Love is a magnificent attribute of God’s character that we enjoy extolling, and we should continue to do so infinitely more than we are accustomed to doing. We cannot exhaust the unfathomable riches of God’s love so we must continue savoring it and praising God for it. A serious problem, though, is that we are not so excited about the holiness of God and that’s because we tend to believe that whereas the love of God extends mercy towards us for repented sins and iniquities, His holiness, of itself, can do nothing but nail us down in justified condemnation and sacred wrath. Consequently, there is significantly less extolling of the holiness of God. What we fail to realize, though, is that God’s love is informed by His holiness and that the two character attributes are not mutually exclusive, nor do they dilute each other. God’s love is a holy love and we cannot enjoy His love without His holiness. Love that is not holy is promiscuous and therefore tolerates sin. Is it any wonder that many who stubbornly persist in sinful disobedience to God, justify their behavior by appealing to His love while being oblivious to His holiness?

 

In the light of the misconstrued apperception of God’s love, we need to examine the attribute a bit more closely. The misunderstanding of the text, “If you love me keep my commandments” (John 14:15), has led to the popular definition of love as synonymous with keeping God’s commandments. This, however, is not quite true. Be patient with me for a minute or two allowing me to seem a bit academic in explaining an aspect of the English language, one of the many languages into which the original New Testament Greek is translated. Here goes -- Three fundamental moods in the English language are: 1. Indicative Mood, 2. Imperative Mood, and 3. Subjunctive Mood. The Indicative Mood indicates something or makes an assertion or declaration. “God is love” (1 John 4:8) is an example of the Indicative Mood. The Imperative Mood states or commands what we should do or ought to do. “My brethren, these things ought not so to be” (James 3:10) is an example of the Imperative Mood. The Subjunctive Mood, on the other hand, is a suppositional mood and tells us that if one condition prevails, then another condition will flow out of it, but the second condition does not define the first condition. For example, suppose I say “If there is no water, we cannot wash the dishes”, does that mean “we cannot wash the dishes” defines water? No, it does not – washing the dishes is merely something I can do if there is water, but one thing is not the definition of the other. Love, therefore, is a spiritual condition which precedes the acts it performs and are not necessarily defined by such acts. The acts may or may not be evidence that the condition exists.

 

Now, before I bring this post to a close let me ask a couple questions. If the definition of love is keeping the laws or commandments of God, then why does Paul declare that we must be dead to the law in order to be married to Christ (Romans 7: 4)? Why does Paul say in 1Corinthians 13 that we can give all our goods to feed the poor, and even give our bodies to be burned and still not have love? Why does Paul say that by the deeds of the law no flesh will be justified in God’s sight (Romans 3: 20)? The answer to these questions is that there can be numerous acts of obedience and of self-sacrifice that can be performed by an individual and not be produced by love at all. How many times have professing Christians said something like this: “My blood just can’t take Sister Mary, but I will wash some clothes for her now that she is sick because God says we must love one another? We exclude our emotions from loving the person and feel satisfied that we have done our duty or fulfilled the requirement to love, if we have performed some good acts. This is all wrong, wrong, wrong! Godly love does not exclude our emotions. If we exclude them, we are nothing more than hypocrites. In Godly love, the emotions, cognitions, and actions must all line up. And, as I have said in previous posts, this kind of Divine requirement is impossible without being born again. We seldom speak about the new birth even though Jesus speaks about its indispensable necessity. Taking the new birth for granted is a dangerous thing. I encourage you to study John 3 prayerfully and to contemplate its gigantic spiritual implications. By God’s grace, and through the power of his Holy Spirit, I will soon make the effort to present a post on regeneration or being born again, and its relation to Godly love, sometimes called “Agape Love”. There is no substitute, however, for our own prayerful study of the Word of God, so I encourage you to feed on it daily. May God help us to be strong authentic Christians, particularly in this age of moral decadence, materialism, and cultural relativism? May we enjoy the love of God as well as His holiness. God’s love is not divorced from his holiness. We cannot have the one without the other..