Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations lists approximately thirteen hundred different definitions, reflections, and opinions on the subject of love, from the sappy to the abstract to the perverse.6 Everyone talks about love, everyone experiences some form of it, and everyone is driven by the need to give and receive it. But false ideas of love are tearing the world apart—homes, hearts, even nations. Why does this happen? Christian philosopher Peter Kreeft points out that “the more important a thing is, the more counterfeits there are. There are no counterfeit paper clips, but plenty of counterfeit religions.”7

Counterfeit ideas of love are all around us. Kindness is often a counterfeit for love. Discipline causes pain, which seems unkind, so parents withhold it in the name of love. But authentic love will administer discipline to achieve a long-term good for the child. Sex is often misused as a counterfeit of love, causing unmarried couples to be led down the dead-end path of temporary pleasures instead of the harder but more rewarding path of a long-term marriage commitment.

Those who have suffered from common abuses of love are often skeptical of love from any source, including God. If your heart is broken romantically, you face the danger of concluding that all love, including God’s, is just as unstable. If you have a troubled relationship with your human father, you might conclude that your heavenly Father is just as unreliable. These mistaken ideas about God can be devastating, but they are not uncommon.

We cannot afford to make broad judgments about love or God from our limited personal experiences. Nor can we look to pop culture as any kind of authority—songs or sitcoms or soaps or cinema. We might as well get our idea of the beach from a child’s sandbox. Better to go to the ultimate authority on both God and love. The Bible must be our guide.

In the Bible the love of God is like a multifaceted diamond: Each glistening facet reveals some blindingly beautiful truth about God. For this is where the quest for love leads—to an encounter with God Himself. To begin to understand love, we must begin to understand God. And to begin to understand God, we must begin in no other place than the revelation of His love in the Bible.

The Momentous Task of Describing God’s Love

I am going to do my very best to describe God’s love. But I must warn you, when I have said everything I can possibly say about the love of God, I will barely have touched it. In many respects I share the feeling of Frederick M. Lehman, who wrote these words to the well-known gospel song “The Love of God”:

The love of God is greater far

than tongue or pen can ever tell;

It goes beyond the highest star

and reaches to the lowest hell.

Could we with ink the ocean fill,

and were the skies of parchment made,