Here’s another definition of love: to love is to live committed — at all costs and at all times — to another person's complete and ultimate wellbeing.
God, by nature, is like this. This love is intrinsic to Him which means He cannot be or act otherwise. God makes this commitment to all His creatures and it is a natural expression of His character. Even when God chooses to pour forth His wrath, it is what His love commitment looks like in the face of creatures putting other interests ahead of being an instrument of His love.
Interestingly enough, our complete and ultimate wellbeing is in fact to love as God loves. Or more specifically it is to allow God to express His love through us. We actually participate in His passion to live for the complete and ultimate wellbeing of others. Ironically, that means living that others may join in and also live participating in His passion. I suggest to you that that is what it means to be God’s friend.
Putting any other interest first is what sin is. God hates it for it results in self-disintegration — cutting off the flow of God loving others through us. Hence this sinful self is polar opposite from God's nature and is on its way out. God's wrath will see to it.
In love, however, God provided a way of escape from His wrath — He destroyed our sinful self when He made his Son, Jesus, who had no sin, to be sin for us. Everything in us that gets in the way of the love of God was destroyed. All sin was maxed-out in Him and condemned to its anti-love core. In utter horror, Jesus totally self-disintegrated in our place, under God’s wrath, as he took full responsibility for our rotten self-centeredness. On that cross we died with him. And he took it all “so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” 2 Corinthians 5:21 That is, that we might live life as God’s friends — full and overflowing with his love.
