God Loves Us As Himself

Matthew 22:37-40 

"Jesus said unto him, Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.”

Matthew 7:12  

"Therefore all things whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them: for this is the law and the prophets."

When Christ commands us to love one another as ourselves, it means that He wants us to mind the souls and welfare of others as though they were indeed ourselves. To do something in their favor is to benefit yourself, not literally, but in the sense that you delight to benefit them because you see yourself in them. And you may do so even if it is at your own loss, because your loss is to you as gain if the other person has gained. It’s like a kind of oneness, although that more so applies amongst believers in Christ who are in spiritual unity. Jesus prayed for us to be one even as He and the Father are one. And He gave a new commandment right before His arrest, a timely choice to say to His disciples, Love one another as I have loved you. He then was tortured and crucified afterwards, paying our sin debt for us. Earlier He had told them about the greatest love a man can have, and then He fulfilled His words: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

        While God is not in a position like us and does not need anything, His mind is to do to us as He would desire we do to Him, hypothetically I suppose. Christ said in prophecy of the judgement day that what anyone did even to the least of those His brethren, they did it to Him also (Matthew 25). The worth and value of our lives is so great that God takes what is done to any person as though it were done to Him. And with that being His mind, He wants us to have that mind also. To not only think of what we do to others as doing it to ourselves, but also as doing it to Him. And in so doing we will have the mind of Christ. We’ll show the fruits of His Spirit (which are His attributes), and the first one as stated in Galatians 5:22 is love.

"He that loveth not knoweth not God; for God is love. In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him. Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins." (1 John 4:8-10)

 

The Father’s heart is to love us as much as Himself. To Him the salvation of our souls is worth the soul of His Son. 

"Therefore will I divide him a portion with the great, and he shall divide the spoil with the strong; because he hath poured out his soul unto death: and he was numbered with the transgressors; and he bare the sin of many, and made intercession for the transgressors." (Isaiah 53:12)