One Word

April 16

“And now abide faith, hope, love, these three; but the greatest of these is love,” I Corinthians 13:13.

How does God define Himself? Certainly, God is beyond definition to the finite mind of man so perhaps there is nowhere in the Word of the Holy One where He actually endeavors to state emphatically all that His personhood entails, but He does give one very crisp, concise statement as to how man can identify Him.

In I John 4:8 the beloved Apostle says, “He who loves not does not know God, for God is love.” The one single word that the Author of the universe has selected to associate with Himself is the word LOVE. Of all the words He could have chosen to identify who He is to mankind, the one He picked is LOVE.

Had He told us that He is faith, we could understand that because we know it must have taken unfathomable faith to speak the worlds into existence as He tells us He did in Psalm 33:9 where it says, “He spoke, and it was done; He commanded, and it stood fast.”

Had He told us that He is hope, we could grasp that as truth, for without abounding hope, He could not expect that One sinless Man could die for the sins of depraved humanity and the sins of the world could be washed clean as Christ’s cousin, John the Baptist announced in John 1:29.

Had He told us that He is power, we could appropriate that truth, for we who see the armies of nations flex the muscle of their arsenals of war, we grasp the reality that tremendous power exists today. If that much clout exists within the storehouse of man’s weaponry, how much more must there be in the resources of Heaven!

After all, Jesus Himself said, “I, with the finger of God, cast out evil,” Luke 11:20, how can we suppose that if He chose to do so, He could not point all evil immediately into hell!

Had He told us that He is absolute authority, (see Matthew 28:18) we would know that it is so because anyone who holds the planets and the stars in their place must have an irrefutable ability to command animate and inanimate creation.

But when God told us how we could identify Him, He did not use the words that our finite minds could most easily understand; no, He chose the one that would be impossible for us to grasp if we hadn’t given our hearts to Jesus, for it takes His love to enable us to see love.