God is love.

There are infinite ways in which God is love. One of the most basic of these is that God is the only being of whom it can be said, His perfection not only justifies but demands His own self-love. If we long to approach His perfection through sanctification, the only path is to love God ourselves and submit to His will.

It doesn't bear simple intellectual acknowledgement: the idea that God's perfection necessitates His self-love requires sweet but arduous reflection. We finite human creatures are so far from perfection that our self-love is always tainted by impure motives, so much so that we are commanded in Scripture to not love ourselves. We are so imperfect that we are forbidden from loving ourselves, and yet God is so perfect that He must love Himself.

That He would also deign to save any of us is literally incomprehensible. We cannot take this seriously enough, yet in our arrogance and unpardonable silliness, we frequently (perhaps always, in one way or another) make light of God's love for us. We could try to excuse ourselves with an appeal to our imperfection, but that imperfection makes us no less culpable before the Sovereign of heaven, and yet He still shows us mercy and grace.

God is love. It sounds almost trite now, after millennia of misusing the phrase and shoving it into shapes in which it doesn't belong, after millennia of trying to make it trite. But it is the least trite statement with which we will ever be confronted. God is love means for His children that He pardons and forgives us, and for His enemies that He is quick to punish and mete justice.

How are these both true? Because of His self-love. If God loves Himself, then any people He has made His own He will also love, and any that have rejected Him without repentance He will force from His presence. Either of these are weighty enough concepts to incubate reflection throughout eternity, but it is the former that is most worthy of contemplation.

These three remain: faith, hope, and love, but the greatest of these is love. God is not some local deity or nebulous life essence to be greedy and mean (on the one hand) or silly and powerless (on the other). Love is great because God is love; and, likewise, God's love makes Him great. A king that is known only for his cruelty and oppression is soon forgotten or relegated to the big black book of history; but a King known for His magnanimity is never forgotten, though His enemies rightly fear the jealousy with which He guards His subjects.

It won't do to think improperly of God's love, but it also won't do to replace His love with intellectual propositions and hard sayings. The only path to enlightenment on this score is the Scripture and its revelations of God's character and nature. These bear constant reflection, not for the sake of mere knowledge, but in order to hear, feel, sense, experience and understand Yahweh, the God who is Love and who simply and absolutely and completely Is.