4:7 Dear friends, let us love one another, because love is from God, and everyone who loves has been fathered by God and knows God. 4:8 The person who does not love does not know God, because God is love. 4:9 By this the love of God is revealed in us: that God has sent his one and only Son into the world so that we may live through him. 4:10 In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins.

4:15 If anyone confesses that Jesus is the Son of God, God resides in him and he in God. 4:16 And we have come to know and to believe the love that God has in us. God is love, and the one who resides in love resides in God, and God resides in him. 4:17 By this love is perfected with us, so that we may have confidence in the day of judgment, because just as Jesus is, so also are we in this world. 4:18 There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears punishment has not been perfected in love. 4:19 We love because he loved us first.

In what sense can this glorious declaration that ‘God is love’ be considered a ‘tough text’?

Consider the following:-

‘However, else God may have revealed himself, and in whatever way he interacts with the world he has created, everything is to be tempered, interpreted, understood and seen through the one, primary lens of God’s love. We should never speak of any other attribute of God outside of the context of his love. To do so is to risk a terrible misrepresentation of his character, which in turn leads to a distortion of the gospel. Christian talk about God must always start with love and introduce the language of power only in that context.’

Chalke, The Lost Message of Jesus, 63.

It is painful to have to argue with Chalke, since any any attempt to magnify God’s love seems intuitively to be a ‘good thing’.  But it is inadequate and misleading.

For one thing, Chalke comes very close to saying that God is nothing but love, or that ‘God is love’ is the only ‘God is…’ statement to be found in the Bible (in fact, Chalke does say precisely that elsewhere in the same book, and it is simply not so: the Bible also says that ‘God is a consuming fire’, ‘God is light’, and that ‘God is spirit’).

For another thing, actually diminishes this glorious affirmation of the love of God by disregarding the context in which it is found.  John goes on immediately to spell out the central consequence of that love, which is that God sent his Son as a propitiation for our sins – a consequence which Chalke must either pervert or reject, given his distaste for the doctrine of so-called ‘penal substitution’.

In the third place, Chalke is mistaken in regarding the love of God as the starting-point for all our thinking about God.  It is better, I submit, to start with the more obvious truths about God’s infinite power and holiness, and then to allow ourselves to be eternally astonished that such a God could love such fallen creatures us we ourselves are.