It's saying, if you come home, I will meet you with open arms. It's saying, "my love is an open door. Don't think that I don't love you. I do. So you can come home and that is what you will find. Not my rejection of you". In other words, it's invitational. "If you come home, I will love you, and not turn you away". "If you come home, I will greet you with the love I have always had for you, so you may trust that you will be met with opened arms, and not my rejection despite the guilt and shame you feel towards yourself. I will love you. I promise that is what you will find." In other words, God's unconditional love....but you are saying "if you come home to me, I will love you."
Based on what you are trying to say, would it not be less misleading, and less confusing to say, "if you come home to me, you will experience my love." In other words... "you will bathe in my love, or be engulfed in my love"?
That is the story of the Prodigal Son. The father ran out to meet him. The only reason he did that, is because he already loved him! He didn't start loving him, because his son made him happy! That's what conditional love smells like. That's a narcissistic love, "I will love you if you please me". That's is not true love, and it certainly is not Agape Love. I know this is hard to grasp for those who haven't experienced what unconditional love is in their lives.
Yes. God doesn't love you because you obey him. God is Love. But you are able to enjoy that love, if you do the right thing and not create problems for yourself.That would more explain what you are saying, since the love is there, available for all to come and benefit. Like when God says, come take life's water free. It's available to all, but you have to come take it.
I understand that.
Only because you are reading them through the lens of what conditional love looks like. I don't read that way. The story of the Prodigal Son does not read like conditional love at all. The father always loved the son, and when the son accepting that invitational love that the father offered, the father ran out to meet him. He didn't say, "Well, I guess I can love him now because he came home". That is not real love. That is not the Love of God.However, that is not what those verses are saying. They state that God's and Jesus' actions are a response to person's actions.
God cannot hate, because God is Love. Hate cannot and does not exist within God. To say God "hates violence", is to say that it is absolutely contrary to the nature of God's being. It's a figure of speech, not a description of God. Where the is Love, hate cannot exist. It is extinguished by it completely. There is no darkness in Light. God's very being is Love itself. I know this from firsthand direct experience, as well as from what scripture affirms.I understand that this is not toward the ignorant, but rather the willful "haters of God".
I get that. It's what you are saying that I don't get... Not that I don't understand your view. I just don't agree with it.
The Bible says God's very being hates a lover of violence.
Well, for one thing I don't believe in capital punishment, so I would not kill anyone. But let's say my child committed murder and was sentenced to life in prison. I would still love him, of course.Tell me something though.
You love your children unconditionally.
If you were an executioner, and your son was found guilty of murder, and sentenced to death by firing squad. Would you point the gun at your son standing in the execution square, and pull the trigger?