I’ve been thinking recently about a consistent message I hear in messages and sermons that for a long time I was used to hearing and didn’t see any issue with.
That is, the emphasis that pastors and ministry leaders put on the holiness of God, the justice of God, the wrath of God, even the goodness of God, all of which are completely true and should be communicated.
The problem I have, though, is that they often talk of those things in a way that would lead someone to believe that any one of those aspects of God are ultimate, or at least all should be treated with the same gravity and level of importance.
I think this is a mistake.
The Primacy of Love in the Christian Tradition
C. S. Lewis reminds us in his essay The Weight of Glory:
“If you had asked almost any of the great Christians of old [what he thought was the highest of the virtues], he would have replied, ‘Love.’”
I think he’s right.
But so often the love of God gets relegated down into a list of moral attributes that at best might find its way into a sermon as a side comment or an afterthought or as something that’s just assumed. I have found it’s rarely given pride of place among the various attributes of God.
Are All of God’s Attributes Equal?
You might read this and think, “Well, why does that matter? Aren’t all of God’s attributes the same?”
To that, I say a strong and resounding, “No” and would encourage you to consider this a bit deeper. The question I have is: What makes God’s goodness “good?” What makes God’s holiness “holy?” What sets him apart? What drives the justice of God? What results in the wrath of God when faced with obstinate rebellion? Is it not love?
Love Is the Source
Far too many teachers and writers and communicators talk about the nature of God but too often they do so without first establishing the love of God. If someone is talking about an attribute of God without beginning with God’s love, they are beginning from the wrong spot.
It’s like someone saying, “Let’s consider the branches of this tree” without showing them the trunk. Branches are not branches without the trunk. Without the trunk, you’ve just got sticks. This is why you often hear people say nonsense like, “God is love but he is also wrathful.” Or, “God is love but he is also just.” Statements like these seem to pit the various attributes of God against one another and serve to illustrate how much misunderstanding and confusion there is around this topic.
But there is no but . . . only and. “God is love, and because of the obstinate rebellion of sinners who refuse to repent regardless of what is done, his love manifests as wrath.” “God is love, and because of the injustice brought about by rebellion, his love moves against it to make the wrong right.” And so on . . . We must come to understand that all attributes of God are sourced and sustained by his love, which “binds them all together in perfect unity” (Col 3:14), so unless we understand God’s holiness, justice, wrath, etc. as an extension of his love, then we do not understand it.
Reframing Our Understanding of God’s Love
One of the driving aspects of Eden Project’s mission is to retrain people to see the love of God not in a list of his moral attributes, but as the driving center of everything that’s real.
God’s love is less an attribute that he has; it’s more the essence of who he is.And when we grasp that, I mean really grasp it (it becomes integrated into our being), then it forms the lens through which we see everything else. At this point, all the questions we have and tensions we feel around the character and nature of God simply fall into place, we see the beauty of who he is and what he is doing in the world and in our lives.
Instead of looking at him trying to dissect and figure him out, we move toward him in a mutual relationship of love. When this happens, and not until then, we are transformed.
As Henri Nouwen said in his little book on Compassion: “We [do not open ourselves up to be loved] because we are afraid that there is something other than love in God.”
But there isn’t. God is love.
Nathan Wagnon
