Of all God’s attributes, love is the most attractive and compelling. Most people who believe in God do so because of the mysterious moments when they felt His love, comfort, and grace. It moved their hearts to faith, even amidst the mind’s doubts.
Because of the Creator’s love, the creation is a benevolent place that upholds and protects life. Indeed, the good creation is an expression of that love. Love is the essence of God; it is even more than that.
As Father Moon teaches, love is the very motivation behind God’s creation; it is the “why” of God. Love is also the reason God has pursued the history of salvation through many torturous paths.
Love teaches God to be patient and forgiving with us, ignorant creatures who long ago lost our way and became inured to the gracious melodies of the Spirit. Despite our deafness and blindness, God never ceases to embrace us and lead us forward.
1. Love: The Essence of God
God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him. 1 John 4.16
My mercy embraces all things. Qur’an 7.156
To love is to know me, My innermost nature, The truth that I am. Bhagavad-Gita 18.55 (Hinduism)
The Great Compassionate Heart is the essence of Buddhahood. Gandavyuha Sutra (Buddhism)
Lord! You are the uninvoked savior, motiveless compassionate being, a well-wisher even when unprayed, a friend even when unrelated. Vitaragastava 13.1 (Jainism)
Bright but hidden, the Self dwells in the heart.
Everything that moves, breathes, opens, and closes lives in the Self.
He is the source of love and may be known through love but not through thought. He is the goal of life. Attain this goal!
Mundaka Upanishad 2.2.1 (Hinduism)
Love is the firstborn, loftier than the gods,
the Fathers and men.
You, O Love, are the eldest of all, altogether mighty.
To you we pay homage!
Greater than the breadth of earth and heaven, or of waters and Fire,
You, O Love, are the eldest of all, altogether mighty.
To you we pay homage!…
In many a form of goodness,
O Love, you show your face.
Grant that these forms may penetrate within our hearts.
Send elsewhere all malice!
Atharva Veda 9.2.19-20, 25 (Hinduism)
O good man! Compassion acts as parent to all beings.
The parent is compassion. Know that compassion is the Tathagata.
O good man! Compassion is the Buddha Nature of all beings.
Such a Buddha Nature is long overshadowed by illusion.
That is why beings cannot see.
The Buddha Nature is Compassion.
Compassion is the Tathagata.
Mahaparinirvana Sutra 259 (Buddhism)
The Bull of Dharma is born of compassion;
Content of mind holds creation together.
Whoever understands this is enlightened.
How great is the load under which this Bull stands!
Japuji 16, M.1, p. 3 (Sikhism)
O Son of Man! Veiled in My immemorial being
and in the ancient eternity of My essence,
I knew My love for thee; therefore, I created thee,
have engraved on thee Mine image,
and revealed to thee My beauty.
Hidden Words of Bahá’u’lláh, Arabic 3 (Baha’i Faith)
Teachings of Sun Myung Moon
God is the Lord of love. He exists to spread love throughout the universe and make it eternal. (298:304, January 17, 1999)
God is the Womb of love. He is the Source of love’s emotion, out of which emanates parental love, children’s love, sibling love, love of kin, and love of country.
These different kinds of love are like branches and leaves growing from the main trunk. They are like waves that eventually turn into ripples. The further away from the Source, the fainter the emotion becomes. (50:267, November 8, 1971)
How does it feel to experience the realm of God’s love?
It is like walking through a garden on a warm spring day. You see all different kinds of flowers and become intoxicated with all their fragrances.
Lying on the grass, you feel something indescribable as you look up at the sky and see the towering cumulus clouds shaped like clumps of cotton. You feel your cells dancing, breathing.
God’s love is the wellspring of power and happiness for all beings; it endows each one with the energy of life. God’s love is the absolute requirement for faith.
It is the necessary element for joy, pleasure, peace, and everything else human life desires. Moreover, God’s love is the principle of the spirit world.
(24:325, September 14, 1969)
What is God’s heart?
It refers to God’s perfect foundation for love. All of God’s creations welled up from His heart, as did all His ideals for them. Thus, God’s heart is the perfect foundation for everything. God’s heart also springs forth into the perfect completion of everything. There can be no perfection or completion apart from God’s heart. (82:292, February 1, 1976)
God is the Subject of the heart. For this reason, God can feel limitless sorrow as well as limitless joy. Just because He is God doesn’t mean that He possesses only joy and positive emotions. When God is sad, His heart of sorrow is deeper and wider than any person can ever comprehend. (11:89, February 12, 1961)
God exists for love and lives for love. God does not live for Himself, but for love. Likewise, all things are born from love. Thus, in the world of love, there cannot be a concept that we should live for ourselves. (303:287, September 9, 1999)
God knows everything. Omniscient and omnipotent, He is the Supreme King of knowledge and power. Omnipresent, He exists everywhere. What does God need?
Diamonds? He can make them any time. Gold or jewels? No. What God needs is love. Dwelling all by Himself, would God say, “I have love and it’s great” and laugh? No, there is something that God needs.
God is a personal God; then He should have a mouth, shouldn’t He? He also should have a nose, eyes, ears, hands, and feet, a mind, and a heart. Surely, God must have them, because He is a personal God. (142:30)
God is the Original Being of love, and out of love He created human beings. A solitary being cannot love. Therefore, there is one thing that even God absolutely needs: a partner whom He can love. He can only love in a relationship with a counterpart.
God, the Original Being of love and heart, created the universe with love as His motivation. In doing so, He created human beings in His image as His substantial object partners, as it is recorded in Genesis 1:27, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female he created them.”
God is our eternal, formless, and internal Parent, and he created Adam and Eve to be perfected as our visible and external parents. (135:10-11, August 20, 1985)
If what God needs is love, then He needs object partners with whom He can relate and share love. What sort of beings could these be? Animals? God would love beings that resemble Him.
If God’s partners are indeed human beings, then we are led to the conclusion that God has a human-like personality. God, who is in complete harmony within Himself, must also have attributes that can harmonize one hundred percent with the innate faculties of the human mind and body. Hence, God must have intellect, emotion and will. (162:271, April 17, 1987)
Love cannot be completed without a partner. Even God absolutely needs a counterpart to attain the most precious love; that is why He created. God seeks out a partner so that He can experience absolute love through relating with another.
In this sense, God exists for human beings, and human beings exist for God. True love begins when we live for the sake of another. What is the origin of human beings? God’s love. We were born for love.
Love is the origin. Life is not the most precious thing. Our life is derived from God’s idea of love; therefore, love precedes life. Love is the root of life. We are born from love, grow up in love, and meet a partner for love—that should be our life.
If God is the first generation, then human beings are the second generation. God always loves us, His sons and daughters, but do we experience God’s love? Human beings need to experience that love if we are to become God’s perfect partners. (143:310, March 21, 1986)
2. Divine Mercy
God is All-gentle to His servants, providing for whomsoever He will. Qur’an 42.19
God is the best to take care of man, and He is the Most Merciful of those who show mercy! Qur’an 12.64
If we are faithless, he remains faithful—for he cannot deny himself. 2 Timothy 2.13
No one is more patient over injury which he hears than God. Hadith of Bukhari and Muslim (Islam)
God drives away flies for a cow that has no tail. Yoruba Proverb (African Traditional Religions)
God is faithful, and he will not let you be tempted beyond your strength, but with the temptation will also provide a way of escape, that you may be able to endure it. 1 Corinthians 10.13
God charges no soul save to its capacity;
standing to its account is what it has earned,
and against its account what it has deserved.
Our Lord! Take us not to task if we forget, or make mistake.
Our Lord! Charge us not with a load as that
which You laid upon those before us. Our Lord!
Burden us not beyond what we have the strength to bear.
Pardon us, forgive us, and have mercy on us.
Qur’an 2.286
Teachings of Sun Myung Moon
What is God? God is the existence that absolutely lives for others. (175:158, March 16, 1988)
No matter what happens in the human world, God is patient because He is who He is. He sees tragic and heart-breaking things, yet He remains calm and composed, never losing His dignity.
If God were to open His mouth and express His suffering, He could pour out tragic stories for millions of years, weeping all the while. Would God weep out of self-pity? No, God weeps only for humankind, His children. (124:60, January 23, 1983)
What kind of being is God? Does He say, “I am God Almighty! I created you to serve Me, to love Me and sacrifice everything for Me.”? Such a being cannot be God. In fact, God has set the tradition of humbly serving and loving the world.
His tradition is that of changing diapers and cleaning up the baby’s feces, and washing the dirt off a sick and infirm old man. That tradition should form the core of our education. (116:90-91, December 20, 1981)
God, the Creator of the universe, still remembers the wonderful process by which His creation unfolded, how each creature arose and what He did to further their development. He invested such great love for His creation; love was the motivation, and love the goal.
Even though humankind fell, God just cannot put aside His abiding love for human beings; to do so would be against His Principle and His standard of love. Therefore, when He sees fallen people living in misery, He does not condemn. Rather, He is merciful to them. (115:320-21, November 29, 1981)
3. God’s Loving Heart toward Humanity
When Israel was a child, I loved him,
and out of Egypt I called my son.
The more I called them,
the more they went from me;
they kept sacrificing to the Baals,
and burning incense to idols.
Yet it was I that taught Ephraim to walk,
I took him up in my arms;
but they did not know that I healed them.
I led them with cords of compassion,
with the bands of love,
and I became to them as one
who eases the yoke on their jaws,
and I bent down to them and fed them.
27 Hosea 11.1-4
In the perilous round of mortality,
In continuous, unending misery,
Firmly tied to the passions
As a yak is to its tail;
Smothered by greed and infatuation,
Blinded and seeing nothing;
Seeking not the Buddha, the Mighty,
And the Truth that ends suffering,
But deeply sunk in heresy,
By suffering seeking riddance of suffering;
For the sake of all these creatures,
My heart is stirred with great pity.
Lotus Sutra 2 (Buddhism)
Teachings of Sun Myung Moon
How hard is it to educate just one child? Children share their parents’ flesh and blood. Their hearts are linked to their mother, so when mother cries they cry too.
Their hearts are naturally connected to their father, so they respond to his cares and sorrows. Even so, it is still extremely hard to teach and raise them, is it not?
Then consider the magnitude of God’s task. Today’s human beings are not God’s children. Although God cries out in bitterness, they act as if they do not hear anything. Although God weeps with grief and sorrow, they just ignore it. This is because human beings stem from Satan’s flesh and blood.
They may sense God’s grief, yet all they do is praise Him. They may notice that other people are perishing, yet still they laugh and make merry. Think how difficult it is for God, who has to train workers and raise leaders from among such people.
Without a heart of utmost compassion, God would not have even a foothold to develop His providential work. Yet it is God’s heart to consider every single detail—from one to one hundred to one thousand to even ten thousand—in arranging things for you. (42:257, March 21, 1971)
God elected Cain and Abel, Noah, and many other families as He pursued the providence of restoration. At every dispensation God led of this providential history, His heart was fretful beyond description. Nevertheless, controlling His feelings, God endured with great patience.
Who on this earth today feels the fretful heart of our patient God? Who would hug God and weep with Him? Anyone who knows God’s heart like this and sheds tears would understand: God rejoiced at the time of the creation of all things in heaven and earth, but due to the Human Fall God now grieves; His sorrow encompasses all in heaven and earth. (4:239, May 18, 1958)
[Until the coming of Jesus], what had been God’s heart toward humanity? He did not have the attitude to live for His own sake. Although we fallen human beings deserved to suffer and die, God poured out all of His heart and strength to save us.
Persevering through the four thousand years of Old Testament history, He fought every step of the way to separate humanity from Satan. You should understand the nature of God who loved us, persevered for us, and fought for us with an unchanging heart… During Jesus’ life of 33 years, he did not try to distinguish himself before the people, but in silence he sought to experience the heart of God…
At difficult moments Jesus might have felt the urge to seek his own welfare, but because he was ever immersed in God’s heart, he could not even think of doing it. Jesus knew that God had persevered for four thousand years for the purpose of finding one man—Jesus himself.
Knowing that, Jesus spent thirty years preparing himself, so that he could emerge as the man of substance who could liberate God from that history.
God never made excuses for His situation or complained about His suffering, not to anyone. Because Jesus was trying to understand everything about the heart of God, when he was lonely, he too persevered and never made any excuses. You should follow the example of his life. (1:78, May 27, 1956)
Even though human beings sinned, God does not accuse us, saying, “Hey, you! Why did you sin?” He knows the situation of sinners. He cares about humanity more than for himself. He comes in sorrow to sorrowful people, in suffering to suffering people, and in sympathy with those who feel victimized and angry.
How much have you empathized with God’s situation? God comes into our sphere of life in this way. Not only that—he comes to us with His heart: “Although you betrayed Me, I am your Father. With a father’s heart I have been searching for you for six thousand years.” (9:231, May 29, 1960)
Father! We have been like pitiful orphans,
knocked about this way and that,
ignorant of our purpose, our direction,
and our historical situation,
unable to grasp the center of life, pushed here and there— still
Thou didst hold on to us.
Yet we did not know that Thou wast there,
sorrowful when we were sad,
not averse to toiling day and night to seek us out,
even as we were ensnared and groaning in the realm of death.
(5:337, March 8, 1959)