God is love. As far as we know, no one in the history of the world ever wrote that before the apostle John penned 1 John 4:8. So simple, yet so endlessly profound. God is love. Love means relationship. God exists in an eternal relationship of love. The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit have loved each other from all eternity. Out of that love, the one God who is three persons created new life. Life meant to be lived in relationship. In love. We humans loving God and one another. Because God first loved us. 

 

How did we come to know this? Because the Son of God came to us as the man Jesus. The first disciples constantly reflected on just who they had followed for three years. They thought about a man who could walk across the sea and still the waves with a word. They knew the man born blind who was made to see by the touch of Jesus. They felt the peace emanating from one tortured by and delivered from demons cast out by the command 

of Jesus.

 

This Jesus ever talked of God as his Father, the two being so close that Jesus could say, “I and the Father are one” (John 10:30). “I am the resurrection and the life” (John 11:25), he told a grieving Martha. But more, this man from Nazareth, who had been a baby in Mary’s arms, said, “For as the Father has life in himself, so he has granted the Son also to have life in himself” (John 5:26). They saw Jesus die and then saw him alive again so that Thomas, touching the wounds of the once-dead Jesus, would declare the astounding truth, “My Lord and my God!” (John 20:28). The man Jesus is the eternal Son of God who took up a real humanity.  

 

Following Jesus’ death and resurrection, it did not take long for his followers to think through all this meant. Within twenty years of Jesus’ time on earth, Paul could write, “[Y]et for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist” (1 Corinthians 8:6). The one LORD God of Israel is Father and Son. Creation comes from the Father through the Son. God spoke creation into being, but God’s Word is a person. In time, Jesus’ disciples put it together further: the one God is three! God the Father created through his Son in the Spirit, that same Spirit who hovered over the primeval waters. 

 

These complex insights underlie the glorious simplicity: God is love. As John’s epistle continues, “In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him” (1 John 4:9). The triune Creator showed himself in Jesus. The man who walked among us, who gave his life on a cross, is no less than the Son of God through all things were made. And he is profoundly for us. For God is love. 

The God to whom I pray is none other than the Jesus who cooked breakfast on a charcoal fire for his disciples (John 21:9). He walked the dusty roads of Israel, learned a carpenter’s trade, and noticed the farming and shepherding of his people. He loved children, received the touch of a sinful woman, and noticed and felt deeply the suffering of others. The notorious and compromised were drawn to him. This man is the same Son of God through whom all things were made!

 

And Jesus is the exact imprint of his Father. He is God’s face revealed to us. He shows us that God is this way, like him, and not another way. This is the best possible news. The Creator God is Jesus who came to us, cared for us and gave his life for us. The Maker to whom I pray is the man I meet in the gospels! He calls me by name. I know that voice and that I belong to him.