1 John 4:10, 19: “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.” … We love because he first loved us.
There is a profound truth in this passage, and throughout Scripture, that we all need to grasp: God loved us first! Wrapped up in that is the understanding that love in its purest form is His love for us, not our love for Him!
Psalm 98:3 He has remembered his love and his faithfulness to the house of Israel; all the ends of the earth have seen the salvation of our God.
John 15:9 “I have loved you even as the Father has loved me.”
1 John 4:7 …for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God.”
If everyone who loves has been born of God, then we were transformed by His Love FIRST in order to even know who He is! His love for us is what allows us to know Him and be born again!
1 John 4:11 “Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. “
Since God so loved us…He loved us first! That is what empowers us to love each other.
Why is this important? Why is it significant? What difference does it make who loved whom first? Understanding this gives us a clear understanding of who we are as Christians. It would be impossible for us to keep the command “love one another” unless we first understood that we are God’s adopted children, dearly loved by Him from before the day we were born, and constantly being molded into His image. If we did not believe that, we would never find the encouragement, the strength, or the will to attempt to love our own friends and families, much less our enemies!
I read that if a Hebrew-speaking Israeli were to invite you to go to lunch with him, he would do so in such a way that would be translated into English as “Me and you will have lunch today.” That doesn’t sound correct in English, to put the pronoun “me” at the beginning of the sentence, but it is done that way purposely. “Me and you will have lunch today.” Why? Because in Hebrew, the person who is mentioned first pays the bill! This is why, in Scripture, God says
Genesis 17:7 I will establish my covenant as an everlasting covenant between me and you and your descendants after you for the generations to come, to be your God and the God of your descendants after you.
…between me and you… Who pays? The answer, of course, is repeated all through God’s Word.
1 John 4:10: “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.”
God pays the tab. His love is immeasurable, beyond our comprehension, so vast that it covers everything, and it is everlasting! Jesus was the payment for our sins and the sins of the whole world.
