Is God’s Love Enough?

“The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases,
his mercies never come to an end;
they are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.” — Lamentations 3:22–23

If such is the great, everlasting love of God that never ceases, his mercy renewing itself each morning, why do we still pine for the love of others?

Consider our first ancestors. Adam and Eve had everything they could’ve ever wanted. Like a parent with unbridled affection for his children, God gave them control over literally everything in creation — this was no mere puppy that Dad had pulled out from behind his back; God gave Adam and Eve every single creature to name and rule over. They were loved.

But did they know it?

If Adam and Eve really truly knew how much God loved them, they would’ve been certain that he wanted what was best for them. Love, after all, is willing the good of the other. (Aquinas)

And so, the tragedy of their Fall was not that Adam and Eve disobeyed God by eating of the fruit — it was that they believed what the serpent was implying; that God did not want what was good for them!

If they did not know how much God loved them, how could they trust in this love enough to return it in obedience?

But here is the first recorded instance of God turning evil for good. Through the Fall, God gives Adam and Eve something they did not have before — a reason to trust in his love. He asks them to leave the Garden forever (this was not a punishment but mercy, as you will discover here!) but first, he makes clothes for them out of animal skins. Up until then, there had been no bloodshed in the Garden — Adam and Eve had been fruitarians — but to make garments to cover their nakedness, God makes the first sacrifice. He could have made clothes for them out of anything, this God who had spoken the moon and stars into existence, but he chose to sacrifice another of his beloved creations — all to cover gently the shame of his errant children, so that they would know how loved they were.

And so, God shows us that the things we give people or do for them will never be quite as powerful as the mercy we show to them.

It is through mercy that we can truly understand love — and perhaps only through our mercy towards someone that they can experience the mercy of God in turn…and know that they are loved. (Read more about this here!)

But in order to experience God’s incredible, merciful love we need to know that we are naked and in need of being covered; in need of mercy. The story of Adam and Eve tells us that without an experience of Christ (whose love is displayed in mercy), we will inevitably choose ourselves. Without an expereince of his mercy, Adam and Eve had reason to believe in God’s goodness — he had given them everything — but not enough reason to trust in his love.

Still, when he called out to them after their fall, they drew courage from a knowledge of God’s goodness and replied to him that they were naked. This is all that we too need to do, when we have suffered from a lack of trust in God’s love — to simply acknowledge our sinfullness and shame, and call out to him for mercy. And just as God covered our first ancestors, we need to ask Christ to cover us — to “put on the Lord Jesus Christ”, as St. Paul tells the Romans [Romans 13:14]

But how does one do this? The key is in realising that we cannot cover ourselves in Christ, he has to cover us with himself.

Too often, instead of simply calling out for Jesus, we make the mistake of trying to be like him, asking “What would Jesus do?”, heaping on ourselves the impossible burden of being God.

But Jesus is not someone we can become, he is someone we are made into. Jesus can only truly cover us when we allow him to, by retreating into him and living there, surrendering control of our thoughts, words and actions to him. Jesus said, “Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing” [John 15:5]” and the psalmist confirms, “Happy are all who take refuge in him.” [Psalms 2]

When we call out to God and spend time with him in prayer, we empty ourselves of our selves — our desires, our fears, our plans, our selfishness — and become increasingly like him, finding that we are now being slowly filled with him and his love.

And God’s love is very unlike human love. “Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable; it keeps no record of wrongs; it does not rejoice in wrongdoing but rejoices in the truth. It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends” [1 Corinthians 13:4–8] His is a hyperbolic love — it keeps no record of wrongs, bears all things, hopes all things, never ends — a love that is far above the way we love.

THIS is how we, created in the image and likeness of God, were created to love — as God does. And so the longing to love like this is inherent, a longing to GIVE love, as we were created to.

And yet — how can one that is empty…give? And so, we take.

In our zeal to do what we were created to, we search for the love that we were meant to give. But human love, though it can give us a taste of Gods love, cannot satisfy our thirst. It is an imperfect love; expecting, striving, insecure.

The prophet Jeremiah, speaking on behalf of God says, “My people have committed two evils: they have forsaken me, the fountain of living water, and dug out cisterns for themselves, cracked cisterns that can hold no water.” [Jeremiah 2:13]

Human love, found in cracked cisterns like ourselves, cannot fill us to the point of overflow — and it is only from an overflow of God’s love that we can truly love others; only when our hearts are full and satisfied. Only having experienced this love — God’s love, that bears all things, hopes all things, keeps no record of wrongs — enables us to die to ourselves in loving the other, because we are already emptied out of our selves and filled with God’s love; not our own. Loving like this — that, on the steam of one’s own love might have seemed like dying– is not dying but living; not suffering, but joy.

It is only when we have experienced God’s love, exemplified through his mercy, that we can do what he asks us to— to love him and others. “We love because he first loved us.” [1 John 4:19]

And so, the question to ask is not whether God’s love is enough for us — not whether it ought to be the end, but how it is meant to be the beginning.

We were created to love like God; to give not our love, but his to the world. Having filled ourselves with God’s love, we are called to give those around us both an understanding and an experience of God himself. There are ways in which we can do this — sharing the word of God, sharing what he has done for us in our lives, using the gifts and resources he has given us to help others, encouraging/ inviting them to pray, being merciful and many more, but mostly by asking God for the grace to be loving, in the way we were meant to be.