Is God's Love Conditional?

"We love him, because he first loved us" (1 John 4:19). Every human response to God, in this single sentence, is placed second — God's love is the origin, not the reward, of anything that follows.
The tension people feel is real: if God's love has no end and precedes any human merit whatsoever, why does Scripture also describe people forfeiting its benefits through disobedience or refusal? The resolution lies in distinguishing the origin of God's love from its ongoing effects. God is the primary source of love, prior to and independent of anything a person has done: "I have loved you with an everlasting love. Therefore I have drawn you with loving kindness" (Jeremiah 31:3). That initiating love is never in question and never runs out. But the benefits of an ongoing relationship with that love can genuinely be shielded against or forfeited, as Jesus's own parable of the unforgiving servant makes vivid: a king freely cancels an impossible debt, prior to any merit on the servant's part, and yet the servant's own subsequent refusal to extend that same mercy results in the original debt being reinstated (Matthew 18:21-35). This is not the same thing as earning love through merit — a freely offered gift can carry a simple condition for receiving it without ever becoming a wage paid for good behavior.
God's love, on this picture, functions like sunlight: constant, undiscriminating, offered before it is ever asked for. What varies is not the sun's shining but whether a person steps into it or builds a wall against it. "We love him, because he first loved us" (1 John 4:19) — the sequence never reverses, even when the relationship it makes possible is, tragically, refused.