(In) This Is Love...What Love Looks Like

John the Apostle and former fisherman often referred to himself as the one whom "Jesus loved."  This was not simply some smug assessment of his relationship with the Savior.  No, it was a declaration that Jesus had fulfilled his (John's) very being.  John saw himself as a man who was defined by Jesus' love.  The God Who is love had incorporated him into the dynamic love of the Triune relationship between the Father, Son and Spirit.  He had found life, a life that can only be found through Jesus' relationship to him. 

This was not a matter of bragging.  John was not trying to highlight a notion that Jesus had loved John more than anyone else.  No, he was telling us about what it truly means to live, to have Life in the fullest sense.  Life is a person after all ("I am the Way, the Truth and the Life...").  He was telling us that the fulfillment of our humanity only comes through the love of God and the relationship found therein.  This is where true life begins, where a life of freedom begins, where a life restored begins and even finds its culmination. 

It is significant to note that John is not simply saying that life is about love.  He is saying that life is love; that love gives us our very existence.  To be, "the one whom Jesus loves," is the same as saying, "the one who now truly exists."  This will become more evident throughout the course of this book (this article is from a book that I wrote called The Forrest For the Trees). 

How do we even attempt to get a handle on something as wonderfully rich and deep as love, particularly love as John talks about it?  In a recent article called, "A Fisherman on God: Three Words That Change Everything," we looked at what love is.  John tells us..."God is love."  In other words, in seeking to discover what love is, John tells us to simply look to God's existence in and of Himself.  In God we find love in its fullest and truest sense.  In this article, we want to look more deeply into what love particularly looks like as opposed to what it is.  For, if love truly is what it is that fulfills our very being, it would be very wise to not just settle for fuzzy and foggy notions of how love plays out in our lives.  Fortunate enough for us John tells us exactly what love looks like even though this verse can be a bit misleading for us:

"This is love: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins."  -1 John 4:10 TNIV

Before we begin to wrestle with what John is saying in this verse, I wish to draw your attention to something significant in the translation here.  To John, words mean something.  As we looked at in a previous article, his three little words, "God is love," pack more of a punch than what would seem to meet the eye.  If there is anything that we can learn from exploring John's famous little phrase it is this: even the smallest of words matter significantly whenever we seek to understand John.  The same is true of the 1 John 4:10 verse, which is why it is a shame that many Bible translations have translated it the way that the TNIV has.  In their translating, they have opted to leave out one word, but that one word makes all of the difference.  That one word is "in." 

ἐν τούτῳ ἐστὶν ἡ ἀγάπη
In--this-------is---------love

The Greek actually reads, "In this is love...," not, "This is love" as you can see above.  The difference may seem very insignificant but, again, that little word "in" shifts the focus of the verse in a monumental way.  What it comes down to is this: where does the love that John speaks of find its origin?  We Western culture Christians have been far too content with extremely shallow and muddled notions of love for so long that most of us probably will have some difficulty even grasping what is at stake here.  Perhaps even the translators themselves have settled for a far too generalized and "Western" notion of love and that is why they failed to see the difference that omitting the word "in" would actually make. 

Again, let's wrestle with this thought: where does the love that John is talking about here find its origin?  If we go with many modern translations like the TNIV, the love of God seems to find its origin in God's relationship to us.  "This is love...the dynamics of His relationship and actions towards us...", would be a good way to paraphrase what the faulty translation is actually saying.  Love, here, is something that would be primarily bound up in God's dealings with us and nothing more.  This leads to some rather massive and misleading implications:

First, if we follow the line of thought found in the common translation that reads, "this is love," we have to look at the text as though John is making an ontological claim on love.  The verse no longer can be about what love looks like but would be about what love is.  Thus, in reading it this way we are looking into what love is not what love looks like and we can't look at it in any other way. 

Secondly, this presents a massive problem for us because this verse falls right in between two instances where John flat out tells us what love is or, to put it in a better way, what is love.  He tells us that "God is love."  Ontologically, love is bound up with the very uncreated existence of God.  Love is something that God is.  How can John make another claim on love; how can he begin another line of thought claiming that "this is love" whenever he has already told us that "God is love"?  Do you see what I am getting at?  If you are having some difficulty following my line of thought so far, just think of it this way.

What is love according to John?

How confusing is it to hear John define love as that which God is but also to hear him say that love is God loving us whenever we didn't love Him? 

If we stick to the faulty translation, love actually becomes two different things and comes from two different sources. 

Rather, we should understand John's thoughts on love in this manner: that, "God is love."  Love finds its origin in God's very being and not in His actions towards us.  Love describes the dynamics of the relationship between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  This would then lead us to the natural question of, "what does this love look like for us?"  To this John anticipates such a question and answers it directly for us: "(In) this is love: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins."  In essence, he is not talking about what love is in 1 John 4:10, but he is talking about how God's preexisting love relates to us; about how the Triune God has opened the dynamics of His communal relationship to us.  The faulty translation is about revealing something new, about defining a new notion of love, whereas John is actually speaking of a love that already exists and has always existed in God.  Again, all of this mess is here for us to deal with and sort through just because some translators decided to leave the word "in" out!

Whenever we leave "in" in the verse, however, the verse can be seen in a much greater depth and in a much more moving way.  We can see that John is not simply and solely talking about God's love towards us, but that he is talking about the manifestation of the love that takes place within the relationships within the Triune communion.  Furthermore, and very importantly, we understand from this verse that we didn't initiate God in any way but it was He who initiated us in His love.  Love is not something that started for Him whenever He created us but love has always existed within God because God has always been love since He has always been a Trinity.  Love is something that He always "had" that He is now sharing with us, not something that became a first for Him whenever He began to interact with us through the work of His Son.  The Father has always loved the Son, the Son the Father, the Spirit both...etc.  The love that has always existed between the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit is now being shared with us because of the work of the Son.  Just by simply seeing the verse in this light we can immediately observe that there is a much bigger picture behind Jesus' coming into the world. The added "in" means that Jesus' coming and saving work is the invitation into something that has always previously existed; communion with the Triune God.  Jesus' coming is the outworking that eternal Triune communion extended towards us.  To put it in a rather cheesy way, we have been invited into the eternal party that has always existed between the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.  The Cappadocian Fathers likened it to being brought into an eternal dance that has always existed within the Triune communion. 

To come full circle: what, then, does love look like?  John has told us what love is by saying that God is love.  By saying, "In this is love...", he is telling us that within God's action towards us we can catch a glimpse of what love has always looked like for God.  He is telling us that we can catch a glimpse of how the Father, the Son and the Spirit have always related to each other in the way that God has related to us, as described in this verse.  He is not giving us a total picture here but is saying that: in God's action in sending His Son into the world for us whenever we didn't love Him we can peek into the dynamic of what it means for God to be love and into what it means for God to be God.  Rather than having to come up with a vague view of what it means for God to be love we can understand that in the way that God has selflessly loved us we can see how the members of the Trinity have selflessly loved one another.  Again, we can see what true and eternal love looks like by looking at what God has done through the Christ on our behalf. 

Very practically, then....what does this love look like? 

The short answer is: "Christ's coming into the world."

However, to go deeper, Jesus' coming into the world actually signifies two very important aspects of the movement of God's love towards us that are implicit in John's line of thought in the verse we've been studying: 

This love is something that doesn't wait to be initiated but it does the initiating.  God didn't wait for our love before He showed His love for us but He initiated the loving relationship between Himself and humankind by sending His Son to die for our sins.  To dive deeper into what John is saying, we can infer that there is something about this fact that unveils a part of the dynamic which exists within the Triune relationship.  It is not merely speculative to say that the members of the Trinity don't wait selfishly upon the others before they love, but each takes the initiative, so to speak.  I say it is not merely speculative because all throughout the Gospels we see that all of Jesus' actions was for the Father.  All of the Spirit's actions seem to be for the Son and, thus, also for the Father.  the Spirit's action within the Church is to point us to Christ and to purify us so that we would be formed into Christ's likeness.      

Furthermore, this love leads to the denial of self.  In seeing that God sent His Son into the world signifies the self-denial of the Father.  In seeing the Son's willingness to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins signifies His self-denial.  Even though we don't read about the Holy Spirit in the verse, the Spirit's work is always implied because Jesus' ministry is impossible to conceive of apart from the work of the Spirit.  The Spirit's service to the Son and to His Church for the Father signifies His self-denial.  Granted, self-denial is something that is difficult to get a handle on especially whenever it comes to thinking through how the members of the Trinity deny themselves for the sake of us.  However, we can understand that there is an element of self-denial whenever it comes to the relationship between the members of the Trinity, particularly whenever it comes to the Son the Spirit submitting to the Father's will. 

In conclusion: In witnessing God's love towards us; in the way that He has loved us, we can catch a glimpse of how the Triune God eternally exists as love.