The Word That Will Not Bend

In 1611, when the King James translators labored over the Greek text of First John, they came to a phrase that stopped them cold: "ho theos agape estin" — God is love. Not God is loving, not God has love, but God IS love. The verb of being. An ontological declaration etched into the very grammar of inspired Scripture.

B.B. Warfield once observed that the doctrine of divine love is not a sentiment we impose upon the text but a truth the text imposes upon us. And this is precisely the point the Apostle John makes in First John 4:7-8. He does not invite us to feel something. He commands us to know something: that love originates in the unchangeable nature of God Himself, and that anyone who does not love has fundamentally failed to know the God who revealed Himself in these inerrant pages.

Consider what this means. If Scripture is breathed out by God — every word, every clause — then this declaration is not poetry dressed up as theology. It is propositional truth with eternal weight. The same God who spoke the universe into existence spoke this sentence into the canon. Love is not a cultural preference. It is a divine attribute, revealed without error, binding on every believer.

The application is inescapable: when we love one another, we are not merely being kind. We are bearing witness to what the infallible Word declares God to be.