JONNO: Jonno-BLOG

To say that “God is love” is an understatement, unless we inspect the type of love that is God’s alone.  According to 1 John 4:7-8, “God is love,” but what kind of love is this?  The Greek word agape is indicated by Today’s Dictionary of the New Testament as unselfish love, benevolence, affection, and good will: better know in today’s church colloquialism as unconditional love.  The immanence of God means that He shares some attributes of Himself with mankind, allowing mankind the capability to truly take on His likeness in a communicable sense.  The transcendence of God means that God stands far above mankind, holding to Himself incommunicable attributes unshared by Him with us, and even with the heavenly beings (Angels).  To love as God loves, for a human is impossible.  For God to “so love” the even the atheist, who renounces even His existence, is a love unshared by humanity (John 3:16).  It is a love that transcends us.  Sure, we can say that we love those who hate us, but it is up to a certain degree of our humanity, unless filled with the Spirit of God: then it is no longer us, but Him loving through us.  

            The immanence of God can be seen in scaled down versions of His attributes.  God allows mankind to possess a certain amount of wisdom, and a certain amount of strength.  Apostle Paul wrote, “For the foolishness of God is wiser than man's wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than man's strength” (1 Corinthians 1:25NIV).  The immanence means, "to exist or remain within" (WordIQ.com - Latin in manere).  When God created mankind, He breathed attributes that were distinctly His into us, and they remained within us, such as the capacity to love.  Because of sin, this capacity to love has been distorted and diluted to the point where we can no longer truly love as God has created us to.  We can assuredly seek to love what God loves, and hate what He hates despite of our sinful nature. 

            The transcendence of God is represented by those qualities that are all His in limitlessness.  The ability for God to “so love the world” is above the human capacity.  Only God, who is not bound by time, matter, space, or distance, is able to unconditionally love all of mankind from the beginning through the end, and beyond.  Man is incapable of this.  Only God has all power, all knowledge, all wisdom, all glory, and is always present.  He is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent.  This is best illustrated in the beginning of the Bible: Genesis 1:1, “In the beginning God….”  

The bottom line is that He is God all by Himself, and we are not, yet He loves us.