The Surgeon's Precise Hand

A gifted cardiac surgeon does not express love for his patient by setting aside his medical textbooks and improvising in the operating room. He expresses love precisely because he has mastered every page, every diagram, every proven procedure. His devotion to the authoritative text is not cold detachment — it is the very means by which he saves lives.

When the Apostle John writes under divine inspiration, "Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God," he is not offering a sentiment we may define on our own terms. This is the inerrant Word of the living God, and the love John describes has a fixed, revealed meaning. It originates in God Himself — "God is love" — and therefore its definition belongs to Him alone, not to the shifting opinions of any culture or era.

B.B. Warfield rightly argued that Scripture's authority extends to every assertion it makes, including its assertions about the nature of divine love. Strip away biblical authority, and love becomes whatever fallen humanity wishes it to be. But because every word of this text is God-breathed and without error, we can trust that the love described in 1 John 4:7-8 is objectively real, doctrinally precise, and personally binding.

The surgeon who abandons his textbook endangers his patient. The Christian who abandons the inerrant Scriptures loses the only reliable definition of love ever given. Hold fast to the Word — for there, and only there, do we find love as God actually defines it.