1 John 3:16 (NIV): “This is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us. And we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers and sisters.”

1 John 4:8-11: “Whoever doesn’t love doesn’t know God, because God is love.This is how God showed his love among us: God sent his one, special Son into the world so that we might live through him.In this is love: not that we came to love God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to atone for our sins. My loved ones: since God loved us in this way, we also must love one another”

1 John 4:16: “… God is love, and whoever stays in love stays in God, and God in him:

1 John 4:19: “We love, because he first loved us”

We may be accustomed to such emphatic language of love, which offers an explicit perspective on the implicit depiction of Christ’s sacrificial compassion in the Gospels and God putting up with his people for so long in both the OT and NT.

But it would have struck people as more distinctive in the first century. Granted, people envisioned patron deities, who had their favorite mortals or peoples. But a God who was reaching out to people of all ethnicities, whose love was so great that he sacrificed his Son, was quite different from typical ancient religious imagination.

Even today, a message of a God who loves all people, whoever will enter covenant with him, is unbelievably good news. It was an idea with which I originally struggled as a new convert; because I lacked analogies, it seemed too good to be true. But it is true—and it is good. And it invites us to love in turn others whom God also loves.

This is not simply the idiosyncratic perspective of one disciple. Rather, it reflects the meditation of Jesus’s early followers on who he is and what he has done for is. To give some samples from Paul alone:

Rom 5:5: “God’s love has been poured out in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us”

Rom 8:35, 37, 39: “Who can sever us from Christ’s love? …in all these hardships we utterly prevail through the one who loved us. For nothing … will be able to sever us from God’s love that’s encountered in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

2 Cor 5:14: “For Christ’s love compels us, knowing this, that one died for all …”

Gal 2:20: “God’s Son, who loved me and surrendered himself on my behalf”

Eph 1:4-5: “… In love he set us apart beforehand to adopt us as children for himself through Jesus Christ”

Eph 2:4-5, 7: “Because of his great love by which he loved us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive in Christ … so that in the coming ages he might show the incomparable wealth of his graciousness by his kindness to us in Christ Jesus”

Eph 3:19: “to know Christ’s love that surpasses knowing …”

Eph 5:2: “behave in love, just as Christ loved us and surrendered himself on our behalf …”

Or Rev 1:5: “to the who loved us,” etc.

This is no minor theme, yet sometimes in our commendable focus on details we miss the big picture. God saved us because he loves us. And nothing makes him happier than when we, as agents of his heart, show that same gracious and patient love for one another. Indeed, “behold what sort of love the Father has given us” (1 John 3:1)! As Charles Wesley put it, “Amazing love, how can it be? That Thou, my God, shouldst die for me!”