Chapter 3 :
love
The greatest of all, the fruit of a great single life
Part Three
The central point of the salvation story is not us – the central point is God, and what He has done and His love for us. We reap the benefits of this awesome loving God, but we are certainly not the heroes. There is nothing in the Bible to show our greatness, only the greatness of God. The death of Christ on the cross showed the greatness of God and Christ because they displayed who gave the greatest love of all – the Father gave His son, and the son gave His life willingly. The whole Gospel clearly shows God as glorious. God is love, indeed. His love for Himself is the starting point of His love for us.*
Some might view this as a particularly strange way of looking at God. As if He has a selfish way of loving. But the point is that God’s glory is exactly where our true joy lies; he created us to find joy in His glory – therefore God’s love for himself and enjoyment of His glory as a central theme is not selfish, because it is the very thing that must be done for us to find joy. If God did not delight and find joy in himself and His glory, we couldn’t possibly have joy (it wouldn’t even exist!). His love for himself overflows to us. If we were the uttermost center of His attention, He would be committing idolatry, and placing mankind as the centerpiece and most important part of the universe.
This kind of belief is humanistic. God must place Himself as the centre and most admired being of the Universe, and so be ‘an example’ so to speak and love Himself as we ought to love Him. This love between the Godhead is joyous and celebratory, pleasurable and glorious. It’s because of this love that we are loved. The love in the Godhead overflows to His creation, much like the strong love of parents for each other will overflow to their strong and committed love to their children. We then can see that God’s love for us is indeed true love. He invites us to share in this glory, this endless and eternal love story of Himself, and not to sit as outsiders. “This is my son, in Him I am well pleased.” God is delighted in His Son, in Himself. Christ’s death on the cross is exactly what opens all this up for us. ‘If indeed we share in His sufferings, so we will also share in His glory.’ (Rom 8:17)
Alrighty, lets just keep this in the back of our minds. I mention it because it’s important for us to know that our lives are for God’s glory and not that He is for ours. It’s important to understand that God is the real only source for true love, that He loves perfectly, and so is all-sufficient. God does not need us to love Him to feel loved. He is not insecure. He finds complete love in himself, and so therefore is able to be an infinite supply of love for us.
This is important, because this is what true love is about. True love is a looking away from ourselves and our selfishness and looking to God instead. True love is this because only by looking to God do we actually love properly. This is what we started discussing in chapter two – the Kingdom of God frees us to love properly and with gladness. God is the very definition of love and goodness – therefore let us go to Him to find out about it. Only He can cause us to love perfectly as He loves.
* For a more detailed and scriptural idea of this I would recommend you read John Piper, The Pleasures of God. This is a running theme throughout the book which I think he can explain a lot better than me!
