God, Love and Apologetics: Understanding God’s Love

“Robo come back!” cried Johnny Sokko, as the Giant Robo flew off into space carrying the evil emperor Guillotine. Guillotine whose body was composed of atomic energy could annihilate the entire earth just by being pierced with a single bullet, and he used this fact as leverage to subdue planet earth. Since the Giant Robo could not use any of his weapons to defeat Guillotine without destroying the earth, the mechanical hero carried the foe far away from the earth to crash into an asteroid. Giant Robo sacrificed his own life so that the earth could be free from Guillotine’s tyranny.

That is the ending to Voyage into Space, a favorite made for TV sci-fi movies from my childhood. The final act of the Giant Robo is one of the more imaginative ways idea of self-sacrifice has been illustrated in film. This idea of giving of one’s own life for the sake of another is something yearned for in the heart of every person, and it is so simple that even a child could understand it. Self-sacrifice for the sake of another is characteristic of the highest form of love. This sort of love is something that flows out from the Triune God of the universe.

The Apostle John exhorts the Christian: “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. (1 Jn. 4:7-8).^1[i] Love is that divine attribute which identifies God with His people. God is love “means more than ‘God is loving’ or that God sometimes loves. It means that he loves, not because he finds objects worthy of his love, but because it is his nature to love. His love for us depends not on what we are, but on what he is. He loves us because he is that kind of God, because he is love.”^2[ii] We come to truly know this divine love through Jesus Christ. John tells us “God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him” and it is “not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 Jn. 4:9, 10). This divine love is also called charity.

Love can be understood as having affections, empathy or solidarity with another. A mother is bound with deep affections for her child. She can even possess an intuition about when her child is hungry, sleepy, or distressed without any words from a child. Love can also be understood as companionship or comradery. Love can be understood within authentic friendship. Many of us know a person or two who will stick with them through the thick of it all. Not fair-weather friends, they got your back. Love is even understood in terms of romance. There is an incomparable ecstasy in the passionate embrace between a man a woman in love with one another. All of these expressions of love are beautiful, sacred, and magnificent. However, they are incomplete apart from divine love.^3[iii]

All the empathy, comradery and romance in the world will still leave us restless without divine love. This is most felt by many in the relentless pursuit for the one true romance. “It should be noted,” writes Rob Whitley, “that humans are restless precisely because we are looking for a man (or woman) to fill what Augustine called the gaping ‘God-shaped void’ in the human heart. The love offered by God, as witnessed through His creation of a fruitful universe, and more latterly through the ministry and crucifixion of Jesus (brilliantly described by Paul in I Corinthians 13 and Romans 5) is the only love that can fill such a hole.”^4[iv]

The self-existent Triune God of the universe is without beginning nor end, and forever and ever divine love happens between Father, Son and Holy Spirit. This is the implication of John’s declaration “God is love.” The love of the monotheistic Trinitarian God of Christianity is complete. On the other hand, the love of any other sort of strict monotheistic deity, such as the Allah of Islam, is deficient, for such a deity “cannot love until he creates an object of love, and even then, his love is based not on his character, but on his will to love his creatures. The Christian God, however, is not limited in this way. The Trinity’s plurality within oneness allows for interpersonal love as each person of the Godhead loves the others and is loved in return.”^5[v]

The Trinity, though eternally complete in love, never really remains alone; rather, God creates the universe to be filled with multitudes of humans formed in the imago Dei (image of God). Just as love never excludes but includes others, humans were created to be included in the love relationship between Father, Son, and Spirit. “We Christians,” writes Donald Fairbairn, “are meant to live in a way that somehow participates in God’s own life, so anything that we may say about God has direct applicability to the outworking of Christian life,” and “participation in divine life means primarily sharing the life of the Trinity, sharing in the relationship that has characterized the Father, Son and Spirit from all eternity past.”^6[vi] Despite humanity’s fall and expulsion from Eden, God still pursues after them, seeking the lost, tending their wounds, breathing into them new life, so that they can be reunited in fellowship. All this is accomplished through the Son, who enters into this world and gives His own life so that whosoever believes shall not perish but have everlasting life.

It is this very divine love that God shows to us and displays through us that becomes a key evidence for why Christianity is good for the world. Jesus puts it this way: “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another: just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another. By this all people will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (Jn. 13:34-35). Christian apologetics calls for the exercise of critical thinking. Beneficial tools for the apologist include logic, philosophy and theology. Nevertheless, the crucial ingredient for an excellent Christian apologist is love. Without love nothing else matters. “If I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge…but have not love, I am nothing” (1 Cor. 13:2).

Amazing love! How can it be, that Thou, my God, shouldst die for me?

— WGN

1. All Scripture cited from The Holy Bible: English Standard Version (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Bibles, 2016), unless noted.
2. Leon L. Morris, “1 John,” in New Bible Commentary: 21st Century Edition, ed. D. A. Carson et al., 4th ed. (Leicester, England; Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press, 1994), 1406.
3. C.S. Lewis identifies these four loves with the Greek words storge (affection), philia (friendship), eros (romance) and agape (charity). See  https://www.cslewis.com/four-types-of-love/ and C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (New York: Hartcourt Brace & Company, 1960) There is even a New York Life Insurance spot mentioning the four loves with agape being a love that takes action.
4. Rob Whitley, “A Reconsideration of Romantic Love,” Christian Research Journal, 32, 3 [2009]: https://www.equip.org/articles/a-reconsideration-of-romantic-love/ See also Michael W. Austin, “We Get to Carry Each Other: Kierkegaard and U2 on Authentic Love,” Christian Research Journal, 35, 4 [2012]: https://www.equip.org/article/get-carry-kierkegaard-u2-authentic-love/
5. Jonathan Haddad and Douglas Groothuis, “Allah, The Trinity, and Divine Love,” Christian Research Journal, 36, 5 [2013]: https://www.equip.org/article/allah-the-trinity-and-divine-love/#christian-books-3
6. Donald Fairbairn, Life in the Trinity: An Introduction to Theology with the Help of the Church Fathers (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2009), 11-12. As part of the same thought, Fairbairn points out: “What many (perhaps most) within the early church meant by the disconcerting word theōsis, or deification, was believers’ sharing in the warm fellowship that has existed from all eternity between the persons of the Trinity, a fellowship that Scriptures announces to us when it speaks of the Father’s love for his Son (10-11).