For the last month I’ve been working on an assignment for one of my classes that focuses on God’s love—specifically on God’s love for us; for me. In short, the first 7 days were a series of exercises falling under the heading “God Loves You” with Scripture verses about God’s love for us (well the exercise was specific to me so the verses were directed at me). The exercise instructed me to read select verses and then meditate on what it feels like when I apply the verses to myself. The next 7 days were a series of exercises falling under the heading “God Really Loves You” with more pointed Scripture verses about God’s love and additional time to meditate on those verses. The final 7 days of the exercises were rather humorously titled “God Really, Really Loves You” with very pointed Scripture verses about God’s love and again time to meditate on those verses. However, during the last 7 days, God’s love for me was described as unconditional love. The purpose of the exercise was to shift my thinking about God away from a relationship rooted in theodicy, toward a relationship rooted in love.
“Theodicy” is a theological term that needs some explanation because it’s a place so many of us get hung up on in our relationship with God. I am more convinced than ever that it’s a place we can stop at for a short time but then we need to move past it. A theodicy is an attempt to explain why we suffer, particularly when that suffering is seemingly unjust, profound, and in our view unnecessary. It is an attempt to defend God in the face of evil. It’s a way of explaining God’s actions in the world so that we can feel better about being in relationship with Him when what’s happening around us seems cruel and unjust. There are four classic types of theodicies that circulate in Christian circles.
The first type of theodicy claims that we suffer because of sin and God punishes us. You’ve probably encountered this simplistic view. “The temptation to attribute guilt of some kind (theological, societal, institutional, or personal) gives us the illusion of safety and control…The Bible states that God punishes sin. But we cannot say when and how that is so in particular cases, and, despite these truths, to do so is cruel…The temptation in this theodicy…bears the unvoiced hope that by obeying the rules we can force God’s hand to deliver what we want. If I pray correctly and am a good person, then God will have to reward me with life, liberty, and the acquisition of wealth. This is magical thinking. Attempts to include all suffering in a paradigm of guilt and punishment offers…‘an apology in which the defense is worse than the charge…and may certainly be left to the detestation of everyone who has the least spark of morality.’ German theologian Dorothy Soelle calls this view an attitude of contempt. We blame—and scorn—the victim.”[1]
The second theodicy suggests that evil and suffering doesn’t really undermine the goodness of God’s creation. The view suggests that suffering may ultimately allow for the greater good within the created order; to highlight, in contrast to evil and suffering, what is good and beautiful in creation. “The theodicy of this form of thinking, however, posits an indifferent God who plays dice with the universe for aesthetic pleasure. With respect to this view, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s characters in The Brothers Karamazov talk about the possibility of faith in God in the face of radical human suffering.
“Ivan [one of the characters in the book], reflecting on the tears that soak the earth, says: ‘Too high a price is asked for harmony; it’s beyond our means to pay so much for admission’. This makes Ivan reject God. He respectfully rejects the ticket for admission to God’s world of aesthetic harmony that seems to require the suffering of the innocent. His bother Alyosha also rejects a theological argument for innocent suffering. He turns his attention to the sufferers, giving up the attempt to explain suffering in terms of some kind of total solution and aesthetic harmony.”[2]
The third theodicy suggests that God uses suffering for educational purposes in our lives. It views suffering as a means of improving, maturing, refining, and strengthening our character and our faith. Now I won’t argue that suffering can have that effect on some people. However, I contend that it is only a plausible argument if it has that effect on all victims of suffering, but, unfortunately, it doesn’t. In some cases, extreme suffering has the effect of destroying the lives and faith of its victims. “The usefulness of this pedagogical argument for suffering is from the point of view of the sufferer, not the point of view of God…But God is greatly diminished when viewed as an all-powerful schoolmaster prodding us toward greater understanding…Sometimes people with a God-the-Schoolmaster theology can usurp that role and become taskmasters for themselves, seeing life as a school for virtue in which they intend to be teacher’s pet.”[3] In this view, people think that if they can become virtuous enough, they can avoid suffering. You can imagine what happens when suffering strikes their lives as we all know it inevitably will—they either blame themselves for not being virtuous enough or they reject God as being too strict a Schoolmaster to satisfy.
The final type of theodicy is one that leans on the future hopes of the afterlife. This is referred to an eschatological theodicy and has, no doubt, provided hope for people who see no hope in history and see no evidence that evil and suffering don’t have the last word. But, “This hope ought to be a grace that offers assurance, not a justification for suffering.
“Without denying the truth of this hope for the future as described in Scripture, it is important that hope for the future does not render us apathetic, passive, and indifferent in the face of suffering and injustice. We live and suffer. Present reality deserves our attention…Hope must join with truth, not be used to silence it.”[4]
Do you notice something that is missing in all these theodicies? Do you sense any degree of relationship based on love in any of them? I’m not saying you can’t contort them somehow to show how God loves us but it takes some hard work. In truth, theodicies are an attempt to justify our belief that God is good; that God is Love, when we are confronted with the harsh reality of pain and suffering, ours or those we care about.
I was challenged by this again this week when I found out that my friend’s husband had suddenly died of a heart attack. My friend is an amazing woman who has already experienced her share of heartache and suffering when many years ago her young child fell into a pool and drowned. And now her husband dies suddenly of a heart attack. Ironically, I first met her at church where she was a greeter whose primary purpose was to love on people who walked through the church doors—and she was really good at it. She was literally the embodiment of God’s love. If you ever doubted that God loved you, you only had to spend a few minutes with her and she could make those doubts melt away with one of her hugs and her infectious smile. It was easy to believe that God is Love when you were around her. But how can you reconcile the idea that God is Love with the tragic loss of a child and a husband in her life?
When I heard the news about my friend’s husband, I immediately thought about the movie “The Shack.” I already know that some of you have turned me off at just the mention of that movie because you somehow think it is heretical. I’m not going to spend time trying to defend the movie’s theology here. If you have issues with the movie that you would like to discuss with me, you can email me. If you are unfamiliar with the movie, the main character, Mack, grapples with trying to understand how God could allow his little girl to be kidnapped and murdered. Mack encounters the Trinity in a visit to the very shack where his daughter was murdered. There, Mack has the opportunity to say things to God many of us have thought but have been afraid to say out loud. He blames God for his daughter’s death because God had the power to stop it. While Mack is mired in his pain and anger at God, the Father says, “When all you see is your pain, you lose sight of Me.” The Father concludes, correctly, that at the root of Mack’s problem is his belief that God is not good. But the Father assures Mack that He is good even if Mack doesn’t see it or understand it. The Father tells Mack that “there are no easy answers to take away his pain and suffering; no quick and lasting fixes.” Then the Father says something really important in the context or our lesson. He says that “life takes a bit of time and lots of relationship” with Him. And then in a very powerful scene, an exasperated Mack is sitting on the porch of the shack watching a bluebird in the tree above him when the Father approaches him and marvels with Mack at the bird’s beauty. The Father tells Mack that the bluebird was created to fly and that Mack was created to be loved, and that living unloved is like clipping a bird’s wings. The entire movie is about correcting Mack’s distorted view of God and moving him past his theodicies which might explain our pain and suffering but lack the power to sustain our faith during the worst times in our lives or convince us that God loves us. Instead, the movie is trying to convey the message that God loves you in the midst of your suffering and the only real way to endure our pain and suffering is to trust God because God is good and to believe God loves us because God is Love.
Subject Text
1 John 4:7-10
7Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. 8Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. 9This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. 10This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.
Context
By the time John wrote this letter, he was an old man. It was probably written sometime between A.D. 85 and 90. He hadn’t yet been exiled to the island of Patmos but he had certainly seen and experienced his share of pain and suffering. This letter wasn’t written to anyone in particular but was sent to several Gentile congregations. It is a letter to counter false teachings and holds particular relevance to us today. What I want you to remember when John talks about God’s love is that in the Gospel of John, he refers to himself as “the disciple whom Jesus loved.” What many of us are grappling with 2,000 years later, John knew from the very start—that God is Love.
Text Analysis
7Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.
At first, it appears that John is talking about love exclusively within the context of the Church in v. 7. And certainly, he is in the first half of v. 7 when he is addressing his friends that they should love each other—a group of people within which he includes himself. For the sake of context let’s replace John’s “everyone” with “you all” so that we don’t conflate believers and nonbelievers into “everyone.” The second part of v. 7 is more general when he says that everyone (read as “all of you”) who loves has been born of God and knows God. Here I believe John is speaking more universally. Otherwise, why not say something like, “All of you who love one another have been born of God and know God.” That certainly makes a nice neat package, doesn’t it? Not that we do that very well either but it’s certainly easier to achieve the command if we are merely called to love those within the Church. But we know that wasn’t the way Jesus loved and it’s not the way we are called to love either. I think John is imploring us to love the way Jesus loved and that means loving people outside the walls of the church as much as those inside the walls of the church. Here’s why I think John is including both groups of people. When non-believers see believers love one another, they know we are followers of Christ. When non-believers see believers loving nonbelievers, they experience Christ for themselves. You see, nonbelievers are much closer to allowing God to love them than you think.
Think about the context of nonbelievers who love. Have they been born of God? Do they know God? Those are interesting questions that we won’t have the time to dig into in this lesson but suffice it to say that if God is Love and God has created all things then how is it that nonbelievers know how to love or even have a desire to love? When we think of non-believers we tend to think they are far from God. In reality, nonbelievers who love others are closer to God than they themselves realize or will admit.
“Love flows from or out of God and had God as its source. Not only is this true of God, but all who love have been born of God…this refers to everyone, Christian or non-Christian. In other words, inasmuch as anyone has even the smallest capacity to love, this comes by the grace of God…it is because all men are created in the image of God that they have the capacity to love, and it is the result of ‘common grace’ that even nonbelievers can demonstrate even an incomplete kind of love.”[5]
We tend to understand love as being a feeling; something that just happens over which we have no control—i.e. we fall in love. However, limiting love to a feeling that just happens is a distorted concept of Biblical love. Biblical love is a choice. Biblical love is active. Biblical love serves others. Biblical love sacrifices for others. Biblical love is not earned. Biblical love is unconditional. When we love this way then we demonstrate that we know God because God loves this way.
8Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.
Let’s stay with the context of believers when John uses “whoever.” You can read it as “Whoever among you who does not love does not know God…”. Verse 8 is simply the inverse of v. 7. If those who love one another know God then those who do not love one another do not know God. Then John gets right to the heart of our lesson in the second part of v. 8. John can make the absolute claims in vv. 7 & 8 about those who know God and those who do not because John knew Jesus and he knew what it meant to be loved by Jesus. Based on that experience, John could make the unequivocal claim that God is Love because he knew Jesus was God.
“An ethical statement, about the person who is unloving, is followed by a theological pronouncement about God’s nature as love. John does not say that ‘God loves’, but that ‘God is love’. God is not only the source of love, but love itself. Thus the assertion ‘God is love’ means not simply that love is one of his activities, but that all his activity is loving.”[6]
Let’s go back to what I said previously about Biblical love and apply it to God. Biblical love is a choice. God has chosen to love you! Stop and let that sink in for a moment. No one makes God do anything. God loves you because He chooses to love you. Remember the other parts of Biblical love; God’s love: it isn’t earned and it’s unconditional. Here’s what that means: no matter what you think about yourself, unless you love yourself deeply, that’s not the way God thinks about you. Instead, God thinks of you as His beloved child. God loves you so much He will go to any and all lengths to prove it to you. John will illustrate my point in the following verses.
9This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him.
As I said previously, Biblical love is active. In the case of v. 9, God showed his love by sending Jesus to us so that we could know Him through Jesus. When John says that Jesus came so that we could live through Him, what he is saying is that we have a chance to live the life God intended in this life. And after this life, we have a chance to live forever with Him all because of what Jesus did for us.
“In the love-laden context of [our Subject Text], to ‘live’ in the full, God-enabled sense is to love as God demands and deserves. [Verse 9] may be taken, accordingly, as an affirmation in support of [v. 7’s] imperative to love each other. Such love is a possibility, according to [v. 9], because God’s very purpose in sending his Son into the world was to bring about the God-given life of regeneration. John makes abundantly clear…that to ‘live’ in this sense is also to love.”[7]
10This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.
John makes it clear in v. 10 that the love relationship we have with God was initiated by God long before we even had a chance to do anything to earn it. There was just one problem. How could God be in relationship with the people He loved so much yet who were infected by the ugliness of sin all while maintaining His standard of holiness? He had to do something about sin and since Biblical love sacrifices, as I said previously, God sent Jesus as the sacrifice for our sins to demonstrate His love for us and make it possible for us to be in relationship with a perfectly holy God who loves us dearly.
“Man, in his natural condition, does not love God nor his Son whom he sent. But clearly and amazingly, God ‘loved us’. And what incredible and unfathomable love it is: He sent his Son, and he sent him to die for us. ‘Amazing love, how can it be’ [From the song “Amazing Grace”]? Love is always demonstrated by actions. It is not abstract; it is never complacent or static…This marvelous act was prompted not by man’s love for God but God’s love for man, so that ‘the sending of God’s Son was both the revelation of his love and, indeed, the very essence of love itself. It is not our love that is primary, but God’s, free, uncaused and spontaneous [love]. All our love is but a reflection of his and a response to it. The origin of love lies beyond human effort and initiative. Left to ourselves, we would not love him. We would hate him and oppose him. It took his boundless, sacrificial love to break our hearts of stone and bring us to himself.”[8]
Application
Pain and suffering have a way of making us question God’s love for us. I know that many of you are struggling with this right now. Whether you are going through a tragic loss of a loved one, the end of your marriage or some other significant relationship, a continued battle with some addiction, the loss of a job, or the loss of your health, when the pain and suffering gets bad enough you begin to doubt God’s love for you. I get it, I really do. However, somehow we need to get to the point that our circumstances don’t make us question God’s love for us. We might have lots of other questions in the middle of our pain and suffering but not God’s love for us. Somehow we need to get to the point that we internalize God’s love for us to the point that being his beloved child is simply who we are.
“In order for our knowing of God’s love to be truly transformational, it must become the basis of our identity. Our identity is who we experience ourselves to be—the ‘I’ each of us carry within. An identity grounded in God’s love would mean that when we think of who we are, the first thing that would come to mind is our status as someone who is deeply loved by God.”[9] In case there are still some of you who haven’t been disillusioned by me as a pastor, I’ll confess that I struggle to accept the fact that God loves me. I’m sorry if it shocks you to learn that a pastor struggles in this area, but I do. If you’re like me, you project onto God how he feels about you based on how you feel about yourself. And if you’re like me, you don’t always like yourself very much. It is a distortion of who God is that I’m still working on correcting.
Even though I have struggled with this my entire life, I struggle less with it now than I have in the past. It hasn’t been easy and it hasn’t been without setbacks. For example, when I found out that my friend’s husband died suddenly of a heart attack this week, I again began to wonder about God’s love in light of my friend’s suffering. However, in order to stay focused on God’s love as opposed to the pain and suffering around me, I am intentional about praying for God to make His love real to me in whatever way He sees fit; to help me with my unbelief. You can do this as well.
“As you spend time pondering the marvelous love God has for you, you may begin to realize that you ‘know’ this, but at a deeper level you do not fully believe it. Do not let this trouble you, but instead repeat the prayer ‘I believe, help me in my unbelief.’ This is a prayer Jesus heard and answered. The love of God is a one-of-a-kind, nothing-can-separate-you-from-it love that is hard if not impossible to fully embrace, so give yourself time and grace as your ability to hold on to God’s love for you grows. The good news is that God’s love is always embracing you, wooing you and indwelling you.”[10]
I want to challenge you to try another exercise as well that has proven to be transformational for me when I think of about God’s love for me. Chapter 13 of Paul’s first letter to the church in Corinth is a discourse on love and I want you to take a few verses out of the chapter to help make God’s love personal to you. Specifically, I want you to use verses 1-6 in the exercise. Here is how those verses read:
“If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing. Love is patient, love is kind, it does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.”
If this lesson has convinced you that God is Love, then here’s the exercise I want you to try: Take the verses above and replace the word “love” with “God,” or “Jesus,” or whatever favorite name you use for God and replace the pronoun “it” with “He.” I used “Papa” because that’s my favorite name for God, but you use whatever name makes God most personal to you. Here is how it reads for me. Fill in the blanks to make it personal to yourself and then keep it with you and read it over and over whenever you’re tempted by your pain and suffering to doubt God’s love for you.
If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have __________[Papa], I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have faith that can move mountains, but do not have __________[Papa], I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have __________[Papa], I gain nothing. __________[Papa] is patient, __________[Papa] is kind, He does not envy, He does not boast, He is not proud. He does not dishonor others, He is not self-seeking, He is not easily angered, He keeps no record of wrongs. __________[Papa] does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. He always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
This exercise has been particularly important to me because it makes God personal to me, which is exactly what God wants from us; a personal relationship. Paul is describing what love is or more accurately, what love does. If you read through it and do the exercise as I’ve described it, you will begin to see how Paul’s description of love describes God perfectly because God is Love.
[1] Susan S. Phillips, Candlelight: Illuminating the Art of Spiritual Direction, (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse Publishing, 2008), p. 101.
[2] Ibid., pp. 102-103.
[3] Ibid., pp. 103-104.
[4] Ibid., p. 104.
[5] Daniel L. Akin, 1, 2, 3 John—The New American Commentary, (Nashville, TN: B&H Publishing Group, 2001), p. 177.
[6] Stephen S. Smalley, 1, 2, 3 John—Word Biblical Commentary, (Waco, TX: Word Books, 1984), p. 239.
[7] Robert W. Yarbrough, 1-3 John—Baker Exegetical Commentary on the New Testament, (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2008), p. 237.
[8] Akin, 1, 2, 3 John, p. 180.
[9] David Benner, The Gift of Being Yourself: The Sacred Call to Self-Discovery, (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2015), p. 47.
[10] Larry Warner, Journey with Jesus: Discovering the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius, (
(Audio version; Music--"The Passion" and "Let Go" by: Hillsong. Music coordination by Meagan Seredinski)
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