The Immutable God: God is Love
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Everyone knows about the New Testament’s most famous definition of love. It is the safest bet for a Bible verse in almost any wedding. 1 Corinthians 13:4-7. “Love is patient, love is kind, love does not …” Much more than just marital love, though, it describes the kind of love God has always had for his creation, even in the Old Testament.
I’ve been exploring how, in both the Old and New Testaments, God is the same eternal, triune creator whose character is perfectly holy, righteous, just, merciful, gracious and above all loving. In both testaments, he acts to judge, bless and redeem all of creation. The last, but perhaps most important, aspect of God’s character is his love. John goes so far as to make the audacious claim that God is love (1 John 4:8). It is equally true in the Old Testament as in the New.
The Old Testament does not explicitly use the word “love” to describe God nearly as much as the New Testament, but we can break down each component of the New Testament’s definition of love in 1 Corinthians 13 and search the Old Testament for an example of God demonstrating those characteristics. If we can find them, we can say that God loves in the Old Testament just as he does in the New Testament.
LOVE IS PATIENT
Many translations render the familiar “patient” as “longsuffering.” The Hebrew word is literally “long-nosed.” The picture “patient” draws is of someone who can suffer wrong without losing his temper and acting rashly.
Methuselah lived longer than any person ever has: 969 years. His father Enoch — a prophet who “walked with God” — named his son Methuselah. Literally, Methuselah means, “when he dies, judgement.” It is interesting that he died the same year Noah’s flood started. God seems to have revealed to Enoch that he would judge the whole world after Methuselah died. God proceeded to give the man whose death would mark the beginning of the destruction of the world the longest life ever recorded. Not only that, but Noah preached and warned everyone he could for 100 years. God gave a 1,000-year warning and a 100-year warning before he destroyed the world. Destruction was not a rash act. Instead, God was being patient.
LOVE IS KIND
Kindness is when you recognize people as real people and treat them that way, even the most “insignificant” people.
Hagar, Abraham’s concubine, was thrown into the middle of a mess. She was taken from her home in Egypt as a slave. Then she was forced by her mistress to sleep with Abraham. Then she got pregnant, and even though Hagar’s pregnancy was Sarai’s idea, Sarai got jealous and started to abuse her. Then, Sarai ends up kicking her out into the desert with her child. She set Ishmael down near a bush and sat down just to wait to die in the desert. That’s when God intervened. He physically rescued the two and provided for them. He made a promise to Hagar and kept it. Hagar called on God, naming him El-Roi, which means “God Sees” because he saw her, a person in need, and treated her that way. God was kind to Hagar.
LOVE IS DOES NOT ENVY OR BOAST
Two sides of the same coin, envy and boasting both come from the heart that claims what is not its own. Genesis 1:1 claims, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” If that doesn’t establish his ownership over everything clearly enough, he explicitly claims in Exodus 19:5, “All the earth is mine.” If God is the rightful owner of all things, he cannot claim anything that is not his own. He is therefore logically incapable of envy or boasting in this sense of the word. If God cannot envy or boast, then he does not envy or boast.
LOVE DOES NOT SEEK ITS OWN
Arrogance as an attitude and rudeness as a disposition are the natural results of selfishness, or “seeking one’s own.” Being irritable and resentful are the result of a selfish person not getting their own after they’ve sought it.
When Moses asked God for his name, God said, “I am who I am … Say to the Israelites, ‘I am has sent you’” (Exodus 3:14). This is the beginning point all Abrahamic monotheistic thought. God just is. This idea, expressed in God’s name “Yahweh,” is so holy that the Israelites to whom God revealed it would neither say nor even write it. God, therefore, needed nothing. Whatever his motive for creating “the heavens and the earth” in Genesis 1:1 was, “seeking his own” could not have been it.
LOVE REJOICES IN TRUTH, NOT WRONGDOING
Love never leads someone to approve of a person’s sin, but it is quick to respond to even the smallest kernel of truth in a person’s heart.
Abraham was not a good man. He lied about his relationship to his own wife twice. He raped his wife’s servant. It was Sarai’s idea, but it happened in his tent. Over and over again, God rebuked and corrected him. Not once did God offer any hint of approval for Abraham’s wrongdoing. But when God made Abraham a promise, and Abraham believed the truth of God’s faithfulness, God rejoiced. Abraham “believed in the Lord, and (God) reckoned it to him as righteousness” (Genesis 15:6).
LOVE NEVER FAILS
Love can bear, believe, hope and endure all things because it never fails. The thing that Abraham believed about God was that God would keep his promise to make him into a great nation that blessed the whole world. After 42 generations of constant failure, stagnation and languishing on the part of Abraham and his descendants, God’s love did not fail. He sent Jesus, a descendant of Abraham. Now, through Abraham’s offspring, all people can be blessed. All people can join with Abraham in God’s promise through Jesus, who offers eternal life that never fails.
Not only do we see God loving according to 1 Corinthians 13:4-7 in the Old Testament, he perfectly models that kind of love in just the first two books of the Old Testament. If you look, you’ll notice I only used examples from Genesis and Exodus. In the Old Testament and the New, God loves, and he never fails to love, and his love never fails.