Is a mandate that someone else love you not inherently twisted? If God commands that we love him, should we not regard such a demand as a form of depravity?
We have a tendency to impose our relativistic way of thinking on God, often assuming without question that he thinks as we do. But Isaiah 55:8—9 warns us that God’s thoughts are not like ours. God is a being of absolutes—he is absolutely loving, absolutely just, absolutely wise, and absolutely powerful. If God is truly ALL-loving, should we expect something other than for him to command that we love him with all of our heart, soul, and mind, AND love everyone else as ourselves (Matthew 22:36-40)? “All-loving” means exactly what it says; it means that God loves all. Since man is made in God’s likeness, man is meant to emulate God’s all-loving nature. We are to love all, just as God loves all. The word “all” includes God.
Counterintuitive as it may seem, God’s nature as a being of absolutes is one of the keys to understanding why he allows evil and suffering. We often assume that we know what phrases like “all-loving” and “all-just” mean, but there is far more to these concepts than meets the eye. The Advent of Time provides a different perspective on what it really means to be “all-loving,” “all-just,” and “all-powerful.”