How God shows his love

In 1 John 4:16, John writes that “God is love,” so we can happily assume that God loves us. But how do we know he loves us? 

John answers that in verse 9: we know because “God showed his love.” He proved it through obvious and loving action. Which makes sense, because how does a wife know her husband loves her? He can say he loves her, sing of his love for her, even write poems to express how much he loves her – just as God tells us he loves us and expresses his love in songs and poems in Scripture too – but the proof of the pudding is in love that’s shown in obvious and loving action. 

So how did God show his love in obvious and loving action? According to John in verse 9, it was by “sending his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him.” 

In 1 John 1:1 John explains why that was the best thing God could do to prove his love for us. It’s because his Son is “the Word of life,” meaning the source of “eternal life” (2). Back in John 1:4, John had already made it clear that “in him (Jesus the Word) was life,” and in John 3:35, that “The Father loves the Son and has placed everything in his hands,” so that “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life” (36). 

So when John writes that the Father sent Jesus that “we might live through him,” he meant “live eternally through him,” because in placing everything in Jesus’ hands, it included making Jesus the source of eternal life. In God sending Jesus to us, therefore, his purpose was obvious and loving: it was to bring us eternal life. 

And what better proof of God’s love could there be than that? Nothing could be more practical and comforting in this finite life of ours than knowing eternal life is ours too. Which was exactly John’s message in 1 John 1:2, that “we proclaim to you the eternal life,” and in 1 John 5:11, that “this is the testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son.” And in verse 12: “He who has the Son has life.”

So for simply believing that God sent his Son to give us eternal life, eternal life is ours already, and that’s God’s proof of his love. Clearly, then, he wants us to grasp that. But how? According to John, it’s by God now “Living his love in us” too….(next blog)