1 John 4:7-8 (ESV) 7 Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.
1 John 4:16 (ESV) 16 So we have come to know and to believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him.
I have spent several days contemplating this subject. Frankly, if you know Christ you will spend the rest of your life and into eternity contemplating the love of God. It is massive and complex.
What makes me want to write on this topic are the cavalier remarks that are so common in this world, either inside the church or outside. “God is love. God loves mankind. God loves me and that settles it.” Or, “God loves everyone the same.” Or “God’s love is unconditional.” In most cases, it is a myopic or often an incomplete view of God’s love. It is a view that ignores the other moral attributes, or as the Puritans would put it, the “perfect affections” of God. It is this view that then ignores the extent and their cooperation with each of the other attributes in the Godhead. It is a way of branding God as a universalistic lover that ignores His holiness, righteousness, purity, and justice. This myopic view has become a salve over the eyes of men so that they don’t have to contemplate God’s justice and wrath over their own sin (John 3:36) and how offensive it is to God. It assuages their guilt and makes the love of God to be the all-important attribute that swallows up the rest of what makes God, God. In the end, it limits God’s love and diminishes His glory.
When you think Biblically about the love of God, at least for me, I find it to be overwhelming and incomprehensible in its scope, especially in relation to the salvific love of God. I John 4:7-8, 16 speak clearly to the fact that God is love. “His lovingkindness is everlasting” is the refrain of Psalm 136 twenty-six times. The Psalmist also reminds us that God’s loving kindness is better than life (Psalm 63:3). God is “merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abundant in lovingkindness and truth (Psalm 86:15). In Psalm 100:5 we are told He “is good; His lovingkindness is everlasting.”
But it is in the New Testament that we see the full expression of God’s love demonstrated “in that while we were yet sinner Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). John in his first epistle speaks to this as well.
1 John 4:9-10 (ESV) 9 In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world so that we might live through him. 10 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.
It is in this context of the propitiating work of Christ on Calvary’s cross we read “God is love (1 John 4:7-8, 16).
Paul also immerses the love of Christ in the work of Christ.
Ephesians 2:4-6 (ESV) 4 But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, 5 even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— 6 and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus,
Of course the most familiar verse in the Bible, John 3;16, clearly speaks of God’s love as it is expressed in salvation.
No wonder John, later in 1 John 3:1 exclaims; “See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are…”
But when we ponder the love it God, we see that His love is apparent but not simple to understand. It raises a number of questions, such as; If God is loving, why does He send people to hell? Or, “if God is loving why did he allow suffering, pain, and sorrow? If God is loving how can He allow wars and natural disasters?” There are a host of other questions that are equally as difficult to answer as well when we speak about a God of love. Full and complete answers to some of these questions, we must admit, are beyond us and are held in the counsels of God and haven’t been revealed to us.
But when you search the Scriptures we can see God’s love in action in unconditional love or common grace and in His saving or salvific love.
Tomorrow I would like to look briefly at God’s unconditional love as it is demonstrated in common grace. Until then, let me leave you with the lyrics from F.M. Lehman’s Hymn, “The Love of God.” Note verse three especially.
- The love of God is greater far
Than tongue or pen can ever tell;
It goes beyond the highest star,
And reaches to the lowest hell;
The guilty pair, bowed down with care,
God gave His Son to win;
His erring child He reconciled,
And pardoned from his sin.- Refrain:
Oh, love of God, how rich and pure!
How measureless and strong!
It shall forevermore endure—
The saints’ and angels’ song.
- Refrain:
- When hoary time shall pass away,
And earthly thrones and kingdoms fall,
When men who here refuse to pray,
On rocks and hills and mountains call,
God’s love so sure, shall still endure,
All measureless and strong;
Redeeming grace to Adam’s race—
The saints’ and angels’ song. - Could we with ink the ocean fill,
And were the skies of parchment made,
Were every stalk on earth a quill,
And every man a scribe by trade;
To write the love of God above
Would drain the ocean dry;
Nor could the scroll contain the whole,
Though stretched from sky to sky.
-Michael Holtzinger
Some Resources:
Putting Amazing Back Into Grace
By Michael Horton