God is love. He loves you, me and everybody else equally, no matter who you are and no matter what you have done. Many of you have been taught that He is an angry and jealous God sitting in heaven on a throne, waiting for the day when He can destroy the work of His own hands. That’s silly when you put it that way, isn’t it? God is love.
God Is Love – Mankind Has a Choice
There are passages in the Old Testament where He did allow sickness, disease, famine and death to occur and some of the scriptures are hard to understand. But if you continue reading and seeking, you will find that He begged His people to return to Him, not because He needed them so much, but because He knew they would not survive without Him. In Deuteronomy, chapter 28, God offered two choices, The Blessing or The Curse. Mankind always had those two choices, and does to this day. You will find this same plea throughout the entire Old Testament, because…God is Love.
God is Love – Mankind Rejects Him
Obviously, in the New Testament, with the life and death of Jesus Christ, things take on a new look and feel, at least for the believers, and you find many passages that reveal God’s love. His wrath was satisfied at the cross and the punishment for the sin of all mankind was delivered to one man: Jesus Christ.
You find strong evidence of this as soon as Jesus was resurrected, in his conversation with Mary. (John 20)
17 Jesus said, “Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”
18 Mary Magdalene went to the disciples with the news: “I have seen the Lord!” And she told them that he had said these things to her.
19 On the evening of that first day of the week, when the disciples were together, with the doors locked for fear of the Jewish leaders, Jesus came and stood among them and said,“Peace be with you!” 20 After he said this, he showed them his hands and side. The disciples were overjoyed when they saw the Lord.
Immediately, and for the first time that I can find, Jesus referred not only to God as his father and his God, but to Mary’s (ours) as well. Then, another first, He greeted his disciples with the word Shalom: every good thing.
Jesus died a horrible death, rose again after three days. We got the gift of peace and every good thing. God is love.
God Is Love – The Believers are Overjoyed
You can see in the passage above a clear, concise, irrefutable cure for misery. When the disciples saw that Jesus was alive, they were overjoyed.
They too had a choice to make, believe He was alive and receive a blessing; not believe and live a cursed life.
Now You Have a Choice
Perhaps the word curse is too old fashioned for you and you’ve gotten wiser than the teachers of old; you’ve gotten wiser than Christ. Maybe you are trying to tackle life from a more philosophical or scientific approach and can’t see where God fits in to your life, your problems, your pain.
It is not from years of studying the Bible and it certainly isn’t something I was taught, but from my own personal, real encounter with a living Jesus that I can tell you this simple truth.
The human condition (curse) you are facing today stems from unbelief and the lack of desire to see Jesus…alive. If you look for the living Jesus, you will find Him. When you find Him, you will see clearly that God is Love.
1 John 4:8-10
But anyone who does not love does not know God, for God is love.
God showed how much he loved us by sending his one and only Son into the world so that we might have eternal life through him.
This is real love—not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as a sacrifice to take away our sins.
