God is love. He isn’t a sappy sentimental love. He is the Holy triune love of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. There is an overreaction in either direction. Some so overreact to the law-based God they grew up with, or who they were first introduced to, that they construct a “God of love” who ends up affirming them in all their desires and fleshy wants. We need to 
come back to the God of our first love, in Jesus Christ. He is a God of justice, but it is a staurological (cross) shaped justice that flows from and is grounded by His life of love. But He truly is love. He is our Father, just because He is first the Son’s Father by the Spirit. This is the God of love we need to proclaim. He isn’t simply a winsome God; He is a God of expectation; an expectation that has been met for us in the vicarious humanity and obedience of Jesus Christ. Nevertheless, He expects that we be transformed from glory to glory; to be holy as He is Holy. This kind of love ought to inculcate a life of holy gratitude; a life of repentant thinking and living; a life of emboldened and holy living, of the type that reflects and bears witness to the ground of our newly created lives in the resurrected and ascended humanity of Jesus Christ. Let God be true, and every man a liar.
On the other hand, others so run from the pietistic, sappy God of love presented to them by mainstream evangelicalism and mainline churches, that they end up turning God into an Iron Fist. They prefer this God because He appears to be a God of moralistic law-coding wherein the personβs obedience begins to almost count towards βtheir election/salvation.β They like this God because within the bilaterally configured relationship they think this God operates with, in a God-world relation, that they have their end of the covenant/pactum to keep; that is if they are going to persevere and demonstrate the fruits of an effectual salvation. These folks like to cudgel others into submission, almost as if Allah and their God have something in common. Indeed, their God, and the Muslimβs God, respectively, are construed from the same fount of Aristotelian intellection; of the notion of actus purus (βpure beingβ). As such, these Christians begin to emulate their God of metaphysical law-coding. They donβt think of others in terms of Godβs love, but instead in terms of a God who expects them to keep their end of the bargain; to keep their end of the salvific promisso.
There is a better way to think Godβs love, I already referred to it above with reference to God as cruciform-shaped. The triune God, who is love by way of His Self-givenness for the other, in the other, as a subject-in-being love that so interpenetrates the other that it becomes impossible to think the other apart from the self and vice versa. This is the ground of Christian love; that is, Godβs triune interpenetrating love. It is a love, that in the assumptio carnis (βassumption of fleshβ) has so interpenetrated all of humanityβs lives that it becomes impossible to think of the other apart from Godβs life for them. This is the way we ought to approach all others in and from the life of Jesus Christ. He loves people, as if sheep without a shepherd. He is the Great Shepherd of Israel, of both Jew and Gentile alike. Treat others with this type of love, even as this love is grounded not in the winds of the cultural turbines, but in the holy and triune life of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Let God be true, and every man a liar.
Amen! This is a good and needed side by side treatment of the three vias. When one preaches obedience and service to God, as your recent post, a person in that legalistic stance may clench his fiat and say “yeah!” missing your larger context and message. Or someone opposed to legalism may likewise mis-read your message anx apply their own spin. This post is a good bifocal reading of the questions and answers.
Thanks Bobby!
“Treat others with this type of love, even as this love is grounded not in the winds of the cultural turbines, but in the holy and triune life of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Let God be true, and every man a liar.” Amen… and emet.
And such is the grace of God also, that courses from God’s triune interpenetrating love. Thanks be to God!
Good word Bobby Thanks.
I have been thinking for weeks now on 2 Corinthians 5:14-21 and submitting my thinking to its reality and how I should look at and speak to everyone. Regarding no one according to the flesh any longer.
2 Corinthians 5:14-21 We have concluded this that one died for all and therefore all died; and he died for all, that those who live might no longer live for themselves but for him who for their sake died and was raised.
good post. too many believe in mushy God who does not have a real problem with sin, while the “loving but holy” caveat can be abused, it is still imo fundAMENTALLY true..we just need to understand god’s chastisement is restorative and not retributive.
@Duane, amen and thank you. Glad it provided greater clarity and context.
@Richard, amen!
@Chris, amen and thank you. And for sure, to see others through the lens of the incarnation and the cross changes all kinds of things, as far as perspective and actions towards others.
@Eric, thank you. It’s how people, Christians often, interpret God’s love (and apply it); it is often purely anthropologically concentrated, and not in a way that is conditioned by God’s unilateral life for us in Christ. This is how God’s love starts becoming predicated by cultural mores rather than heavenly ones.
Wonderful read, sir. “This is the ground of Christian love; that is, God’s triune interpenetrating love.” Love it! Our salvation is not a mere pardon or a mere theistic, distant love, but an enfoldment into God’s life. That is, the love of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit in an eternal, “holy dance.” Keep doing what you are doing!
@Alex, thank you.