A friend told me about a boy who was the apple of his parents’ eyes. Tragically, in his mid-teens, the boy’s life went awry. He dropped out of school and began associating with the worst kind of crowds. One night he staggered into his house at 3:00 a.m., completely drunk. His mother slipped out of bed and left her room. The father followed, assuming that his wife was in the kitchen, perhaps crying. Instead he found her at her son’s bedside, softly stroking his matted hair as he lay passed out drunk on the covers. “What are you doing?” the father asked, and the mother simply answered, “He won’t let me love him when he’s awake.”14

God’s Love Is Uncomplicated

The crowning achievement of Switzerland’s Karl Barth, one of the twentieth century’s most prolific theologians, was his Church Dogmatics, a theological work containing more than six million words. It is told that when Barth made his only trip to the United States in 1962, a student asked him to summarize the broad-ranging biblical theology he had written in this vast work. His audience awaited his reply, expecting to be amazed by a profound statement from the learned man. After a short pause, he said, “Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”15 The audience indeed got something profound, but they also got something uncomplicated. In a dozen simple words, Karl Barth summarized the essence of all Christian theology in a way that a child could grasp as easily as a world-class scholar.

John 3:16, the most beloved of all Bible verses, captures the essence of what God’s love means for us: God loved and gave, so that we need only believe. We could write volumes of books about the subject and find new areas yet to be examined. Yet this vast tree of theological knowledge springs from a single seed, plain in its simplicity: God loves. Though He loves in profound ways we can never grasp, He has expressed that love in terms that all humanity can understand. We don’t have to plumb the depths of theology to understand what “I love you” means when spoken in the language of the heart.

God’s Love Is Unconditional

Most Christians are familiar with the word agape, which is a term used to describe God’s unconditional love. For the writers of the New Testament, the idea of God loving imperfect people in a perfect way was so radical and new that only the relatively obscure word agape could capture it. J. I. Packer explains: “The Greek and Roman world of the New Testament times had never dreamed of such love; its gods were often credited with lusting after women, but never with loving sinners; and the New Testament writers had to introduce what was virtually a new Greek word, agape, to express the love of God as they knew it.”16