sum of all human sin was not enough to erase His love for us. He loved us first, because He chose to. He loved us before we were loveable. He will continue to love us after we have been redeemed. These truths bring glory to His name: may they also bring joy and comfort to our hearts.
Note: article 2 in this series is "The Breadth of Christ's Love".
