God Is Love

To feel the weight of this verse, it helps to know the trouble around it. The letter is traditionally linked to John, and whatever the exact situation, the text itself tells us a community had fractured. Some people had left them (1 John 2:19). Scholars make educated guesses about what those who left were teaching, and the guesses vary, but you can hear what John cares about all through the letter. He keeps tying the invisible claim, I know God, to a visible test: do you actually love your brother. That is the air our verse breathes. It is not a tidy definition offered in a quiet study. It is a pastor refusing to let anyone separate God from how they treat the people in front of them. When he writes that the person who does not love does not know God, he is answering real folk who reckoned they had outgrown ordinary kindness for something higher. I find that bracing, because the temptation has not aged a day. It is still possible to feel spiritually advanced and be hard to live with.

There is a small thing in the wording that opens the verse up. John does not say the loveless person holds wrong ideas about God. He says they do not know him. Across John’s writings, to know God is never merely to have correct information. It is relational, the kind of knowing that changes you, closer to how we speak of knowing a person than knowing a date. So the logic runs like this. If love is God’s own nature, then being genuinely joined to him will, over time, make a person more loving. Coldness that never thaws is evidence the connection was never truly made. Notice too that John puts it from the negative side. He does not promise that loving people automatically know God, since plenty of warm, generous folk make no claim on him at all. He says the reverse: a settled refusal to love cannot sit alongside truly knowing the God who is love. That keeps the verse from becoming a ladder you climb. It is not love enough and you will earn him. It is meet him, and love will follow, because that is what he is like.

It is worth noticing that John states God is love twice in this chapter, here in verse 8 and again in verse 16, and he frames it differently each time. The first time leads outward into history and the sending of the Son. The second time turns it back on us: the one who remains in love remains in God. He will not let the sentence float free as a lovely idea. He pins it down at one end on what God did in Christ and at the other end on what we do next with our neighbour. That is why I do not think God is love is the soft sentence our culture has made of it. People reach for it to suggest God approves of more or less anything. John means closer to the opposite. Love is so central to God’s character that it judges us, showing up exactly where we are guarded and slow to forgive. Real love, in his hands, has a backbone, and it cost a cross.

On its own, God is love could be wishful thinking. Set inside the Bible’s long account, it has roots that reach back centuries. The Old Testament keeps returning to a Hebrew word for God’s covenant love, his steadfast, loyal kindness that holds on when his people give him every reason to let go. You meet it in God’s own self-description in Exodus 34:6 to 7, and in the worn refrain of Psalm 136. John is not announcing something new about God so much as naming what had been shown over and over, now made unmistakable in a person. The letter takes that step a verse or two on, and the New Testament makes the same move again in Romans 5:8. So when I want to test whether God is love is true, I am not sent to consult my feelings or my circumstances, which mislead me often enough. I am pointed to a fixed event outside myself. The clearest definition of the word turns out not to be a sentence at all. It is a cross.

Honestly, the days I most need this verse are the unspiritual ones. The person I find difficult has done the same maddening thing again, I am tired, my patience is down to fumes, and being told that knowing God means loving them lands like a weight rather than a comfort. What steadies me is the order John insists on, the one set out in 1 John 4:19. The love I am meant to give is not squeezed out by gritting my teeth and trying harder. It is drawn from a supply I did not fill. On the days I have little, my first task is not to manufacture warmth but to go and receive again before I try to pass anything on. I have also learned to be gentle with the gap between this verse and my life. John is describing a direction of travel, not a finished state. If it bothers you that you do not love as you should, that very ache is a quiet sign the love has reached you and is at work. People who are genuinely cold do not usually lie awake worrying that they are cold.

Read the sentence slowly and the weight falls on the word is. John does not say God is loving, the way we say a friend is patient. Those are qualities a person has, and qualities can come and go. He says God is love, naming not something God keeps but what he is made of. If love were one of his moods, it could cool when I disappoint him and warm again when I behave, rising and falling with my performance. But you cannot fall out with your own nature. His love towards me does not flicker, because it is not a feeling he is having about me. It is simply what he is.

It would be easy to hear God is love and fill the word with whatever love means to us, a warm feeling, a God who mostly wants us comfortable. John blocks that exit in the next breath. He tells us what he means: God sent his only Son into the world and gave him as the offering that deals with our sins (1 John 4:9 to 10). Love is not God smiling on people he finds delightful. It is God spending what was dearest to him on people who had turned away, to mend what held us apart. That keeps the word from collapsing into sentiment. This love bled, and it went straight at our sin rather than around it.

The sentence survives being quoted. It does not survive being reversed. God is love slides, almost without anyone deciding to do it, into love is God, and then any strong feeling qualifies. Falling for someone. An hour in the garden with the grandchildren. The lump in your throat at the end of a good film. All of it filed as a brush with the divine, with this verse handed round as the warrant. I did that for years without noticing I was doing it, because it flatters us: it means whatever I already wanted is holy, and I need not ask any further questions.

But turned back to front, the sentence can never be checked on me. Love is God asks nothing and tells me nothing I did not already believe about myself. It is a mirror with a halo on it. Said John’s way round, love is not the thing I feel but the God I have to answer to, and he is standing there asking whether I look anything like him yet. That is a far less comfortable sentence, and it is the one that was actually written.

Nearly every talk I have sat through on this verse opens with the good news and hurries the hard half through at the end, apologetically. Preached that way it becomes a compliment about God with a warning stapled on the back. John wrote it the other way round. The charge lands first, and only then comes “for God is love”, offered as the reason the charge holds. Not a softener. A cause.

So start where he starts, with a person who does not love and therefore does not know God, and resist the urge to file that down into “we all struggle to love sometimes.” Let the room sit in it a moment. Then let “for God is love” answer the question they are now genuinely asking, which is why love, of all things, should be the test rather than doctrine or attendance or trying hard. The cross is your evidence, and 1 John 4:19 is the way out, and both hit harder for arriving late. I would rather people went home stung and hopeful than warmed and unbothered.

This verse earns its keep at a baptism. Someone is stepping into a family whose nature is love, not a family that tries very hard to be nice, and that is worth saying out loud over the water. It belongs at a reconciliation service, where the point is that love is the test of belonging rather than an optional extra. With a sentence of steer beforehand it will even carry a wedding, though left bare it gets heard as a verse about romance, when John is after a whole congregation loving each other visibly enough that outsiders can see God in it.

Where I will not use it: in the room with someone being ground down at home who wants to know whether to stay. I have watched this verse handed over like a lid, pressed onto a box that needed opening. Nor at the end of a meeting where a complaint against the church has just been raised and everyone would rather it stopped. “Well, God is love” works as a full stop there, and John never meant it as one. He wrote it to open the argument. In those rooms, tell the truth first, do the love, and let the verse come afterwards, once it has something real to describe.

Try hearing it the way someone might who walked past half a dozen shrines on the way to buy bread. I cannot tell you which town John’s first readers lived in, and I would not trust anyone who sounded too certain about it. But the religion on offer in most Roman towns ran, broadly, on exchange. You gave, the god gave back, and the arrangement was the point. You poured out wine before a voyage because the crossing was dangerous and a god’s mood mattered. If the harvest failed you asked which step you had missed. I do not want to flatten that world into a cartoon, because ancient people did feel real devotion, and there was tenderness in it here and there. But the currency was service. Nobody was building temples on the claim that the god’s own substance was self-giving love.

Into that street, “God is love” is not a religious pleasantry. It is close to a slight aimed at every altar in town, because it cancels the transaction. You cannot buy off a God who has already spent everything before you turned up with your offering, and a god you cannot bargain with is no use to a priest with a stall to run. I think that is part of why John will not leave the sentence hanging in the air but keeps hauling it back to a Son sent and a death that dealt with sin. He is not offering a friendlier mood in the same old distant deity. He is describing something the neighbours would not have filed as a god at all, and I suspect the first people who heard it felt the ground move slightly.

I have sat with this verse next to people for whom it reads as an insult rather than a comfort. The parent whose child did not get better despite months of praying. The woman who has never once in her life been loved well by anybody, who hears “God is love” and thinks, then why does it feel like nothing at all. If love is God’s actual nature, why does it so often arrive late, or not at all, or wearing a face nobody in the room can see. I do not have a tidy route through that. I have grown wary of people who claim they do.

What I notice, and it solves nothing, is that John never promises this sentence will feel true. He states what God is. He does not state what will happen to you. Nothing in the letter suggests the people he wrote to were being spared anything; if anything, holding to this cost them people they had loved. So “God is love” was never a guarantee that circumstances would bend to match it. It sits right beside a cross, which is love and unbearable pain at the same moment, and neither one cancels the other.

That is the nearest thing to an answer I have found, and I want to be honest that it is not an answer. It is a pattern. Love, in this letter, has never once meant the absence of suffering. It means the claim that God is inside it rather than watching from a safe distance. Whether that is enough on the actual night, in the actual corridor, I cannot tell you. I only know I would rather sit there saying that than saying something warmer and false.

Left alone, “God is love” will be filled with whatever we already like the sound of. What steadies me is putting 1 Corinthians 13:4 to 7 next to it. Not because Paul is explaining John, they never met the same problem, but because he gives the word grain instead of a glow. Patient. Kind. Not envious, not proud, doesn’t seek its own way, is not provoked, takes no account of evil.

Read those as a description of the God John says is made of love, and the sentence stops being soft. It means he keeps no running total of the morning I lost my temper in the kitchen or the year I quietly drifted off. It means he is not provoked, which is not at all the same as never angry. It means he does not seek his own way with me, which is a strange thing to say about the one being in existence who would be entitled to.

Then turn it round and it stops being comfortable reading about God and starts being uncomfortable reading about me. Paul wrote that paragraph to a church of people living in each other’s pockets and getting on each other’s nerves, not to a lecture hall. Put his lines and John’s together and the ladder I keep hoping for disappears: if love is what God is, and mine is meant to answer to his, then patient and keeps no account stop being lovely ideals I admire from a distance. They are the exam I am sitting, this week, with the person whose name came to mind before I finished the sentence.

Keep reading and John does something with this claim I took a long time to swallow. He says perfect love casts out fear (1 John 4:18), and he has just tied that to the day of judgement. For years I read it as a telling-off, because I was frightened of God fairly regularly and here was a verse implying I should not be.

But the logic only works if verse 8 is true in the strongest possible sense. If love were a mood God has, then judgement day is exactly where the mood might break, and fear would be plain realism: be nice to him now, because there is a second face behind this one and you will meet it eventually. If love is what he is made of, there is no second face. The God waiting at the end is the God who was on the cross, because he cannot be otherwise without ceasing to be himself. That is the whole argument, and it rests entirely on the little word is.

The sting is what follows: the one who fears is not made perfect in love. Read that at three in the morning and it sounds like being scolded for a symptom. I have never fully made peace with it. What helps, and I offer it as a limp rather than a cure, is that John does not say the frightened person is shut out. He says love is not finished in them yet. My fear is not evidence that God is other than this verse says. It is evidence that I have not yet believed the verse all the way down.

There is an old hymn, translated out of Welsh, that opens “Here is love, vast as the ocean”. I have seen the authorship reported various ways and will not pretend to settle it, but congregations have been singing it in English for well over a century, and a hymn makes you commit to a claim in a way a sermon rarely manages. Nobody sings four verses of something they privately think is nonsense.

That is partly why I think this sentence has survived so well outside the study, carried in hymnbooks and muttered prayers rather than sitting in an old letter waiting to be explained. Ideas you agree with fade by Monday. Sung ones get hummed at a sink and surface in a waiting room thirty years after the sermon has gone. If you want to know whether you actually believe God is love, rather than simply nodding when it is read out, try singing that hymn slowly in a week when things are hard. Feel what in you resists the words. Then feel what in you, despite everything, still means them.

• Where am I quietly keeping “I know God” separate from how I treat one particular person, and what would shift if I refused to keep them apart?
• When I reach for the words God is love, am I using them to wave away what he calls sin, or letting them expose where I am guarded?
• Is there someone I have privately written off as too difficult to love, and what would taking the order of 1 John 4:19 seriously look like for them this week?
• Whose love first showed me something of what God’s love is like, and have I ever actually thanked them?

If you would like to keep going, you could read on through the rest of John’s letter, or find a verse for how you are feeling today.