Christopher cross what do you think about love

#Christopher cross what do you think about love how to
#Christopher cross what do you think about love free

The statement must remain tethered within its immediate context in 1 John 4, within the broader context of JohnвЂ™s writings, and within the ultimate context of GodвЂ™s entire self-description in Scripture.

#Christopher cross what do you think about love free

We are not free to pick up the ball of 'God is love' and run with it wherever we will. GodвЂ™s love must be 'read' within the rest of what Scripture teaches about his divine attributes. Whereas it may be immediately obvious to us that God will not decide to stop loving us, for some reason it is less obvious that his love is different from our love in other ways, such as in being self-sufficient, sovereign, unchanging, all-knowing, just, and passionless (yes, rightly understood). When we do this God becomes in effect just a massive projection of our own selves, a shadow cast onto a screen behind us with all of our own features magnified and exaggerated. ' The reasoning that follows is usually untethered from GodвЂ™s wider portrayal of himself in Scripture. This comes out very clearly when someone says something like, 'If I were a God of love then I. We are often less alert to the ways in which the love language is to be interpreted in the light of GodвЂ™s other descriptions of himself. We quickly leap to the wrong conclusions about GodвЂ™s love. And that includes its pictures of his love. Its many pictures of God form a self-interpreting mesh of images. The Bible is a self-interpreting book: what it says in one part shows us how we are to read another part. What, when we stop and think about it, is the reason that we do not infer this? The reason is that other ways in which God describes himself prevent us doing so-for example, his repeated self-description as a covenant-keeping God who makes solemn oaths to his people.

#Christopher cross what do you think about love how to

The pictures of God in the Bible regulate themselves, including pictures of his love.ДЄ pressing question then arises: how do we know which aspects of each picture that God draws of himself we are to apply to him and which we are not? How do we know that we are not to infer that his love might ebb and flow as human love can, even that it might fail? This may seem obvious to us, but that is only because we have to some extent already learned how to read the Bible properly. This all applies to GodвЂ™s love: when we read 'God is love' we know something of what love is from what he has made, but his love is never to be identified point-for-point with any created love that we already know. Our fallen minds cannot piece together a picture of God from what he has made-indeed we suppress his natural revelation-but in his inspired Word he himself can use those things to describe himself, and then he can illuminate our minds to understand and believe those descriptions. It is as if his fingerprints are left on the things he has made, so that each of them contains a pale reflection of some of his divine attributes. How is it possible for created things to image God for us like this? It is possible precisely because he created them. When he says that he is a rock he means some of what we mean when we say that a rock is a rock: he is not made of stone, but he is solid and reliable. But nor are we to think that he is he entirely unrocky, discontinuous in every way with rocks. When he says 'rock' of himself, we are not to map all the rockiness of a rock onto him point-for-point. He is a rock, for example, not because he is made of stone. This means that the things he uses to describe himself are neither identical with him, nor utterly different from him. When God uses created things like lions to speak about himself in the Bible he is speaking analogically. Thus he is a lion, a rock, fire, even moth and dry rot (look it up!). He takes up the things he has made and uses them to describe himself to us. How is that possible, given the divine difference? It is possible because God makes himself known to us in creaturely reality. We can do so because he has made himself known to us in his Word and he opens our eyes to that Word by his Spirit. We cannot define God in the sense of delimiting exhaustively who he is, but we can nonetheless describe him truthfully.