The Image of God

Chapter 1 Faith in God’s Love

If there is one thing that every single person has had some difficulty accepting at one point or another, it is the love of God for them. We have all struggled in some degree with the idea that we must earn God’s love, as if it were conditional.

Conditional, as if God’s love towards us is on a meter that is raised and lowered depending on the level we feel that we are pleasing Him. We have to keep our feelings out of it. God’s love is always 100% committed to us, no matter what we feel like. God’s love is unrelated to our pleasing or lack of pleasing God. Pleasing God is only contingent upon our faith, and without faith it is impossible to please God. Yet His love is unrelated to anything we do, and therefore, there are no conditions on it.

But without faith it is impossible to please Him, for he who comes to God must believe that He is, and that He is a rewarder of those who diligently seek Him. —Hebrews 11:6

Our faith pleases God, but His love remains the same regardless of the actions of our faith. God’s love is not altered by our actions, but God’s love is enacted by our faith. What do I mean by that? If we do not believe or accept God’s unconditional love for us, then our faith is not pleasing Him. God is pleased when our faith allows Him to reveal how solid, how deep, and how never ending His love is for us.

I am completely amazed at how God continually reveals His love to me. Am I saying I have always gotten everything I’ve ever wanted, exactly when I wanted it? No of course not. Contrary to what we may want to think, that is not the measuring stick for love. So why can life take us through so many hardships?

I wish I knew the answers for the whys to every difficult moment, because we all go through growing pains that are unique to us. We will explore some reasons to help explain why bad things happen later in the study. Some things more than others, can persuade us to doubt or flat out deny God’s love. Following doubt could hinder our fellowship with God just as it did to Job.

As things went wrong for Job, he began to question what he might have done to anger God. Job started to doubt God’s love for him, as if his pleasing God raised or lowered God’s level of love for him. Then God spoke to Job in a whirlwind, and come to find out that God’s love for Job hadn’t changed a bit. The only thing that had changed was Job’s faith in God’s love for him.

Job’s fear held his faith back just far enough that when trouble came, Job was overwhelmed by the trouble instead of staying focused on what God has promised. It is easy to have faith when things are going great, but that is not faith. In all actuality that is just being thankful, which is also good to do but it’s not faith. Being thankful helps to build our faith but shouldn’t be mistaken for faith. Before we are able to physically see it, faith calls things that are not as though they were.

Therefore it is of faith that it might be according to grace, so that the promise might be sure to all the seed, not only to those who are of the law, but also to those who are of the faith of Abraham, who is the father of us all 17 (as it is written, “I have made you a father of many nations”) in the presence of Him whom he believed—God, who gives life to the dead and calls those things which do not exist as though they did; —Romans 4:16-17

We find out that Job’s faith was not in God’s love, nor in His Word, nor His covenant. If our faith is not in God’s Word (covenant), it is in something else. Any thought that is not based on faith in God’s covenant Word is based in fear. It is based in fear because we are afraid that God’s covenant Word is not true or that it won’t work for us. Depending on when Job lived, perhaps Job could have been the father of us all instead of Abraham, but his faith was held back by fear.

Job said it himself, “For the thing I greatly feared has come upon me, and what I dreaded has happened to me.”—Job 3:25.

Job feared that God would not uphold His covenant Word with him. Let’s understand that God is not going to force us to have faith or magically cause us to have faith in His covenant with us.

When we have fear working in the place of our faith, beginning with the fear that God doesn’t fully love us, the difficult times we face in life will become more intense and more frequent. If we are going to grasp the magnitude of our covenant with God, we must first grasp the fact that God is perfect love and there is no waiver in God’s love. God loves me, has to be a fixed truth that is firmly settled in our hearts and minds. What is wrapped up in God’s love?