The best synonym I can think of for the word “love” is the word “helpfulness.” When we read in 1 John that “God is love,” I’m persuaded that he could have just as well written “God is helpfulness.”
Listen to how paraphrasing the following passage along these lines sheds light on it:
1 John 4:7-12, paraphrased: Dear friends, let us help one another, for helpfulness comes from God. Everyone who is helpful has been born of God and knows God. Whoever is not helpful does not know God, because God is helpfulness.
This is how God showed his helpfulness among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is helpfulness: not that we helped God, but that he helped us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.
Dear friends, since God helped us in this way, we also ought to help one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we help one another, God lives in us and his helpfulness is made complete in us.
