True, God is love, but to grasp the breadth and depth of this statement, Scripture portrays God’s love with varying forms concerning how he relates to his creation. As Carson shows, the Scriptures portray God’s love in diverse yet complementary ways. Published in 2000, Carson’s slim volume punches above its weight class as it guides believers to represent accurately God’s love and, thus ours. Carson’s little book, The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God. To help us in that endeavor, we turn to D. Thus, Christians must rigorously avoid distortions when we speak of God’s love and our love, which must imitate his. Thus, many conceive of God only as a more perfect human. Sin-corrupted reasoning also has a proclivity to project onto God creaturely qualities, limitations, and emotions. Distortions occur primarily because people isolate God’s love from his other attributes, especially his holiness, justice, and self-sufficiency. Packer correctly argues that while Scripture twice affirms, “God is love” (1 John 4:8, 16), this affirmation is regularly misunderstood and distorted. Also, we must first ponder God’s love as integral to his moral perfections and then consider the exercise of his love in deeds and actions. So, when we consider love, whether a human or divine attribute, we must always do so in correlation with God’s full character, especially his holiness and goodness, never isolated from these attributes. This God-likeness is what we properly call godliness. God’s redeeming work is restoring the full array of God’s likeness in us. Every quality and every moral attribute that constitutes us creatures “after God’s likeness” is, by definition, analogical, not identical to his moral attributes. These qualities belonging to God are what Christian theologians describe as “communicable attributes,” transmittable to us, his image-bearers, to reflect the attributes of our Creator (cf. We would be wrong to say that God is simply more holy, good, loving, than we are in each of these attributes. Rather, there is a qualitative difference in God’s character and our own. The Creator’s character and ours do not differ in mere quantity. All these qualities and attributes God gives us are analogical to his, not identical. God’s Love Is the Measure of Human Loveīecause the Creator fashioned us after his likeness, God gives us his qualities, including his moral attributes, but all with creaturely limitations, now corrupted by sin. Editor’s Note: This is a two-part article on the nature of God’s love and human love.
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