If I may, I suspect that what God’s love means is wrapped up in what Zacharias is calling the embrace of “welcome home”. ← That seemed to be the crux of what he’s getting at in the quote above.
I’ve had visions of the role that life plays in the universe that may shed some light on this:
Evolution is the only process we know of that comes close to microcosms coming out of the macrocosm. It is a process whereby parts of the universe attempt to individuate themselves from the rest of the universe. Every form of life is an individual being acting in semi-independence from its environment. Plants are the only thing that come to mind which are least individuated since they are reliant on being rooted in the ground for survival.
As a pantheist, I see this as a form of escape–a part of God trying to escape itself, to become independent of itself, to be “other”.
“Welcome home” must be the experience of death–the experience of being reunited with the source. The biological organism ceased to be the individual it has striven all its life to maintain and returns to dust, scattered back into nature. As a pantheist, I imagine this experience is like something, not a black nothingness than atheists and materialists believe in. If this experience is captured in those two words: “welcome home”, and if those two words capture God’s love (according to Zacharias), then one can only know God’s love in the unification of the self with the universe upon death.
It might be like the love of mother back when we were children, living care free in the safety of home, knowing nothing of the harshness and cruelties of the dog-eat-dog world that our parents went out in it to toil, compete, and sacrifice in order to make the comforts of home possible. It might be like returning to that, a remembering of whence we came, of how things once were.
This comes as a light vision and a dark vision. The darker vision asks the question: why did God want to escape himself in the first place. Is it really that horrible being God? I once said in another thread:
Why would life put in so much effort unless the alternative was so much worse? But then what does that say about the state of being God?
^ But that’s the dark vision. In all likelihood, the light vision seems right: deaths seems like an incredible calm, not a struggle. Rocks, lakes, mountains… those parts of the universe which do not evolve… seem at peace. And when we are in the grave, laying there motionless, we too will be at peace.
This speaks more to our place in evolution than it does to our individual selves. According to this view, we–our conscious selves–are just going along for the ride. None of us actually chose to evolve out of the universe and become the individuate being we experience ourselves to be. And if we were to choose to return to nature by way of suicide, we most likely couldn’t do it. Instincts which we have no control over, which were built into our biology long before we even existed, will typically stop us. We–the conscious mind–only comprises maybe 50% of the brain (at most)–but the organism that evolution has worked arduously over eons to create is the whole body–90% of us is unconscious ← and that’s the part that persistently chooses life over death. ← That’s the part that God awaits, ready to embrace with open arms and say “welcome home”.
If that’s what God’s love is, then above all else, we cannot say we even remotely understand it. What is the experience of being one with the universe like? Can anyone here honestly answer that? It might be like returning home to mama, it might be like remembering where we came from, it might be like recalling why there isn’t a need to struggle in the game of individuation… but these are surely only shoddy metaphors at best.
But this does give us a bit of insight: God’s love seems to have a lot to do with being itself–just existing–of being united in the whole. But as for what it is, it seems too far beyond my ability to comprehend.