Dictionary of all Scriptures & Myths

LOVE OF GOD

An intuition or direct sense that all things in the natural, moral, and intellectual orders work together for good, despite appearances to the contrary. Truth acquired best enables us to realise Wisdom, but not Divine Love, for which faith is necessary.

"To know God' is to see in the laws and events of nature the revelation of his will, or his eternal decrees. To 'love God' is to accept the order of the world, with all its necessity and invariable sequence and even with its apparent indifference to moral character, as not only inevitable but perfect. Further to know and love God is to know and love one's fellowmen, for they too are part of that real world which expresses God; and hence all that makes for their welfare makes for one's own." - R. A. DUFF, Spinoza's Philosophy, p. 22

Whilst we necessarily have only partial experiences of the good and the true, we have also what appear to be their contraries: but the appearance is illusory, it is of the form and not of the life.

Bruno teaches that "the soul or spirit tends towards that with which it has greatest affinity, as the sun-flower tends towards the sun, and this affinity in the human soul is Love. The symbol of love is fire, for love converts the object of love into the lover, as fire is of all elements the most active, the most potent to transform others into itself. It is the divine in man that makes him, or impels him, to love God as He is in reality, and the goal or aim of that love is to take God into himself, to become one with God." - MCINTYRE, Giordano Bruno, p. 280

“And then should a man wrap his soul in the great Love of God, and clothe himself therewith as with a garment; and should account thence all things alike because in the Creature he finds nothing that can give him, without God, the least satisfaction, and because also nothing of harm can touch him more while he remains in this love." - BEHMEN, Supersensual Life, p. 34

“We love, because He first loved us (1 JOHN iv. 19). The writer's thought is that God's love is the source of ours; we are only able to love at all because God indwells us. Divine love is the source of human love, but the latter must learn to know itself through human relations before it can rise to the higher level of immediate communion with that from which it came... Christ stands for love divine made manifest in sacrifice, the fundamental fact of all existence, the fact that explains everything else. There never would have been any egoism, any violence, wrong, greed, or suffering, but for the necessity of affording love its opportunity to burst forth in splendour. The last in order of time is also that with which time began; the highest to be evolved is also that which was first involved." - R. J. CAMPBELL, Serm., The Source of Good

“‘God so loved the world that he gave' is an accurate and expressive summing up of the great mystery of the divine manifestation in the world or worlds. God is love: hence the impulse to create. God is love: hence the sacrifice of himself in the limited and imperfect life of the cosmos, and the slow and painful struggle upward to ever fuller and richer modes of spiritual achievement, until at length the consummation shall be reached wherein all things shall be summed up in Christ and love be all in all." - R. J. CAMPBELL, Serm., God's Gift of Himself

"The love of God is the love of goodness. The old Saxon word God is identical with Good. God-the Good One-personified goodness. There is in that derivation not a mere play of words,- there is a deep truth. None loves God but he who loves good. To love God is to love what God is. God is Pure, and he who loves purity can love God. God is True. God is Just: and he who loves these things out of God may love them in God; and God for them, because He is good, and true, and pure, and just. No other love is real; none else lasts." - F. W. ROBERTSON, Sermons, 4th Series, p. 69

"The way is to throw ourselves in faith on the eternal Love of a Father. To do that is to know that there must be a divine and good end to all; to know that is to know that all which we see, however dark it be, is education; to know the victory of goodness, justice and truth, and knowing it to throw ourselves on that side, and to feel that in doing so we are chiming in with God, and yielding our lives and will into His hands. There is no doubt, if we can do that, that our pursuit of the secret of life, and the tragedy in which we live, will ennoble us. For so our minds will be steadily set towards right, and will company with the noble things of justice, temperance, love and truth, so that, though we are involved in tempest after tempest of feeling and thought, we shall finally get the good of these tempests in the education which they give to our whole nature." - STOPFORD A. BROOKE, Serm., Secrets of Life

Knowledge of the soul's evolution LOVE shows clearly that there is not, and cannot be, an outside objective Deity who superintends earthquakes, explosions, and all the horrors of the natural life, together with all the “providential" escapes, comforts, and pleasures of existence which go to wicked and good alike. God limits himself in creation, and can now only interfere in his universe through his human and other agents who act from the divine impulse within

See Also

DEMIURGE
EROS
EVOLUTION
FAITH
GOD
INVOLUTION
JUSTICE
KHABIT
RULER (aeon)