We hear the saying quite often that we need to be careful that we don't "miss the forest because of the trees".  The idea being that you can get so caught up in the details of something that you miss the big picture.

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Perhaps the opposite saying is "the devil is in the details" where we are warned that something that sounds great as an overarching concept can run into serious problems if the component parts are not well thought out.  Giving a car or truck or train a powerful engine to get you from A to B quickly sounds great but you need to remember that you need to be able slow down from the high speeds the engine can give you and so you need a good set of brakes too!

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In a similar way, our understanding of God needs not just the overarching view that God is loving and kind ("God is love" - 1 John 4:8) but the detail, "In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins" (1 John 4:10).  We cannot just take the first statement and assume from it that God is loving and so will overlook sin without any problem or special intervention.  No, the detail of the second statement is needed to show how the God of love is angry due to human sin and how he actually deals with it by providing his own Son as a sacrifice to turn aside that anger (all of this is contained in the detailed meaning of the word "propitiation").

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To use an ecological analogy that someone I was corresponding with recently may appreciate, it is one thing to look at a forest and say "this is a Eucalypt forest" based on the fact that 80% of the trees are Eucalypts but this should not mean that we safely just ignore the other 20% of the trees.  If someone goes into the forest and says, "look - a Bunya Pine", it would not be right for a forest ranger to respond by saying, "yeah but it doesn't really matter, we can safely ignore that one because we know that this is a Eucalypt forest".  While that is true, the presence of the Bunya Pine and the other trees in the 20% make a difference to the whole ecosystem of the forest and cannot just be ignored on the assumption that we know all we need to know by saying "this is a Eucalypt forest".

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In a similar way, just saying "God is love" cannot give us a full picture or understanding of God and his ways based on our own experience and assumptions about the nature of love.  We need the whole Bible to give us the details of exactly what this means and how it really works out in the world.