Agapé 5

Everlasting Love 1

True love – agapé – is not a feeling. It is a choice demonstrated by actions. Actually, it is more than that even. It is the very nature and character of God. It is Who He is. He is love. As such, He has made a choice to love us with an everlasting love. And He has demonstrated that everlasting love with actions.

Jeremiah 31:3 NKJV
The LORD has appeared of old to me, saying: “Yes, I have loved you with an everlasting love; therefore with lovingkindness I have drawn you.”

An everlasting love! That means it has no end. God’s love for us is an endless love. And because of this endless, everlasting love He draws us to Himself with lovingkindness. God’s mercy, grace and lovingkindness are like a magnet that pulls us to Him. It is the goodness of God that leads people to repentance (Romans 2:4). And the ultimate display of His goodness and lovingkindness is the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Not only does God’s love have no end, but it has no beginning either. It always has been. Because it simply is Who He is. And He has always been. God is the uncreated One. He has no beginning. He is the beginning. Psalm 90:2 says that God was God before He had formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting. In Malachi 3:6, He says: “I am the Lord, I do not change…” So, however God was from the beginning is how He is today, and however He is today is how He has been since the beginning.

Throughout the Bible, God is revealed as merciful, gracious, longsuffering, slow to anger, forgiving and abundant in goodness and kindness. God first revealed Himself in this way to Moses. Moses asked God to show him His glory. God said that He would make all of His goodness pass before Moses and proclaim the name of the Lord to Him (i.e. reveal His true nature). But then He said that as His glory passes by Moses, He would cover his face with His hand for a time so that Moses would only see His back, and not His face.

Exodus 34:6-7 NKJV
And the LORD passed before him and proclaimed, “The LORD, the LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abounding in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, by no means clearing the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children and the children’s children to the third and the fourth generation.”

This is a description of God revealing Himself. Actually, this is just Him revealing His back parts. It is not the full revelation of His true nature. It is not His full glory. But it is still amazing, nonetheless. And this revelation of His back parts is carried throughout the Old Testament from Moses, to Hezekiah (2 Chronicles 30:9), to those serving under Nehemiah (Nehemiah 9:17), to the psalmists (Psalm 86:15; Psalm 145:8), to Joel (Joel 2:13) and even to the runaway prophet Jonah (Jonah 4:2).

Hebrews 1:1-3 NKJV
God, who at various times and in various ways spoke in time past to the fathers by the prophets, has in these last days spoken to us by His Son, whom He has appointed heir of all things, through whom also He made the worlds; who being the brightness of His glory and the express image of His person, and upholding all things by the word of His power, when He had by Himself purged our sins, sat down at the right hand of the Majesty on high.

Now we don’t have to just settle for the back parts of God. We can receive the full revelation of who He is through Jesus Christ. Jesus is the full revelation of God’s true nature. Jesus is His full glory. Jesus reveals the front part of God. And what is the front part of God? Love. Agapé. That is why we are filled with all the fulness of God when we come to know and experience His love.

The everlasting God has loved us with an everlasting love. We have hardly even scratched the surface…

Peter

Please share and subscribe!