Does God Love Us?

“God is love.  In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”

I John 4:8-10

How do we know God loves us?  Perhaps this is one of the most important questions we can answer in our life time.  It is not enough to simply declare that He loves us, but it is as important to know how He loves us.  Many of us know the Bible verses and have seen all the greeting cards, bumper stickers, coffee mugs about His love, but how do we really know that He loves us?

In the Bible there are two basic words for knowing.  There is ginosko and there is oida.  Oida occurs over 300 times and ginosko over 200 times in the New Testament.  Oida has to do with facts and knowing something because I have heard about it.  But ginosko goes beyond facts and conveys intimate knowledge based on relationship and experience.  It is not just facts but is also emotional, something that touches our hearts deeply.

Many of us know God’s love us in an oida kind of way.  We will say He loves us because we were told or read it in the Bible, but deep down we struggle with God’s love, especially as we go through various valleys and difficulties in life.  If you are like me, there have been times I have raised my fist to heaven and have said to God, “If You really love me, then why am I go through such pain and suffering?”

There is only one way out of this struggle that is common to all of us.  Our knowledge must begin with relationship and trust with God.  Relationship is a sense of experience of God’s presence in our lives, while trust has to do with believing that what God has declared to us is true, reliable and something that we can lean on for understanding. 

John 3:16 tells us that “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son Jesus” and interestingly John’s first letter, I John 3:16 tells us that we can “know God’s love because Jesus laid down His life for us.”  And the word there in John is the relational Ginosko kind of love.  How can we know God loves us, by the demonstration of that love through Jesus, who went to a cross to die for our sins that we may have relationship with God and ginosko or know He loves us. 

Listen to how John the Apostle continues with this thought in I John 4:8-10, “God is love.  In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him.  In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”