In the Beginning, Love

Start here, because everything starts here.

Before there was a world, there was love.

We say God is love, and we say it so often that it slides past us like water. So slow down. It does not say God loves, the way a good man loves. It says God is love — that love is the very stuff of Him, the way light is the stuff of the sun. The sun does not decide to shine. It shines because it is fire, and fire shines. Take the shining away and you have not described a sun resting. You have described no sun at all.

"The one who does not love does not know God, because God is love." — 1 John 4:8 (NET)

John wrote that when he was an old man. He had leaned on Jesus' chest at the supper. He had stood at the cross while the others ran. He had outlived every friend he started with. And after all of it — after a lifetime of looking — this is the smallest, truest thing he could say. Not God is powerful, though He is. Not God is holy, though He is that too. God is love. That is the bottom of everything. There is nothing underneath it.

Now hear what that means, and let it land slowly. When God loves you, He is not deciding to. He is not reaching down into a reserve and choosing to spend some of it on you today. He is only being what He has always been. His love for you is not a mood. It is His nature, turned toward you.

And He was loving before you existed — before anything existed. This is the strange and beautiful thing the Church has always confessed: that God is one, and yet within that one God there is a Father, and a Son, and a Spirit, three so completely joined that you cannot pull them apart, and so truly distinct that the Father has loved the Son, and the Son the Father, from before the first morning. The Spirit is the love moving between them — the living love that the Father pours toward the Son and the Son pours back.

I cannot fully explain this to you. No one can, and the ones who claim they can are usually the furthest off. But hold onto this much: love did not begin when God made the world. He did not create us because He was lonely or needed something to love. Love was already happening, full and complete, inside Him. When He made you, He was not starting to love. He was opening His hand and letting out into the world what had been true in Him forever.

And here is the part that should change how you breathe: that same Spirit — the love that passes between the Father and the Son — is the One God puts inside you. He does not send you a letter about His love. He sends His love itself, the Person of it, to live in you. That is why a book cannot teach you this and He can. The love is not described to you from across a distance. It is poured into you, where you live, and it begins to do from the inside what it has always done inside God.

So before I ask anything of you — before there is a single thing for you to do — just receive the name. God is love. Everything else in this whole book grows from that one root.