“But let him who boasts boast in this, that he understands and knows me, that I am the Lord who practices steadfast LOVE, JUSTICE, and RIGHTEOUSNESS in the earth. For in these things I delight, declares the Lord.” Jeremiah 9:24
Whether we choose to acknowledge God or not, there is a deep desire in every human being to know Him. I have come to experience this through years of wrestling with Him, wandering from Him, and finally digging in with God. My friend, we were not designed for a vague spiritual experience. We were designed for a relationship with God. And just like in the passage above, He is described in the Bible with stunning clarity. He is Love. He is Justice. He is Righteousness. And the astonishing thing is that every human desperately longs for all three of these aspects of His nature—without even knowing it.
For example, we feel it when we watch the news and see the innocent crushed under the heel of the powerful. We feel it when someone we love is betrayed, and the betrayer walks away smiling. We feel it when we know we have failed to do good, and we can’t escape the guilt of that knowledge. These aches are not malfunctions. They are our internal homing device pointing us directly toward God.
If we want to REALLY know who we are, it’s critical to examine the three aspects of God’s nature!
So let’s begin by examining the three elements of God’s nature: Love, justice, and righteousness.
God is love:
“Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love.” 1 John 4:8
This verse doesn’t just say that God loves—though He does—incredibly and without condition. But God IS love. It is the very fabric of His being. He cannot be unloving. Every generous impulse you have ever felt, every moment your heart empathized with someone else’s pain, every time your heart melted at the love you’ve felt for your children, and each time a friend showed up when they didn’t have to—that was you experiencing the very nature of God.
We were made for this love.
It shows up all over our lives. Think of how desperate we are to be truly known—not just seen, but understood, esteemed without pretense, and accepted without performance. Every human being carries that hunger. It is not neediness; it is by design. We were created for the kind of love that only an infinite God can sustain—without burning out or growing bored.
But here is where the enemy does his cruelest work.
The wicked enemy’s lie is subtle and deeply destructive: God’s love is conditional. He is tolerating you, not delighting in you. The moment He sees the real you—the cluttered, complicated, inconsistent you—He will pull back. I have believed that lie. I have lived inside it for many years, keeping God at arm’s length—performing to try to earn His love. And the tragedy is that the very love I was starving for was available to me the entire time. How thankful I am for God’s Word and the experience of His presence, because He continues to reveal that lie to me. Even the most well-known verse in the Bible makes it crystal clear how much He loves us:
“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” John 3:16
This is the love of a Father who completely bore the cost to reconcile us. He hands all His love over freely to anyone who accepts His gift of salvation.
The more I work this truth into my everyday life, the less I live like a defendant on trial and the more I live like a beloved child.
God is just.
“The Lord is known by the justice he has brought about; the wicked are ensnared by the work of their hands.” Psalm 9:16
We grew up watching injustice go unpunished. We all carry wounds from people who were never held accountable and from broken systems of “justice.” We have seen the wicked prosper and the vulnerable pay the price. If you have lived any length of time, you know exactly what I am talking about. The fury that rises in your chest when you see a child exploited, when corruption is rewarded, or when the vulnerable are preyed upon by the powerful—that fury is not ugly. It is holy. It is the imprint of a just God on our human souls.
We are wired for justice because God is perfectly, unrelentingly just.
He cannot look at evil and shrug. He cannot overlook the oppressor. He cannot pretend evil never happened—or He would not be God. Listen to how He describes Himself:
“For the Lord your God is God of gods and Lord of lords, the great, the mighty, and the awesome God, who is not partial and takes no bribe. He executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing.” Deuteronomy 10:17–18
That is not abstract theological language. This is God, who sees what no human court records, and He forgets nothing. But the lie the enemy tells here is particularly effective against those of us who have been deeply hurt:
“God doesn’t care. If He did, He would have stopped it. Your suffering is proof of His absence or His indifference.”
I have sat in that dark room of injustice—both for myself and with my clients. The silence always seemed conclusive. But what God was teaching me was that His justice operates on a timeline I cannot see from inside my own grief. His accounting is meticulous and complete.
Paul writes plainly:
“Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.’” Romans 12:19
Releasing justice to God is not passive resignation. It is a fierce act of faith—trusting that God, who sees everything, will settle every account—perfectly. The more I begin to truly trust this, the more I become free from unforgiveness and bitterness. Not because the wrongs were made right—but because I believed they were being accounted for by God, who is far more capable of handling them than I am. What a relief!
God is righteous.
“Your righteousness, O God, reaches the high heavens. You who have done great things, O God, who is like you?” Psalm 71:19
God’s perfect righteousness is hard for us to grasp in a world full of so much evil. Love we understand instinctively. Justice we crave viscerally. But Biblical righteousness—the perfect, moral wholeness of God, the fact that He is incapable of corruption, incapable of error, and incapable of being anything other than utterly good in every direction—is hard for us to grasp in this corrupt world. Why? Because…
God’s righteousness both convicts us AND draws us.
We live in a world that is fully soaked in compromise. We have watched institutions corrupt themselves, watched leaders we admired collapse under the weight of their own hidden failures, and watched our own hearts choose the low road because the high road cost too much. There is something inside us that is exhausted by all the immoral noise, all the spin, and all the ways goodness gets diluted or weaponized. We deeply long for purity that frees us from the fear of what might be revealed when our life comes under scrutiny.
That longing is our soul reaching for the righteousness of God.
God is not righteous because He follows a moral code above Himself. He IS the standard. Every true thing, every genuinely beautiful thing, and every moment of authentic moral courage you have ever witnessed reflects His nature. He is the source. But the enemy plants his lie at the root of our longing. He says: “You are too far gone to be righteous. You know what you have done. Righteousness is for other people—not you.”
I have heard that voice. And the incredible answer of the Gospel is:
“For OUR sake he made HIM to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the RIGHTEOUSNESS of God.” 2 Corinthians 5:21
Did you get that? When we are born again, we become “the righteousness of God.” This is not our righteousness. We don’t become slightly better or earn incremental improvement. Rather, in Christ, we are clothed in the very righteousness of God Himself. That is a metaphor I cannot fully absorb. But I can learn to bring my thoughts in line with the truth of God’s Word. And every time I do, the shame that the enemy uses to keep me from sensing the presence of God—loses another layer of its power against me!
Isn’t it amazing to see how our deepest desires align with the nature of God???
So, now the question becomes: why do we run from God? Lord, how we run. I have run. Often—and with great creativity! We run because the enemy has done masterful, generational work convincing us that God is something He is not. Satan tells us that God is the cosmic rule-enforcer waiting for us to slip up. He is the distant Father who loves in principle but cannot be approached in practice. He is demanding in ways that crush rather than refine. He is the God of other people—people who are more disciplined, more spiritual, and more consistently obedient. Not us. Not you. Not me.
And so we settle.
We settle for lesser gods that feel manageable. We settle for human justice systems that are imperfect but at least visible. We settle for our own attempts at self-righteousness, which are exhausting and ultimately hollow. We keep God in a category labeled “good in theory” and live our actual lives somewhere else. But the hunger for God doesn’t go away. Because we were made for Him. We were created in His image.
The ache we feel for love, justice, and pure righteousness is the proof of God’s image in us.
What I have found—and what I am still learning, often slowly and while stumbling—is that the lies collapse when we go to the actual source. Not human religion. Not reputation. Not other people’s secondhand experiences. Being born again is the first and crucial step. Then we must grow. For example, when we study the Word of God, we are introduced to a God who is astonishingly different from the caricature the enemy presents. The Spirit of God, welcomed rather than managed, does something inside us that no amount of intellectualism can produce. The community of the church, imperfect and beautiful, shows us the love of God in each other. And the life of Christ—His actual life, the one recorded in the Gospels—shows us the love, justice, and righteousness of God in a human flesh. The Bible reminds us:
“The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” John 1:14
Full of grace AND truth. Not grace that ignores truth. Not truth that has no grace. The perfection of both, held together in one Person. But God does not ask us to discover Him through willpower alone. He knows the mess we are working with. He knows the weight of the lies we have absorbed, the wounds that have distorted our vision, and the exhaustion that makes the journey feel impossible. So He gives us what we need.
He gives us His Word—not just a rulebook, but a living document, described this way:
“For the word of God is alive and active. Sharper than any double-edged sword, it penetrates even to dividing soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it discerns the thoughts and intents of the heart.” Hebrews 4:12
He gives us His Spirit—the stunning promise that we do not navigate this life alone, but with the very presence of God inside us:
“But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit—Grace make that two part devotional on come meet the Holy Spirit a link, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you.” John 14:26
God gives us His church—the gathered, imperfect, irreplaceable community of people who are also being made whole.
“And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching.” Hebrews 10:24–25
Through salvation, we have the radical and total provision of everything we need to stand before a holy God and to know we belong in His glorious presence.
“His divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness.” 2 Peter 1:3
Prayer:
Lord, I want to know You—not a version of You constructed from fear, or other people’s failures, or the enemy’s relentless campaign of distortion. I want to know You as You actually are: Love that does not run out, Justice that does not look away, and Righteousness that is not a standard designed to crush me, but a nature You have actually clothed me in through Christ. Forgive me for believing the lies about You. Teach me to know You deeper. Take me deeper into Your Word, and help me to desire Your presence. I was made for You. Help me live like I believe it. In Jesus’ Name, Amen.
