God as he is

Love is not a verb that God does; it is a noun that he is. God, who is all-powerful, can not cease to be love without ceasing to be God. It is *the* essential element of his nature.

I can anticipate the objection, "yes, God is love, BUT...what about holiness (or justice or mercy or wrath or forgiveness, etc.)?" The problem with this question is that it pits one divine characteristic against another, as though they were separate, discreet things, but they are not. Holiness, mercy, wrath and forgiveness proceed from God's love. This is how we end up with the schizophrenic god who loves with one hand and smites with the other, who takes our sin away on a cross but holds us to account for every misstep after that, who gives us freedom so that we can love him meaningfully but withholds that freedom at the same time, who tells us that he is just and good, but that he has destined millions and millions of people for hell for doing *exactly what he created them to do*. These are not apparent contradictions, they are in fact contradictory notions, which means that you can't rationally hold both of them at the same time. It's at this point that we retreat into "the mystery of God", as though it were a rug under which we sweep all our bad philosophy. We must not believe these things under the rubric of faith, accepting self-contradictory notions because "God can do anything". They are self-contradictory because they are not true.

If we get the love part wrong, everything else downstream of it gets screwed up. We end up living a quid pro quo life with God, whereby we give him our loyalty and obedience and he keeps us from going to hell and (hopefully) gives us a home in heaven when we die in return. This is the "contract" worldview. When we have this worldview then everything becomes a process of self-evaluation. How am I doing? Am I doing it right? Am I doing enough? What am I getting in return? Is it feeding me? Everything is a deal. Love is filtered through the lens of how it will benefit me. I become an expert evaluator of people (based on what the do, of course).

God works through covenant, not contract. The covenant worldview is other-centered. It's based on love, the central characteristic of which is knowing, intentional self-sacrifice. It is an act of the will which is aware of the probably cost. Covenant does not love because of something the beloved has or doesn't have or because of some character trait the beloved possesses; it loves because the beloved *is*, and so it is not conditioned by its environment, is not lessened by time or reduced by circumstances. There is no self-evaluation in the same way that we do not look at our eyes with our own eyeballs. They are not an apparatus for evaluating that; it is not what they do. So it is with covenant love. It is not an apparatus for self-evaluation. It is not what it does.

God tore up the contract on the cross. He entered into a unilateral covenant with us just like he did with Abraham. God is pouring all of his love into me right now as though I were the only person on the earth and he had only this second to do it, so dump the contradictions. Shred the contract. When God exercises all the power he has, it looks like love. When God, who has all the resources and power available to any being, wants to respond to sin it looks like free pardon. When God, from whom all wisdom comes, responds to suffering it looks like rescue. To God, omnipotence looks like free relationship.

As if that were not enough, it's not just that God *will* not stop loving me; it's that he *cannot* stop while remaining what he is. That's the kind of love I need a supernatural revelation from God to believe. That's the love found in the gospel.