He Is Worthy: What We Love when We Love God, part 2
“You shall love the LORD your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength… [And] You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” – Jesus, in Mark 12:30-31
Jesus tells us to “love your neighbor as you love yourself.” What does it mean to love others “as we love ourselves”? In our last reflection on this, we began with the idea that the answer to this may be drawn from the immediately preceding context. In other words, there is perhaps something about how we “love God” that can help us understand how we are “to love ourselves” in a way that is not self-involved, but in a way that draws us toward loving others well.
So we are considering, in this series of reflections, What do we love, when we love God?
When we say we love a person, what do we mean? We do not mean that we love only something about them. That is, if we just found them attractive, or funny, or creative—this by itself wouldn’t be enough for us to say, I love you! In fact, if a friend told you they were in love with someone just because of one of these features, you would consider your friend to be “shallow.” You would, rightly, say that they don’t really love that person.
So, when we say we love someone, what we love is… them. They themselves, when considered as a whole, when considered as a single entity.
Now, it’s certainly appropriate to “itemize” our love for the ones we love. If a friend told you they were in love with someone, and you asked what they loved about that person, and they were like, “Just, like, them. Not, like, any one thing though,” you would roll your eyes. It’s appropriate to describe things about them that you love.
We will, over the course of this series, reflect on many specific things that we love about God.
But, again, what we love when we love God is… God.
So as we talk about loving God, how do we talk about all that God is?!
There are a few things the Bible says about God that point to what we might call, God’s essence.
The Bible says that God is Holy (E.g. Lev 11:44-45). That is, God very different from us. He is “other.” This “otherness” affects how we understand what God does—“My ways are not your ways.” (Isa 55:8-9) But this “otherness” also affects how we understand God’s essential being. God is, in His being, different from us—He is Holy.
The Bible also says that God is Love. (E.g. 1John 4:8, 16) That is, in God’s essence, He is other-oriented. Love is, of course, what God does—“The steadfast love of the LORD is from everlasting to everlasting” (Psa 103:17). But love is also how we are to understand God’s essential being. In His very being, God, unlike us, is Love.
If we were to stop here and fall down in praise and worship, it would be appropriate. To know the holiness of God, just that He is holy, calls for the eternal praises that God rightly receives in glory—“Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts—the whole earth is full of His Glory!” (Isa 6:3) And to know the love of God, just the extent of His heart and His plans and His works for us, deserves the same—“Worthy is the Lamb who was slain!” (Rev 5:12)
These are two things that sum up who God is that, by themselves each, rightly demand our love and even our worship.
But in fact, these two truths about how we understand who God is point to something even more profound, mysterious, and glorious.
Who is God really? Who is He, in His essence? God is Three Persons.
This is the holiness of His Being, what makes Him so different from us. This is what it means that He is love, what makes love an essential characteristic of God.
Father, Son, Holy Spirit are separate persons and together are the One God. They are each entirely, eternally, perfect in love, in wisdom, in power, in peace, in the joy of being Who They Are.
What we would see, if we could see God truly, would be an infinite—never-begun and never-ending—perfect, all-powerful, all-wise, mutual delight. Each person of God directs all of the virtues of God to the adoration and celebration of the other persons of God.
This is the essence of what it means to say that God is holy, that God does all things right, that God is love. And being shown this in God’s Word—His revealing this vision to us—is the essence of His mercy, grace, blessing, and wisdom, upon us.
Understand: there is no ego, in God. There is only, and only ever has been, love. Love of the Father for the Son and the Spirit, the Son for the Father and the Spirit, the Spirit for the Father and for the Son. And this love is carried out with endless energy, power, wisdom. And peace. It is a furious, raging glory, that is gentle, resting, still. It is without doubt.
And all that exists, exists as the expression of this, Who He Is. God created in order to share. He did not create in order to be loved by His creations, but to share the loveliness that God alone—Father, Son, Holy Spirit—knows the perfections of. Our love for God only means that we are beginning to understand how lovely our God is (and how loved we are with Him).
[If all this sounds somewhat incomprehensible, all I can say is that, Yeah. This is what tends to happen when we awestruck humans attempt to convey to each other the splendors of our God]
When we get a glimpse of this, truly, we too, like so many characters in the Bible who encounter The Divine, we would fall on our faces in worship. We would cry out, Glory! (Psa 29:9)
And then, later, as we talked about this with each other, we would say, O how I love my LORD! “One thing I have asked of the LORD—and that one thing is what I seek after—that I may dwell in the house of the LORD all the days of my life, so that I might gaze upon the beauty of the LORD and learn ever more about Him.” (Psa 27:4) I cannot begin to describe His glories—but nonetheless, I shall try.
What we love when we love God, is God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. What we love, when we love God, is that He truly is worthy. Of trust. Of resting in. Of serving and praising.
Of love.
He is worthy of all this, and more. Times three.
Prayer
[Let silence be kept.] Amen
Photo by Bing Hui Yau on Unsplash