³¹ “… but so that the world may know that I love the Father, I do exactly as the Father commanded Me. Get up, let us go from here.”

Everything recorded in the Gospels about Jesus demonstrates His love for His father. Intentionally. Everyone knows that Jesus talked about loving your neighbor and loving God. Although humans usually put those two points in that order, the Scripture always puts loving God before loving neighbor. But there is a greater message, and that is that there is a love relationship within the Trinity. Those who deny the Trinity miss this huge fact. God is not simply an impersonal being who needs created humans in order for love to exist. To say, as John does in his first epistles, “God is love” (1 John 4:8, 16) is abstract to the point of irrelevance. Love is not something that exists as a principle, a concept. Love is an active reality independent of the existence of human beings. God was completely immersed in a love relationship within Himself. He needed nothing else to complete that love, for God was complete in His love within the members of the Trinity.

Admittedly, speaking about this enlivens the difficulty of our human understanding of the singularity of God with the plurality of the Trinity. We must live with that tension, which is more a limitation of human language and thought rather than of the concept of a singular God who exists as three persons. Jesus the Son loves the Father—we have that on inspired authority of Scripture. God is complete in that love.

God does not need love from any source outside of Himself, apparently by love’s very nature (we should really say, by God’s very nature). But there is an inherent flow outward. First it emanates out from each member of the Trinity toward each other—perfectly and completely. God loves, not because He lacks, but because He is perfect. He needs no other reciprocity, because His love is complete within the Trinity. So therefore, God can give love freely (the “love period” kind of love). And Jesus wants the world (over which Satan is currently ruling, see vs. 30) to know that He perfectly loves the Father and is absolutely committed to exactly and absolutely obeying His Father’s commands.

That’s how Jesus demonstrated His love for the Father, by doing, “exactly as the Father commanded Me.” That included what was coming next, and so the time had come to engage the “ruler of the world.” It was time to face the final battle. He was about to continue modeling what He asks of the disciples, namely, obedience to God.

Lord, I want the world to know there is a God who loves them, the proof of that being my commitment to loving You and loving them.