The Love of God

A sermon preached at Covenant Presbyterian Church of Fort Smith, Arkansas on December 10, 2023.

For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die—but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation” (Romans 5:6–11).[1]

Theologian D.A. Carson writes, “If people believe in God at all today, the overwhelming majority hold that this God—however he, she, or it may be understood—is a loving being.” “But,” Carson explains,

that is what makes the task of the Christian witness so daunting. For this widely disseminated belief in the love of God is set with increasing frequency in some matrix other than biblical theology. The result is that when informed Christians talk about the love of God, they mean something very different from what is meant in the surrounding culture.[2]

To Carson’s point, perhaps you, like me, have encountered the wrath of our culture’s “love.” Should you dare, for example, to say something about God’s love for marital fidelity between one man and one woman for life and his hatred of sexual immorality (in all its varieties), you will be labeled unloving, a hater even, along with your God. And should you try to explain the biblical understanding of God’s love, which will take longer than a sound bite, prepare yourself for disbelief, even hostility. Because, to describe the love of God biblically requires also references to his sovereignty, holiness, even his wrath, among other things, attributes the world considers incongruent even antagonistic to their definition of love.

This, of course, should come as no surprise to the Christian. We live in a fallen world that would fashion God in its image and therefore deny the one who said, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (John 14:15). But my concern is not with our surrounding culture but you, that your inner dictionary is being populated more by the world than the Word. Has your definition of God’s love become, as D.A. Carson puts it, “sanitized, democratized, and above all sentimentalized”?[3] J.I. Packer rightly cautions,

Our understanding of the love of God must be limited by what the Bible’s homiletical flowings of thought actually yield. Sentimental ideas of his love as an indulgent, benevolent softness divorced from moral standards and concerns, must therefore be ruled out from the start. God’s love is holy love. The God whom Jesus made known is not a God who is indifferent to moral distinctions, but a God who loves righteousness and hates iniquity, a God whose ideal for his children is that they should be ‘perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect’ (Matt. 5:48).[4]

When the Bible speaks of God’s love it is generally in five ways. There is the love of God the Father for God the Son and the Son for the Father, an intra-Trinitarian love between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. There is the love of God over what he has made, a benevolent providence over creation. There is the love of God toward this fallen world, a love for the lost. There is the love of God specifically for his elect, an exclusive and efficacious love for his eternally chosen ones. And finally, there is the love of God for the obedience of his children.[5]

There are then distinctions within the love of God, distinctions we cannot ignore or elevate one over the other as each contributes to a right understanding of God’s love and therefore what love truly is. Because, the source of love is God himself; the testimony of Scripture is “God is love” (1 John 4:8,16). Yes, God loves, but most importantly he is love. It is a present-tense description of love’s origin and source. Just as all truth is God’s truth, all love is “from God” (1 John 4:7). He is, John Calvin says, “the fountain of love.”[6] To know what love is then, we look to him.

Consider, for example, the fifth chapter of Romans, in which Paul explains that God shows, or demonstrates, his love for us in our redemption (Rom. 5:8). That is, we see what love is specifically in considering what God in Christ has done for us. And while not an exhaustive study, I want to draw your attention to four ways in which God shows his love: He gives, he justifies, he saves, and he reconciles.

Gives

The tangible expression of God’s love for us is the gift of his Son: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). God’s gift was not only for the Jewish race but the human race, for “whoever believes” in the Son. God’s gift was not a response to righteous works, not wages earned, but bestowed by grace. It was given for the weak, a gift to the ungodly, love for the unlovable.

To die for someone is the ultimate expression of love, which leads to the question: For whom would you die? Paul says what we are all thinking: “For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die” (Rom. 5:7). Would I die for my family? Surely. For my best friend? Probably. For my church family? Likely. For my enemy? For one who hates me and wishes I were dead? I doubt it.

But that’s what we were, the enemy of God. Apart from Christ, our sin rendered us repeat offenders of the perfect standard of his holiness. Our due was death. But God shows his love for us in that while we were enemies, God the Father gave his Son; while we were still sinners God the Son died for us. God’s love for the world was not mere sentiment but sacrifice: He gave his one and only Son to suffer and die: “He is the propitiation for our sins,” the apostle John writes, “and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world” (1 John 2:2). The Son was given as an atoning sacrifice to satisfy the wrath of God for sin, not only for the Jew but for the Gentile, not only for you but for me too, not for everyone without condition but for all who repent and believe the gospel. Through God’s gift, though we deserve death, we receive “eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom. 6:23).

Justifies

That God “gave his only Son” in love does not mean that he accepts our sin. In fact, he hates it. God’s love is in direct opposition to sin. He is offended by it, finds the sinner guilty, and is storing up his wrath for punishment. Therefore, if God is love, then his love requires that sin be dealt with according to his justice.

When the world thinks of love, the holiness of God is considered contrary to it, but as R.C. Sproul points out,

there’s only one attribute of God that is ever raised to the third degree of repetition in Scripture. There’s only one characteristic of almighty God that is communicated in the superlative degree, from the mouths of angels, where the Bible doesn’t simply say that God is holy or even that He’s holy, holy but that He is holy, holy, holy. The Bible doesn’t say that God is mercy, mercy, mercy or love, love, love or justice, justice, justice or wrath, wrath, wrath. But that He is holy, holy, holy. This is a dimension of God that consumes His very essence.”[7]

Therefore, in both the Old and New Testament, we are commanded, “You shall be holy, for I the LORD your God am holy” (Lev. 19:2; 1 Pet. 1:15). But apart from Christ, holiness is an impossibility for us all, since “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom. 3:23). Therefore, we must we justified as righteous not by our works but by God’s grace through faith. Paul explains it this way in the third chapter of Romans: We are “justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus, whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith” (Rom. 3:24-25a). The gift God gives in his Son makes him both the just and justifier of sinners who believe in him (Rom. 3:24-26).

To be clear, this does not mean that he who is holy, holy, holy overlooks or dismisses our sin. Our sin is not ignored in Christ. As John Stott explains, “Far from condoning sin, his love has found a way to expose it (because he is light) and to consume it (because he is fire) without destroying the sinner, but rather saving him.”[8] This God does in the sacrifice of his Son: “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor. 5:21). We the guilty stand in the perfect righteousness of Christ before God, “justified by his blood” (Rom. 5:9a). And because God justifies us as righteous through faith in Christ, he saves us from his wrath and unto eternal life.

Saves

The love of God does not let us continue in our sin but saves us from it. The love of God does not leave us to sin’s consequences but saves us from them. The love of God does not leave us to what our sin deserves but saves us from perishing. Thank God he does not love the way the world loves! For, those who continue in their sins will be given over to them. Those left to the consequences of sin will suffer for them. And those left in their sin will receive not love but judgment.

But God shows his love for us in that we “shall be saved by him from the wrath of God” (Rom. 5:9b). We do not save ourselves by living for Christ but are saved “by him.” Our salvation then is not a response to a profession of faith but a gift of love “before the ages began” (1 Tim. 1:9b). It began, as Paul puts it, “before the foundation of the world. …In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ” (Eph. 1:4b-5a). And what God the Father ordained, God the Son accomplished, and God the Holy Spirit applies to us through faith.

Reconciles

To be reconciled to God means we enjoy fellowship with God without condemnation. We, who were once enemies, are now his children. “See what kind of love the Father has given to us,” the apostle John writes, “that we should be called children of God; and so we are” (1 John 3:1a). We who were once deserving of death can now cry, “Abba! Father!” (Rom. 8:15). We who were once deserving of his wrath are now joint heirs of the kingdom. Such is the love of God, shown most generously to the most undeserving.

The love of God reconciles as only he who is love can: giving, justifying, saving, reconciling not for the sake of the sinner but our Savior: “Christ also suffered once for sin, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God” (1 Pet. 3:18). And this he has accomplished not by accepting our sin but substituting the atoning death of his Son for it, not by allowing us to wallow in debauchery but reconciling us to himself in Christ. “In Christ Jesus,” Paul writes to the Ephesians, “you who once were far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ …. that he might….reconcile us both to God in one body through the cross” (Eph. 2:13-17). In Christ, we are “brought near” to love himself.

For this, we rejoice but not only because we have been saved from the wrath of God but because we are reconciled to God through our Lord Jesus Christ. We rejoice because we are now, today, reconciled to the lover of our soul. We rejoice today because the one who knows us best loves us most. We rejoice today because “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8).

And today, we too may share the love of God with a world that does not know love. If we would love with the love of God, then let us give the gift of the gospel. If we would love with the love of God, we will point the weak, the ungodly, the enemy of God to the love of God in Christ Jesus. If we would love with the love of God, then let us not call sin love but tell of the one who loves us enough to justify the sinner righteous. If we would love with the love of God, then let us not reconcile the sinner with his sin but share a gospel that makes a sinner a saint.

If we would love with the love of God, then let us not accept sin in ourselves but mortify it. A righteous life tells the world of your love for God. And if we would love with the love of God, then “let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. … Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another” (1 John 4:7-11). Amen.

---

[1] Unless referenced otherwise, all Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible, English Standard Version (Wheaton: Crossway Bibles, 2001).

[2] D.A. Carson, The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God (Wheaton: Crossway, 2000), 10.

[3] Ibid., 11.

[4] J.I. Packer, “The Love of God: Universal and Particular,” Celebrating the Saving Work of God: The Collected Shorter Writings of J.I. Packer, Vol. I (Carlisle: Paternoster Press, 1998), 149.

[5] D.A. Carson, The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God (Wheaton: Crossway, 2000), 16-24.

[6] John Calvin quoted in Terry L. Johnson, The Identity and Attributes of God (Edinburgh: The Banner of Truth Trust, 2019), 285.

[7] https://www.ligonier.org/podcasts/ultimately-with-rc-sproul/holy-holy-holy

[8] Johnson, 289.