When God Must Love the Way I Demand! Or Does He...Doesn't He?

What Does "God Is Love" Mean?

What do we mean when we quote 1 John 4:8Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.? Or even John 3:16For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son...?

I have watched believers on all sides of the issue try and get their arms around this. Thus, it's something I'd been thinking about a lot lately. I even discussed this in my previous post a bit and if you follow me on FaceBook I've been grappling with it and so many odd ideas of God and how He must love. 

I believe the North American post-modern mind (Besides slowly fading into the sunset)  has a tendency to deal with this out of the context of how they were raised. We tend to sentimentalize God's love. Similarly Christians often ascribe human ideas of fairness to talk of God's sovereignty and how God interacts with human will and volition. We read much that ascribes human or, more succinctly humanitarian ideas of love to talk of God's love. We also speak of it singularly as if God, unlike you and I, loves always the same way with all people in all circumstances and at all times.

I am convinced that God loves everyone. But I am not convinced that He loves everyone the same way.

Here are a couple of passages from D.A. Carson's excellent treatment of this subject, The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God:

I do not think that what the Bible says about the love of God can long survive at the forefront of our thinking if it is abstracted from the sovereingty of God, the holiness of God, the wrath of God, the providence of God, or the personhood of God -- to mention only a few nonnegotiable elements of basic Christianity.

Later, Carson writes:

If the love of God is exclusively portrayed as an inviting, yearning, sinner-seeking, rather lovesick passion, we may strengthen the hands of . . . those more interested in God's inner emotional life than in his justice and glory, but the cost will be massive. There is some truth in this picture of God . . . some glorious truth. Made absolute, however, it not only treats complementary texts as if they were not there, but it steals God's sovereignty from him and our security from us.

Now, I will try to be good and not state any conclusions or firm personal beliefs on the details of these matters in this post. But in the comments thread, perhaps we can hash out our differences through discussion and maybe even reach some conclusions.

In another book by Carson, a sort of companion volume to The Difficult Doctrine called Love in Hard Places, he takes on certain "hard cases." If Christians collectively believe we are to love everyone because God does, we must ask ourselves questions like:

• "What does it mean to love Osama bin Laden?"
• "What does it mean to love Saddam Hussein?"
• "Is this similar to the love you have for your mother and if different how and why?"

I ask you the same questions. Does God love everyone the same way? If not, should we?

Perhaps we should begin with a biblical example.
How do you personally interpret the following passage: - THOUGHTS?

Yet, before the twins were born or had done anything good or bad . . . she was told, "The older will serve the younger." Just as it is written: "Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated."
-- Romans 9:11-13