What are the most important things to understand about the nature of God?

All the rest clusters around the statement — the blessed statement — that GOD is LOVE. This is the setting forth of what God is in His own nature; He is also light, it is true, but this is said relatively to darkness — "God is light, and in him is no darkness at all." We also say that God is righteous, that is righteous in His actings and ways, but when the word of God speaks of what He is absolutely in His nature, one word describes it, and that word is LOVE.

It was there in the death of His beloved Son that He told out all that He is, His righteousness against sin, His love in providing the sacrifice; yea, every divine attribute was displayed in the cross, and in all the perfection of their entire harmony because there every question of good and evil was for ever solved.

All the thoughts of God toward His people are thoughts of love. He has not, never had, nor ever will have, a thought toward any of His own than that of love. He may chasten them, scourge them, bring them through deep waters of tribulation and affliction, take them away out of this world by the death of the body, but every one of these ways of His with His own springs from the fountain of love, which, welling out of His own blessed heart, has stopped at no sacrifice for the recovery of its objects from distance, darkness, death, and the power of the devil.

It was love that thought of us before the world was, that planned redemption, that gave us our place in Christ, that determined to have us as sons before His face for ever, and that guards us throughout our whole pilgrim pathway, until we land at home in His glorious rest.

The blessed manifestation of God's love is, that I find what is in God's heart about me; that He has done what was needed for my state, and revealed it too. It is what is in God's heart that is my comfort, not hunting anything out in my own.

One would have thought it impossible to over-emphasize these wonderful words, "God is love." This is certainly true, if this grand truth is held in due proportion to other Scripture truths. But when emphasis on the truth "God is love" (1 John 4:8) is made to such an extent, as to obscure the truth that "God is light" (1 John 1:5), there is something very fundamentally wrong.

Never does the love of God shine in greater splendour, never does the light and righteousness of God shine more clearly, than when God's only begotten Son hung upon the cross of Calvary. He endured the judgment of God to the full in respect of sin, so that God now offers salvation to whosoever will, guaranteed by light as well as by love.

God, in dealing with man fallen, used tangible and visible means to bring out His intrinsic holiness and His abhorrence of evil, with His judgment upon it. At the same time He indicated ways and means whereby men might be delivered and reconciled, and right relations be established or restored; and whereby God might righteously bless them, rule over them, and dwell among them, according to His own heart.

From the world's foundation the eternal power and divinity of God were to be perceived in the things that are made, but not the true God Himself.

It needed One who was in Himself God to be adequate to perfectly declare God. This assertion is self-evident and needs no argument.

The Son is the Way, not simply a way! The Son is the Truth, not simply a portion of it! The Son is the Life, not simply a partial manifestation of it. Yea, "He is the true God and eternal life."

The great, glorious, and overwhelming reply to this horrible and deadly falsehood [of Satan's misrepresentation] is given by God in the cross of His beloved Son. There He who knew no sin is made sin for us. The fruit of a tree in which lay the seed of death was withheld from a pair of innocents, but for a guilty world God in His unspeakable love gave His only begotten Son. And at the cross God is declared in His true character, and "God is Love."

Remember it is God! You may remind me that God is love, and a happy reminder it is, but it is God who is so! Love is the nature of Him who is infinite in power and holiness. God is light as well as love. And yet, blessed be His name, this very God, is for us.