Love is Something That We Feel
Love is something that we feel. Love is also something that we do. One without the other would be empty, a contradiction in reality. If you truly love, you will feel love and you will act on that love. We tend to think of love as the way we humans feel it, as if we corner the market on this “love” thing. But love didn’t begin with us. We humans didn’t invent it. We forget that we only can taste love because we are made in God’s image. I say “taste”, because I can’t help but think that God feels and acts on His love, infinitely more strongly and powerfully that we could even imagine. That’s saying a lot when you think back on how strongly you have felt love yourself. To think, that strong feeling of love you’ve felt is only a sampling, a wisp of the driving force of God’s love. So hard to imagine, and beyond our comprehension, to be honest, I’d have to say it’s hard for me to even believe that God feels love stronger than I have ever felt it. Even though I’m saying it, I still, in the back of my mind, think, “but I feel it with such crushing, overwhelming, controlling strength, how could it be felt more completely, more strongly? It’s just not possible.” But still, I know it’s true that God feels it more strongly, even though I can’t believe it with my mind.
So God has the original, complete, strong, strong love. Both in feeling and action. (And in every other way) Often we seem to think that God’s love is purely an action, as demonstrated in His works to save us. He is all powerful and acts to save us. We need to be careful to not leave out the truth that God demonstrates and speaks of His love in emotional terms also. Jesus showed emotive love as He expressed concern and compassion for Jerusalem and the masses as they followed Him. It is not just a robotic, omnipotent, unfeeling love. Again, our love, as we are made in His image, must be a fairly accurate image of what His love feels like to Him, albeit only an image. Who could be more able to create images than God. If God creates an image, I’m prone to think it is a very accurate representation, not a sloppy sketch or rendering. God made us with the ability to love. It resonates with our “hearts”, our deepest emotions and with our minds. God has put a love receptor in us, (where ever or whatever it may be), that echoes and murmurs within us, when we are offered love from another.
An important and undeniable aspect of love, is its enjoyment of a positive response from the target of its love, (emotion and action). Love, felt and expressed does not thrill when it is shunned or rejected. Love, accepted and responded to, is actually one of the most rewarding parts of love. God has given us our human picture in our own lives to see just how love works. God’s patience and infinite love, expressed in His word over the years through history, show just how great His love is towards us. He truly would like us to respond positively, to be converted by His love.
To what does love appeal, our minds? Are we to observe God‘s actions, read His word, and logically deduce that we really “ought” to respond to His love. While it is excellent and even probably necessary to be taught that God is the one appealing to us in His actions towards us, love really appeals on a more emotional level. Tell me, whose believing heart was not overflowed, washed, immersed and filled with God’s love when they were saved. I’ve not heard of one. God’s love is so immense that a believer is totally overwhelmed by the knowledge of what God has done for them. It resonates with our deepest feelings and emotions, deeper than we can express and could ever hope to fully explain. Deep calls to deep. God made us this way. We are images of Him. Only images, but again, the master artist of all time, can certainly do his perfect art and put this “love” thing in our heart and mind.
God made us, not only to be able to respond to His love, but He made us, when we operate according to design, He made us to respond to His love. This is normal, the God-designed way for us to act. He loves us, we are overcome and respond as His children, accepting His love. This is how we are designed to operate, this is how we should act, how we should respond. This is not an exceptional act on our part, that we should respond to God’s love. God’s love is the impetus, the power, the driving force that leads us to be able to respond. Fully an act of God. He designed us to operate this way and His love is so wonderful, so amazing, so beyond us, how could we do anything but respond, in love, to God. We love because He first loved us. So while there are the mechanics of salvation going on through this process, it is driven and can be adequately described by God’s infinite, immeasurable love for us. God does this work of salvation as He planned it from eternity and made us for His plan. God alone gets the credit for our salvation.
So how could we not respond to His love for us. This is the seemingly impossible question.
As believers, it is hard, perhaps impossible, to imagine the mind that would choose to rebel to so great a love that God has for us. Logic forbids the option, while the Bible declares that some do exactly this. Emotion pleads for the union of creature with their Creator. The resultant impending, required despair that would come if one rejected God and His love, cries out to every part of the hearing soul, that they should, by all intents, they must, respond to God’s love. How can they reject this love of God. It doesn’t seem possible. Perish the thought! Yet, from the beginning of creation, we are told of some who, of their own rebellion, chose to rebel against the covering, protecting, guiding love of their Heavenly Father, their Creator, their God. Some will not walk in the path of God. As Jesus said, they “would not.”
When as humans, our expressed love is not returned, and we feel rejection, oh, how strongly we feel that. It can feel crushing, crippling, bringing our heart to tears and despair. I don’t think God ever says in His word that He has these type feelings, feelings of weakness or despair. Rather, I think God does realize and feel the rejection, but we are the picture, the representation of His image. God must feel the rejection more completely than we could ever imagine, hence expressed in our feeble human vessels as a crushing emotion. Our feeble human vessels, our feeble human psyches, just can’t handle the full weight of this feeling of emotion. It is too great for us, frail as we are. When our human love is rejected, we see this as diminishing our worth. We feel loss. God, in expressing complete love, must fully comprehend and realize the rejection, but God, being always all-powerful, will never see this rejection as threatening His worth or value. He realizes that it is only the rebellious human that has chosen this path, not due to any lacking or imperfection on His part. Herein lies another vast difference in the way that God must realize the full impact of man’s rejection. We are remorseful when our love is rejected by another, because of how it hurts us. God, fully comprehending eternity, realizes how terribly, how horribly, how awful it is going to be for this person, each person who chooses to reject Him, choosing separation from God’s presence for eternity, which is equivalent to choosing damnation for their soul for eternity. Surely God realizes the horror of this rejection by this person, these persons, more than we could ever imagine. God had done more than we could ever ask or imagine to help man avoid this end for himself in eternity. God has done all that He can do to show us His love, even doing the unthinkable, giving up His only Son, to die in our place. There is no greater love than that. God can do no more. If man chooses to reject this, they can. God does not desire or wish that any should reject Him. God desires that His creation embrace Him. Rejecting God is the epitome, the very definition of evil. Evil is rejecting God. Rejecting God is “evil”. There are countless manifestations of this “evil”, but this is the very core, the very essence of evil, rejecting God. Now this next point is so obvious, I almost hate to state it, but God does not cause evil. It is against His very nature. God only creates and encourages good. It is His very nature. When man rebels against God, it is by his own doing that he does this. Not as a result of God’s actions, lest we try to blame God. Just as the rich man in Jesus’ parable futilely tried to blame God for not being persuasive enough, by not sending someone back from the dead, there is no excuse. It is not God’s fault. If they don’t believe Moses and the prophets, neither would they believe, even if Jesus came back from the dead. They didn’t, neither would they. They would not. Again, to us, as believers, it is inconceivable that any person could ever reject God, the great lover of their soul, except that we are assured by scripture that this is how it happens. As we operate within God’s plan, His love has flowed through us, saved us, changed us, and we can’t even fathom how some could refuse God, turn against His love, resist this infinitely beautiful, overflowing gift of fully accepting love. Not possible, we think. Yet true, we realize as taught by Jesus. On earth, He was constantly confronted with rejection, founded on their human pride, which was their all-pervasive root idol. In order to embrace God, they would have to reject their own life, and take up their cross and follow Him. This is really what it all boils down to.
Enter the all-consuming wrath of God. This is the appropriate response of God to those who truly, ultimately rebel against His love, against Him as their Savior, their lover. Again, beyond our comprehension. This is not a temper tantrum by God, but how else could God respond to such rebellion? Not a slobbering, pitiful, despairing display of lost remorse by God as a rejected lover, but the only proper response that creation could tolerate for such blatant rejection of the Creator. Neither is it a “gotcha” moment where God shows a glint of smile, or feels joy or happiness that He can finally punish these sinners, these rejecters. God made it very clear in Ezekiel 18:23, 32 and 33:11 that He has no joy in the death of the wicked. If God had his “druthers” they would all turn to follow him and accept His grace, as offered through Jesus’ death for them. But this is the response, the end, they have pursued, a lack of God and His love. This is what they are paid for their rejection, as the wages of sin, death.
Eternal life- totally a gift.
Eternal death- payment for actions rendered.(earned wages)
Believers saved by God alone,
Unbelievers lost by their own, actions, alone.
O, the deep, deep love of Jesus!
Frankly Speaking 