Is Love the greatest power God can possess?

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BenSinner

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When I ask Christians why our God is superior to the other gods, I often get answers like “Our God loved us so much to make himself known to us and die for us, etc.”

I never really understand how that is a good argument to prove one God is more powerful and true than another.

So is Love the greatest power a God can possess?
 
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Would that mean a God who lacks in perfect love, would in effect, be a God that is lacking?
 
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My answer would be something like He is powerful and has made His Name great among the gentiles! Behold, He has crushed the false gods and shown truth in the beliefs of the lowliest of peoples, behold He fulfills all! He is Love, rules with mercy, slow to anger yet quick to Justice, the One and only True and Everliving God, He fades not but knows the end from the beginning.

Love is the greatest among the three theological virtues. Which is a good reason to demonstrate the folly of those whose gospel is to merely believe.
 
When I try to imagine God as creator of all that is, and all that implies. The kind of knowing. That He is willing my existence instant to instant. He has in mind everything. Everything finds the source of existence and being because this God is willing them to be from instant to instant. In every moment every thing is because God is creating them in every moment. Now what do we say when we love someone. I was thinking about you today. You are always in my heart. I had you in mind when I bought this. It gets overwhelming Then imagine that greatness of being, became one human cell in a human womb.God trusted man with His most precious gift of love. The gift of Himself. The God that holds all that is in His thoughts and wills us to be, reached out and gave Himself to us. Knowing we would hurt Him and hate Him and make His death as miserable and agonizing as possible. The heart that never stops willing us to be, the mind that we are in continually, will suffer humiliation agony hatred so that we can be with Him …I am overwhelmed by that kind of love. If Jesus hadn’t shown us… it is unknowable
 
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BenSinner said:
So is Love the greatest power a God can possess?
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How would we even measure God’s properties against each other?

God’s nature is Love, but it’s also Power, Propositional Knowledge, Goodness, Being, etc.

They are all apart of God’s essential nature, so to take any of them away and we are no longer speaking of a Maximally Great Being, and as such would no longer be discussing God.

God’s greatest property is his Maximal Greatness (the possession of all great-making properties to their maximal extent while not possessing any lesser-making properties to any extent).
BenSinner said:
I never really understand how that is a good argument to prove one God is more powerful and true than another.
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Asking which Maximally Great Being is Greater than another is absurd.

Really the only reason the Trinity is greater than Allah, Brahman, Aten, Ahura Mazda, Zurvan, and Tian is because the Trinity is the True God in the sense of both being the fullest understanding of God and that it isn’t a persona presented by of an impostor. If Brahman was the True God and the Trinity a False God, then Brahman would be truer than the Trinity. You’re trying to compare nonbeings to fullest being.
 
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I think if you are going down the path of superiority its not a Christian path.
“You know how the great men of this world like to make their authority felt…”
 
Love is superior simply because it makes anything else God may do or any other power He may have of supreme worth, because love is the ultimate good itself and involves willing the good of another-of us. Because God is love our futures are unfathomably bright.
 
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I think we have such a limited mind to understand What love really is 🙂
 
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Blessings
God is Love. He is all powerful and infinite. Of FAITH, Hope and Love. Love is the greatest mortal terms. God is equally Big in all things. Judgement, Forgiveness, Mercy.
For us, the greatest of these is love
In Christ’s love
Tweedlealice .
 
Love is not just an attribute of God. Love is not a power of God. Rather, love is the very being of God. Love is not something that God does. Love is what God is. That is why we say that God is love. It is only in this paradigm, that we can truly grasp the reality of the Trinity (at least in some way and not fully for it is a Mystery).
 
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Love is the foundation of creation. Without Love, why would we even exist?
 
Love is his nature. On the highest level love is powerful, we are seldom in a position to execute it fully and lack the potential on earth to do so to the magnitude of God. So perhaps that skews it somewhat.

For me God’s most powerful weapon is Truth. A sword wielded by Jesus that cast back shadow and doubt and allowed Gods love to actually come to rest in the hearts of man, when previously it had been out of reach.
 
Brighter and brighter on thru eternity!! To Love and
know Love is plunging into the Depths of the Mystery
of God. (See Eph. 3:16-19) What does it take to
“fathom” God’s Love? It requires the sum total of the
efforts of ALL the Saints for ALL eternity!!
 
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Kts1816 said:
I think we have such a limited mind to understand What love really is 🙂
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Absolutely. And to the degree that we do know what love is, on the level of agape, it’s to the extent that God has worked in us, a work of transforming us into His image. That love is a gift.
 
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BenSinner said:
When I ask Christians why our God is superior to the other gods, I often get answers like “Our God loved us so much to make himself known to us and die for us, etc.”

I never really understand how that is a good argument to prove one God is more powerful and true than another.

So is Love the greatest power a God can possess?
Click to expand...
Love is an act of the will but this act depends on a power of intellection which pertains to knowledge and truth to know what to love. So, St Augustine says ‘We cannot love what we do not know.’ Accordingly, it is said that the will follows the intellect. We see this in the order of persons in the Trinity. For the second person of the Trinity, the only begotten Son of God, is begotten by the Father’s intellect and so Christ is called the Word of God and the Wisdom of God. The Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, proceeds from the will of the Father and the Son, the love that they have for each other. And so the Holy Spirit is called Love, the personification of Love in the Trinity. The attributes of God such as love, truth, goodness, justice, mercy, eternity, do not admit of more or less. They are all equally and infinitely great. In fact, in God, the attributes are identical to each other and with his intellect and will which are also identical to each other. God’s intellect, will, and attributes are God. They are of his very essence, nature, or substance which is absolutely simple. God is supremely one and simple in the unity of the divine nature. The only thing that can be distinguished in him is the origin or relations of the persons.
 
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