I wanted to share something with you, something I've been meditating on and had in my heart. It's about God's love, the way He loves us, and our relationship with Him, which is a relationship of love.
In Scripture, we often see God's love portrayed as passionate. He feels this passionate love for us because He desires to be with us. He wants us to belong to Him. This is for our good, for we are safe with Him. With Him, we are saved. It can be said, and in fact it is true, that the love He has for us is much greater than the love we can have for Him, and at the same time, it is the fuel and reason for the love we have for Him. Scripture says that He first had this love for us (1 John 4:19). That is why He died on the cross. A sinner experiences God's love when he repents and welcomes it with open arms as a result. This is because the Father had already accepted him that way. He comes before God with his sins and his misery, and God offers him love. He does not come before Him to offer Him something good, nor can he offer Him the love He deserves. He comes before God with his burden only. After this work, a person begins to love God and offer Him sacrifices of thanksgiving for what He has done. With all this, the believer always falls short and needs to be renewed and realize again that he is loved by God.
If we focus on God's word in depth, we can notice that the love and relationship between God and us are often compared to a man's love for his beloved. Therefore, we see a central example in Scripture in the comparison of Christ as a bridegroom and us, His church, as His bride (Ephesians 5:25-32, John 3:29, Matthew 9:15; 25:1-13, 2 Corinthians 11:2, Revelation 19:7-9). This example compares both to the church and to us personally. We see that it is indeed true that He took the first step of love toward us, sacrificing Himself on the cross, and that this then drew our attention and love. As often happens, it is a man who takes the first step towards his beloved, even though she has never approached him, paid any attention to him, or felt anything for him. The man, however, falls in love and tries to win his beloved. He tries to attract and awaken her love.
A person can reject God's love, and this hurts God's heart greatly, because He wants us to be saved and belong to Him, because in Him is the life. The life that fills everything in us and makes us whole. He desires us to be saved so much more than we do. Still, it's just as it happens with love, which can't be forced. The other person must also respond to this love and love in return. They must act as a result of this love. A man experiences a similar pain when he truly falls in love with a woman, and then she rejects him. It seems that this is also why God created the love we can naturally feel for each other—to somehow bring us closer to the image of His love and help us understand it. Of course, it can only be understood and felt when we have faith in God and have Him in our hearts. Although it is a shadow of His love, the love we feel when we are in love is full of passion and strong. God's love for us is also strong. It is complicated, profound, strong, and simple at the same time, when we surrender to it.
6 Set me as a seal upon your heart, as a seal upon your arm; for love is strong as death, jealousy is cruel as the grave. Its burnings are burnings of fire, a mighty flame.
7 Many waters cannot quench love, nor can the rivers drown it. If a man would exchange all the goods of his house for love, he would be utterly despised. (Song of Solomon 8:6-7)
This passage from the book of Song of Songs describes what God's love is like.
In this book of the Old Testament—the Song of Songs, which is one of the poetic books of the Bible and in which God's name is almost never mentioned—we see a man's love for his beloved represented. This in itself is one of the greatest and most important comparisons in the Bible, representing Christ and the church. He has the same attitude toward the church as He does toward every believer. I invite you to read the book of the Song of Songs in this light. It seems like a love letter, but it has a much greater meaning. The Bible speaks of love, faithfulness, and even jealousy. It exhorts us to be faithful to our God. It compares sin to infidelity toward the One who loved us first. Therefore, the Bible often refers to sin as "adultery and infidelity." Unfaithfulness toward God Himself. That’s why He addresses His people in this way, who have continually abandoned Him, worshiping idols and other gods (Hosea 1:2, Hosea 2:2-5, Hosea 3:1). The book of Hosea, as well as other books of the Old Testament, deals with this topic. We know that today most of us no longer worship idols made of wood or stone, but another type of idols which, however, always take the place of God in our hearts. Yet, He has always urged His people to return to Him.
He has always told them that, even though He has corrected and rebuked them, He still waits for them to return to Him (Hosea 6:1 , Jeremiah 3:12-22 , Joel 2:12-13). The New Testament summarizes all this in the picture depicted in the parable of the prodigal son, where we see a Father who eagerly waits for His son to return after he has gone away (Luke 15:11-32). He is always there waiting for us, but it is we who wander, and sometimes, because we have not fully understood His love or because we have believed some deception, we do not return in time.
In the Old Testament, we also see God's anger and jealousy, but if we look closely, we see that if He caused His people to go through certain situations due to their estrangement, it was to make them understand that, outside of Him, there is no life and that they should not distance themselves from Him. He does this to protect us and to help us understand that we shouldn't distance ourselves from Him. He knows that away from Him, we can go astray, hurt ourselves, and get lost. Therefore, He does everything possible to keep us close to Him. One of the ways that He uses is to make us understand the pain that sin brings into our lives and its consequences. He acts this way towards His children because He does not want them to distance themselves from Him. This way He uses is referred to as "chastening" in the Bible. A father disciplines the son he loves (Hebrews 12:6), and if he does not do so, then that son is illegitimate (Hebrews 12:8). Therefore, those who do not belong to Him, who are not His children, do not now directly suffer the consequences of sin. They are not being chastened. This is also because they would not understand His correction. He simply begs them, through the gospel brought by His servants, to reconcile with Him.
James 4:4-5 tells us that His Spirit yearns for us jealously.
“Adulterers and adulteresses! Do you not know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Whoever therefore wants to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God. Or do you think that the Scripture says in vain, “The Spirit who dwells in us yearns jealously”?” (James 4:4-5)
He chastens us for our own good because He loves us. The Bible compares the feelings He has toward us when we love the world more than we love Him to jealousy. We could say that the jealousy a man feels toward his beloved when she is unfaithful to him is not the primary source of this feeling. I mean, God didn't take the love we feel as an example, and then have the same feeling toward us. He is the Creator, and He created love. We could say that the first love that ever existed was the one He felt toward us. Then He created us, and also the love we can feel toward one another. Therefore, we feel love and fall in love because we were created by Him. He is the initiator and origin of this. He, being the Creator, left His imprint on us, just as when a person creates or designs something, they leave their imprint on their creation. Of course, we have distanced ourselves from the image in which He created us in the Garden of Eden, but He created us with feelings and ways similar to His, even though this may seem like a bold statement to some. It's just that these feelings are not as holy and pure as His. They become that way when we are united with Him.
We all know, or at least some of us do, the pain and jealousy we feel when the person we love doesn't respond to us or isn't faithful. Yet, our love is only a faint shadow of the love He feels for us. In saying this, I don't want to underestimate the feelings of love we can experience as human beings. We know it is strong and passionate. I say this only so we can imagine the love He has.
All these examples we have given can be summarized in the metaphor that the Bible presents to us: comparing the Church—and, in this case, each of us as believers individually—to the bride, and Him to the bridegroom. That’s why the Bible speaks of the wedding of the Lamb (Revelation 19:7-9). This wedding will take place in heaven when we are fully redeemed. It is the wedding in which all believers, forming the church, will be forever with Christ. There, the church will be presented without spot or wrinkle and dressed in fine, pure linen. There, there will be no weeping, pain, or offense. So often, love is also the cause of weeping and pain. Pain and tears for disappointing our Creator, but also tears for realizing the love He has for us.
It must also be said that we were not the first to love Him, but He showed His love for us first by dying on the cross. Christ died for us while we were still sinners (Romans 5:8). At that moment, it was not we who sought Him, but He sought us. This is what awakened our love for Him. That’s why a believer loves Him—because they are loved by Him with a love they do not deserve. A believer must also show a similar love toward their neighbor. This kind of love, like the love a person must show toward God, can't be truly understood or possessed unless we have first accepted His love in our lives, or better put, unless we have allowed ourselves to be conquered by His love. We must leave ourselves to His love. Then we, too, begin to love Him. When someone repents, they understand God's love. Another question and mystery is also what moves a person to repent. Often, it is the very love of God itself. At times, it is hard to find the line between these two events – the coming of God’s love and our repentance. If we have repented and then felt and understood His love, or we have faced it, and it has made us repent. I personally think that it is first God’s love. Still, when I examine my life, those two events are so intertwined and deep that it is hard for me to say or explain them. I know only that if it wasn’t for His love, it would never have happened.
God's love is one of the Bible's core themes, and when we talk about it, we are not referring to humanistic love or any love driven by self-interest. God's love is also necessary in a family. It strengthens the love between a husband and a wife. Born of Christ's love for the church while it was still distant and in sin, the love we receive from Him gives us the strength to love unconditionally, not only when we are repaid. This is very important in family life as well.
Love is one of the most fundamental themes in the Bible. We are not talking about love according to our human conceptions and motives, as we mentioned before, but about God’s love. It is often compared to perfection in Scripture (Colossians 3:14, 1 Corinthians 13:10, 1 John 4:12). We people, by nature, feel love. It is a gift and a feeling given by our Creator, just like our other emotions. They help us find greater meaning in life and make us understand that it is not just about survival and instinct, but about something greater. These feelings help us relate to other human beings and show us that life is made up of relationships. But above all, they are like an echo that resonates within us, reminding us of our need to connect with God. There, however, our feelings are not enough. There, something more supreme is needed, something we have lost (along the way)—His love. It brings us completeness, and through it, we find the true meaning of our life and existence. We will never know this until we experience it. What all people know is that something is missing in their lives. Many are searching for this, and perhaps they're looking in the wrong places. It is God's love, and it is found in Him.
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