God As Love

Ex 3:14 God said to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM. This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I AM has sent me to you.'”

Eph 3:14-15 “For this reason I kneel before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name.”

“Fire ever doth aspire,
and make all like itself – turn all to fire,
But ends in ashes; which these cannot do,
for none of these is fuel, but fire too”
John Donne

The foundation of all things is simply God.  I do not mean any particular manifestation or attribute of God, but God Himself: the fountainhead up out of which everything else exists.  I AM, the name by which God revealed Himself to Moses expresses the idea that He is not contingent or dependent.  He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together [Col 1:17].  Everything in eternity and the created universe derives its substance and being from God.  Nothing exists outside of, or apart from Him

Early Christianity concerned itself with the direct experience of God through the Holy Spirit.  Jesus’ very name, Emmanuel, means “The God who is with us.”  Apostles John and Paul make it clear that their desire is to know God the way He knows Himself and to share that “knowing” with the rest of the church. The Apostles testify that what God is is unutterable.  He is not representable in any language, image, emotion, or thought.  This is why God prohibited the Hebrews from making any physical images to represent Him.  Biblical writers do converge on two fundamental ideas about God:

  1. God is love.
  2. God is a consuming fire.

These two statements define and explain the indivisible nature of God. The ancient Christian authors use the second concept to elaborate on the first: love is who God is, but fire is how His love acts. God’s love is a powerful and active force.  It permeates and sustains the universe.  We consider love to be a soft, or weak thing because we associate it with a particular kind of emotional effervescence.  But love, as God understands it, is a raging fire: powerful and indomitable.  God’s love takes everything that it not like itself and either transforms it or consumes it.

Early Christian authors describe the action of God’s love on the human soul through the metaphor of a wet log thrown into a fire. At first the fire causes the wood to smoke as the water evaporates from it.  As the wood dries out, dirt and moss burn off the surface and the log blackens and cracks.  The blackness spreads as the fire penetrates more deeply, removing impurities from the wood.  Eventually the wood ignites and begins to burn along with the fire instead of resisting it.  It seems to be two things at the same time.  It has a coherent physical structure, like wood, but it can give off light and heat and set other things ablaze, the way that fire can.  As the fire continues to burn, it entirely converts the wood to flame.  What it leaves behind is ash, which is the substance that would not submit to this transformation.

Classical authors believed that all matter was made up of earth, air, water, and fire.  Primitive as this sounds to us, keep in mind that the periodic table of elements that we study in school is only about two hundred years old.  The classical mind viewed wood as a mixture of earth, water, and fire.  The presence of fire “inside the wood” was the reason that it was combustible.

Knowing this, there are two perspectives from which we can imagine the action of fire on a piece of wood. From the perspective of the fire that is “trapped inside” the matrix of earth and water, “burning” is a liberation and multiplication.  The physical structure of the wood perceives the action of the fire as entirely destructive.  The fire burns against it until it is annihilated, leaving only unconvertible ashes behind.

The action of the love of God on the human soul is no different. The love of God seeks out the parts of us that are like itself, releasing and amplifying them.  Any genuine love within our souls is a participation in or echo of the love of God.  But that love is trapped within walls of selfishness, fear, and anger which must be converted or destroyed.  If we identify ourselves with these traits, we will experience the love of God as torment, because He is, by nature, opposed to everything that we think of as “us”.  

God gives us a choice to lay aside fear, anger, and selfishness so that we can identify ourselves only with what agrees with His love.  When we do this, we experience the love of God as ever-increasing glory: the fire of God’s love producing liberation and transformation.  A soul in this condition is one that burns continually, and yet is never consumed.  A soul that resists the transforming action of God’s love is one that suffers ongoing torment.  God’s love burns against it, seeking its freedom and transformation, but it refuses to be changed.  In the words of Thomas Merton:

“God is a consuming fire. If we, by love, become transformed into Him and burn as He burns, His fire will be our eternal joy. But if we refuse His love and remain in the coldness of sin and opposition to Him and to other men, then will His fire – by our own choice, rather than His – become an eternal enemy, and love, instead of being our joy, will become our torment and destruction.”

New Seeds of Contemplation, Thomas Merton, p. 124.

The love that God is is so far removed from human experience that the Greeks used a distinct word, agapé, to refer to it. As I have already observed, love is not something weak, or soft.  His love is a potent force that keeps every atom in the universe from flying apart.  The 14th century religious writer Julian of Norwich received a revelation from God in which she saw:

“…a little thing, the size of a hazel-nut, in the palm of my hand, and it was as round as a ball.  I looked at it with my mind’s eye and thought, “What can this be?” and the answer came to me, “It is all [I have] made.”  I wondered how it could last, for it was so [frail] I thought it might suddenly have disappeared.  And the answer in my mind was, “it lasts and will last for ever because God loves it; and everything exists in the same way, the same way [up out of] the love of God.”

Revelations of Divine Love, First Showing .

Compared to God, all of time and space is a fragile ball, prepared to fall into dust if the love of God did not hold it together.  God’s love is more potent than magnetism or gravity.  It is more powerful than the nuclear forces that hold atoms together. God’s love intimately and thoroughly permeates the universe.  He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together. [Col 1:17]  

God’s understanding of love is so much more potent than ours because He does not define love through the lens of covetous affection, sentiment, or casual sex.  To God, love is not a warm blanket that you wrap up in when you feel cold.   It is not a rosy glow or a gentle, passive illumination. God’s love is a howling thermonuclear holocaust that shreds matter with incandescent fingers and flings it away at the speed of light. It is all consuming.  Nothing can stand before it.  Nothing can endure in its presence.  By nature, God’s love glorifies and enhances anything that agrees with it, but afflicts and destroys everything that opposed to it.