The Love Of God -Part 1

The Love Of God - Part 1

Before we launch into this study about love in the Bible we need to understand something about the word “love.” In short, The Bible’s word for love and your word for love are not the same thing. Let me explain.

You may have noticed that the English word for love is very broad. We can make love to someone, say that we love a tv show, go to church and sing about loving God and then love our mom and dad. None of those is the same type of relationship yet we use the same word to describe all of them.

The Greek language, which is the language that the New Testament is written in, has a different word for all of those things.

To make things even more complicated, the Old Testament was written, primarily, in Hebrew which presents love as something even more different. To the Hebrews, love comes from deep in our bowels (that’s your gut) while the Greek world saw love as a product of the heart and mind.

Love, then, is a very complicated thing. Is it a feeling? Is it an emotion or an an action? Is love based on our thoughts or our intuition? Is love a choice as opposed to an impulse? Is love fleeting or is it a long lasting bond? All these things go into our processing of what love is.

So, what does that mean for us on this Christmas Eve? Well, ask yourself this: why did Christ come to earth? Was it to show me how to feel closer to God, to teach me to know and understand Him better or to build a relationship between man and God?

Well, isn’t it all of those things? I think that’s what we mean by love. It’s all of that and probably a lot more that we haven’t even touched on here.

Christmas is much, much more than we make of it. God came to earth to show His love for us. That’s all we need to know about love.

Tomorrow: enjoy your Christmas and then we’ll come back and start looking at some of these incredible Bible verses about love.

Merry Christmas!