“God is love,” John wrote (1 John 4:8, 16). Love is what God is. Love and God are virtually synonymous. Love is God’s way of life.

This is a true Bible definition of love. Anything that is contrary to God and His nature and His thinking isn’t actually love. At best, it is a counterfeit of love.

Here’s another way to define love: “For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments: and his commandments are not grievous” (1 John 5:3). God is love, so it makes sense that anything God commands is an expression of love.

Many people think they know what love is, but unless you study the law, you don’t.

God’s law is love! So it is also love for us to throw ourselves wholeheartedly into keeping those commandments. It is not love to begrudgingly keep them. The kind of love John is talking about includes how we feel in our heart of hearts toward the law of God.

The Apostle John is one of the Bible’s deepest writers. He knew God in the flesh more intimately than any other man. He had a vision of the glorified Christ. He deeply understood our future.

“Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God,” the Apostle John wrote. “Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3:1-2).

Here is the awesome vision of the future awaiting God’s people. This is the most transcendent truth in the Bible: We are going to become God! God is doing all He can to keep this hope alive in us in the midst of a dark world.