How To See The World The Way God Sees It-A World View

 God is love-1 John 4:8, 4:16

The bible tell us that God is love.  We know that God expresses His love toward us in that He gave us His Son, that He cares deeply for His creation.  That, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.  This is a very comforting thought is it not?  God really cares for us as in John 3:16.  Christ is how God demonstrated His love toward us.

We demonstrate our love toward God through obedience.  There is no better way for your child to show their genuine love and affection than by obeying mom and dad.  In that same sense, there is no better way for us to show God that we love Him than by being obedient.  You see, there has to be that element of obedience, or it is not love at all because we can say that we love God but act otherwise.  We can say that we love God but continue to trust in our flesh and wisdom being obedient to ourselves.  Can I say to you that this is the doctrine of humanism?  To do our own thing is to adhere to the evolutionist/humanist point of view.

You may have heard the saying "love God, love people".  It is correct that God is love, the bible says so.  But I ponder these things and wonder if I need to have a deeper understanding of the idea that God is love.  The idea of loving God, loving people is only part of the bigger picture.  This is not a wrong idea, I just need to see the depth of it because I desire, greatly, to see the world the way God sees it (biblical world view).

Scripture tells us that God sees man as lost, depraved, wicked and sinful. (see Jer. 50:6; Col 1:21; Mr 8:38)  Why is this an important aspect of understanding God as being love personified?  The answer is in the fact that God is a just God.  Evil cannot go unpunished, and we all (believers), at one point, fell into this catagory.  However, the fact that God, Himself, took our punishment in our place demonstrates that He is love.

What exactly, is that love?  1 John 1:5 says that God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all.  In other words, love is an absence of darkness.  It is everything good (1 Cor 13).  In Exodus 34:6,7 we see a great description of the love that God has toward us.  And he is all of those things, but here is where many get tripped up.  Many tend to stop at verse 6 and feel good about that.  We need to see verse 7 also, because in this verse we see that God says that His love, in itself, by no means clears the guilty.  He still has to punish sin.  This is important because when we fail to see the world the way He sees it, it affects the way we interact, react and handle people.

Take heart, there is hope!  Psalm 86:5,15 lets us know that the God of love is ready to forgive and full of mercy and compassion.  He sees the world as lost and wicked and sinful and that must be dealt with because He is God and does not change.  However, it as if His word is suggesting that He doesn't want to.  In other words, He wants to forgive. I think a person would be hard pressed to find anywhere in scripture that God enjoys sending people to hell.  But what His word is telling us is that His love, alone, won't save us (Exodus 34:7).  It is His physical demonstration of love to us through His Son, this is the gospel.  But we cannot preach the gospel without the law.  For it is the law that points out to us that we are sinners, it is the school master.  At the same time, you cannot preach the law without the gospel, because it is the letter of the law that killeth (2 Cor 3:6). You need to have both, in equal shares.

So how is this played out in our lives?  How do we love God, love people in a biblical way?

Christ demonstrated this with the woman at the well in John 4.  What Jesus did was point the woman to the truth of her sin, as an adultress, and then pointed to the need for the Savior, which is Himself.   God (Jesus) loved that woman so much that He took the time to reveal her nakedness, her utter failure so that she could see that she needed Him.  She would never have come to that realization by herself, it was only through direct spiritual intervention by God.  She chose life, as you can see in the rest of the story.  But we must not forget that if she had chosen the other way and died in that condition, the bible is very clear of where she would go.  God is just and because of that, He could not say that His love is enough.  It would not have been just if He were to say, "I love the world, you can all come to heaven!"  That would mean that those who believe, ALONG WITH those who do not believe would all be saved.  That is not just.

Instead, God DEMONSTRATED His love through His Son, one time for all.  In personal application, we need to see the world the way God does (biblical world view).  That means that we love a sinner enough to tell him that he is going to hell unless he accepts Christ.  That is how we love God, love people, by DEMONSTRATING His love to others through ourselves.  Like God, we need to sacrifice ourselves and make the commitment to love others that much.  Loving people is not enough, we have to love them the way He does (Rom 5:8).  There is a Trojan horse in Christian churches in America today.  The Trojan horse of "God is love, we are good people, we will all go to heaven."  Christ gave Himself for the church, man is commanded to give himself for his wife and we, as Christians, are commanded to give of ourselves for the sake of others-for their salvation through the hearing of the Word.   Heb 12:28 Wherefore we receiving a kingdom which cannot be moved, let us have grace, whereby we may serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear:
 Heb 12:29 For our God is a consuming fire.

God is love, He is light in a dark world (1 John 1:5).  His light is within us, so let it shine.  Darkness does not overtake light, light overtakes darkness.  You cannot go into a lighted room and open a can of darkness and the room becomes dark.  Instead you open a can of darkness and light fills the can.