Lesson Two: God Is Love, God Is One, God Is I Am

God Is Love — Not Merely Loving

Scripture does not simply say God performs loving acts among the many things he does. It says something far more foundational about his very nature.

Love is not one attribute among many competing for space in God's character. It is the substance underneath everything else he does, his justice, his mercy, his discipline, his patience. Every action of God flows out of this center, because this center is who he actually is.

God Is One

Alongside his love, scripture is equally clear about God's oneness, a truth Israel was called to declare daily.

This declaration set Israel apart from every surrounding nation, whose gods were many, fragmented, competing, and often capricious. Israel's God was, and is, undivided. Not one god among many options to appease, but the one true source of everything that exists. This oneness is not a mathematical technicality. It is the ground for trusting that God's character never contradicts itself, that the God who is love in one moment is the same God who is love in the next, unchanging and undivided.

The Great I Am

When Moses stood before the burning bush and asked who was sending him, God's answer revealed something profound about his nature.

I am. Not I was, not I will be, but I am, present tense, self-existent, dependent on nothing outside himself for his own existence. Every created thing depends on something else to exist. God alone simply is, the uncaused cause, the eternal present. This name carries into the New Testament directly, when Jesus applies it to himself.

Jesus does not merely claim to have existed before Abraham. He claims the very name God gave Moses at the burning bush. The I am of Exodus and the I am of John's gospel are the same voice, the same eternal, self-existent God, love and oneness and eternal presence all bound together in a single identity.

Why This Matters

A God who is love, who is one, and who simply is, eternally present and unchanging, is a God who can actually be trusted completely. His love is not a passing mood that might shift with circumstance. His oneness means there is no competing will inside him working against his love. And his eternal I am nature means the love he showed a thousand years ago is the same love available today, and the same love that will still be true a thousand years from now.

This is the God being introduced in this lesson, love as his substance, oneness as his nature, and I am as his name, the same yesterday, today, and forever.