We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.

man-reading-newspaper

What Makes the Good News So Good

While God was revealed in various ways and to various degrees through the law and the prophets of the Old Testament, in Jesus we finally have the one who is “the exact representation of God’s being” or essence (hypostasis, Heb. 1:1-13). This is the heart of the Good News that reverberates throughout the New Testament. God looks like Jesus. To see Jesus is to see the Father (Jn. 14:7-9). This is why followers of Jesus can never just accept a generic understanding of the word “God,” as though the meaning of this word is self-evident.

What makes this Good News good, however, is not merely that Jesus is the definitive revelation of God: it’s rather the beautiful character of the God that Jesus reveals. This character is succinctly, and famously, captured by John when he proclaims, “God is love [agape]” (I Jn 4:8, cf. 16). In my estimation, this is the most simple, profound and breathtakingly beautiful revelation in all of Scripture, and indeed in all of history.

As Peter Kreeft notes, this passage is claiming nothing less than that “[l]ove is God’s essence.” He continues:

Nowhere else does Scripture express God’s essence in this way. Scripture says God is just and merciful, but it does not say that God is justice itself or mercy itself. It does say that God is love, not just a lover. Love is God’s very essence. Everything else is a manifestation of this essence to us, a relationship between this essence and us. This is the absolute; everything else is relative to it.[1]

Along similar lines, biblical scholars Reinhard Feldmeier and Hermann Spieckermann argue that the absolute centrality of the command to love God and neighbors in the teachings of Jesus as well as in several NT authors, “presupposes that—assuming the congruence of the divine nature and will—love belongs to God’s nature, and more, that love constitutes God’s nature.”[2] In other words, since love is the essence of all that God wills, as Jesus and the authors of the NT teach (Matt 22:37), then we must either accept that love is the essence of God’s nature, or we must accept the truly blasphemous conclusion that God is a hypocrite!

Everything Christians think and say about God must be grounded in this all-important revelation that God is love. Whatever else we may wish to say about various divine attributes— including God’s “justice” and “wrath”—we must ultimately understand them as expressions of God’s love—indeed, of the love God eternally is.

Feldmeier and Spieckermann note that the NT teaches that the God revealed in Jesus Christ is not only “a God of love (2 Cor 13:11),” but “he is love (I John 4:8, 16).” And for this reason, they argue, “the contrary statement, that he is a God of wrath, indeed, that he is wrath, is inconceivable.” So too, they argue, there is a “clear asymmetry between wrath and love” such that if God “grows angry,” it is only “because of his love and for the sake of his love.” And for this reason, they conclude,

It must, therefore, be asserted emphatically that God’s wrath is his reaction to injustice and defiance (see Rom 1:18), and not a divine affect, not one of God’s dark sides, and certainly not a divine attribute [in the sense that love is].[3]

If God’s very eternal essence is love, then to experience God is to experience perfect love. If some experience God as fierce wrath, therefore, it is not because there is something else in God alongside his love. Rather this is how their hard hearts experience God’s love. But this doesn’t alter the fact that it is God’s perfect love that they are experiencing. God’s love alone is the one absolute.

[1] P. Kreeft, Knowing the Truth About God’s Love: The One Thing We Can’t Live Without (Ann Arbor, MI: Servant, 1988), p.91.

[2] R. Feldmeier and H. Spieckermann, God of the Living: A Biblical Theology, trans. M. E. Biddle (Waco: Baylor University Pres, 2011), 127.

[3] Feldmeier and Spieckermann, God of the Living, 339-40.

Photo via VisualHunt.com

Related Reading

Reflecting on Henry and the Heart of God

Several years ago Jessica and Ian had their theology revolutionized by coming in contact with the vision of God and the warfare worldview that ReKnew ministries stands for. Tragically, this last September this wonderful couple learned that their precious 4-year-old son Henry had a massive brain tumor and that he had only months to live.…

What Does It Mean to Be Married to Christ?

The New Testament calls Christ the “bridegroom” and the church his “bride.” To understand what this means can change your life. We need to read this through the lens of first century Jewish marriage. In what follows we’ll highlight six aspects of first century Jewish marriages to see how each sheds light on the New…

What To Do With the Violent God of the Old Testament

For eight years Greg has been researching for and writing the book entitled The Crucifixion of the Warrior God. In it he confronts the commonly held idea that the Old Testament depictions of God behaving violently should be held alongside of and equal to the God revealed through Jesus dying on the cross. But if the Old Testament…

Can You Believe It?

The origin of human sin and the world’s oppression goes back to a deceptive, untruthful picture of God given to Eve by Satan. Jesus came, in part, to finally reveal the absolute truth about God. He is the way and the truth (alethia) and the life (Jn 14:6). The word “truth,” literally means “uncovered.” And…

Is God Good?

Andrew Stawarz via Compfight This reflection by David D. Flowers seemed like a good addition to Greg’s recent blogs on free will. Here David talks about the problem of evil and how it is that we can call God “good” in light of a world full of evil. He even quotes Greg extensively. From the…

Knowing the Eternal God

If all our knowledge about God is to be oriented around the cross, as I argue in many places (see this post for instance), what does this mean for how we reflect on God’s transcendence? In other words, how can we speak of God’s eternal being since there obviously was no cross within God prior…