“God is love” (1 Jn. 4:16). How many times have we heard those Words? How many times have we heard someone say “God loves you?” How many sermons have been preached, Sunday School lessons taught and songs sung having God’s love as their primary theme? The most memorized and recited verse in the Bible begins with “For God so loved the world ….” The first spiritual concept most of us can remember concerned the love of God. God’s love has been proclaimed to cover words, thoughts and deeds ranging from one end of the moral spectrum to the other. The fact of His love has been voiced during the saving of life as well as the sacrificing of life, the beginning of life and the ending of life. His love has been used to excuse the worst of sins and to justify the most righteous of acts. God’s love has been used as the reason to start wars and to end wars. If man can name it, be it good or evil, it has probably had the Almighty’s love applied to it. God’s love truly has many faces but, as this paragraph points out, not all of them can be attributed to the Lord Himself. Man has a tendency to help Him in this regard. And as is usually the case, when man injects himself into the determining of spiritual truth, things tend to go haywire. Man has a penchant for embracing the Biblical statements he likes and rejecting those that do not confirm his religious beliefs. This deadly error often involves the love of the Almighty as we will see.

Religious men KNOW about SOME of God’s Word from having read certain Bible verses and from having heard sermons preached about them. Some of those people BELIEVE SOME of the statements they have read and heard spoken. SOME of those who BELIEVE those statements come to EMBRACE SOME of them. SOME of those who EMBRACE what they believe go on to OBEY SOME of what they embrace. Then there are those who know, believe, embrace and obey all that God has written in His Holy Bible. This includes those passages that speak about God’s love. In summary: Some people know; some believe some of what they know; some embrace what they believe; some obey some of what they embrace; and some become sons of God by obeying all of God’s Word. As Jesus said, man must live (now in order to live in the future, every Word that comes from the mouth of God–His Holy Scriptures.

The purpose of this series is to bring to light some of the ways in which Biblical love is expressed within the Lord’s Holy Bible so that the reader can compare his concept of God’s love to God’s concept. This comparison is absolutely necessary in order to keep oneself in line with what God Commands. L.J.