[Living Word] Love of God - Part 3

" 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.

O love of God, how rich and pure!
How measureless and strong!
It shall forevermore endure
The saints’ and angels’ song... ”

– The Love of God, a hymn by Frederick Lehman

The love of God is indeed greater far than tongue or pen can ever tell. Yet, because He loves us so much He has sent His Word down to earth that we, in spite of how fallen we are, may have a chance to know Him and to seek Him. From Scripture, we can see many examples of God’s love. Categorically, there are 5 main genus of such examples, though this list is not exhaustive.

1. God’s love within the Trinity. This is shown in God’s love for His son, Jesus, and reciprocally, Jesus’s love for the Father. The Father’s love for His son is one of revelatory and trusting delegation. John 3:35 says, “The Father loves the Son and has placed everything in his hands.” And the Son’s love for the Father is one of willing obedience, which crystallised in the crucifixion. Here I take leave to a little theological philosophy: it is with this premise of Intra-Trinitarian Love that God’s love can exist in itself, independent of any other notion of love, and hence also logically buttressing the statement that “God is Love”, because if this Intra-Trinitarian Love never existed, God’s love would be perceived in terms of His relation to the external, i.e., beyond Himself, and the apostle John should/would have written “God is loving” or “God loves”, and not “God is Love”. It is also on this logical premise that we can say God’s love is everlasting. I shall expound on this further in subsequent parts.

2. God’s sacrificial love. The Father sacrificed His only begotten son, and the Son sacrificed His life; not only that, Jesus emptied Himself of divine glory to enter this world, be betrayed and afflicted, be escorted all the way to the cross where the Father poured the cup of His wrath – the culmination of His wrath against the sins of every human being that exist(s)(ed) across time – onto the Son. All these because “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. ” (John 3:16), and “by this we know love, that he (Christ Jesus, God the Son) laid down his life for us… ” (1 John 3:16).

3. God’s providential love. It is such an amazing perplexity that God is able to sustain the amalgamation of all the cosmos and all the atoms and forces that stitch the universe together and we know it because “You are the LORD, you alone. You have made heaven, the heaven of heavens, with all their host, the earth and all that is on it, the seas and all that is in them; and you preserve all of them” (Nehemiah 9:6) [ESV]; also it is said “God gives to all men life and breath and everything else... For in Him we live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17:25,28). And Jesus knows this because Hebrews 1:3 tells us, “The Son is… sustaining all things by his powerful word.” This very same person who merely ‘speaks’ existence into existence, have told us to “look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them” (Matthew 6:26) and “why are you anxious about clothing?”, “but if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O you of little faith? ” (Matthew 6:28-30). Indisputably, God provides; His Providence is for everything, down to the last detail.

4. God’s love for His elect. A highly precarious topic to tread but one which will inevitably have to be returned to. As much as we can try to democratise our God, we have to embrace the fact that a crucial cornerstone of our faith is built on this – the doctrine of election, or sometimes fragrantly known as grace. Israel was chosen as God’s own people, not because Israel was powerful or possessed any other merits but merely because He loved them: “The LORD did not set his affection on you and choose you because you were more numerous than other peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples. But it was because the LORD loved you and kept the oath he swore to your forefathers that he brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the land of slavery, from the power of Pharaoh king of Egypt.” (Deuteronomy 7:7-8). God also chose His new Israel, the NT Church not by the basis of merit but solely by loving grace, “for he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight” (Ephesians 1:4). I mentioned that this is precarious because to have an Elect, the corollary is that there is a Reprobate; there are times even when God’s love appears to be discriminatory: “Yet I have loved Jacob, but Esau I have hated” (Malachi 1:2-3). Perhaps I am now touching the Pandora’s Box, but precisely because God’s love is so intricately inexplicable that we must wrestle with it.

5. God’s conditional love. We’d like to think that because God has chosen us and chosen us to be the object of His everlasting love, it is done. Indeed, it is done, but… There are ‘buts’. This begs the perennial issue of “once saved always saved”, but we shall leave it to a later time. For now, we should bear in mind that the love of God is but one coordinate in an entire matrix of His character – I say matrix because the coordinates are not separate and/or distinct from one another, but are all intricately inter-woven into His personality – and we ought to remember that our Lord is also a just God, a wise/omniscient God and all-powerful/omnipotent God. Hence, His love for us, for His elect, must be seen side-by-side with His justice, which is why there are conditions. Deuteronomy 7:9-11 says “Know therefore that the LORD your God is God; he is the faithful God, keeping his covenant of love to a thousand generations of those who love him and keep his commands. But those who hate him he will repay to their face by destruction; he will not be slow to repay to their face those who hate him. Therefore, take care to follow the commands, decrees and laws I give you today” and Christ in John 15:9-10 decreed to us, “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love. If you obey my commands, you will remain in my love, just as I have obeyed my Father's commands and remain in his love.” Evidently, one is able to remain and not remain in God’s love, the deciding predicate being obedience.

I ought to admit that to segment examples of God’s love into categories can be obstructive to comprehending the fullness of His love, but it has served me well in at least inching towards a slight understanding of it. Indeed, God’s love means many things to different people, but I should, at this point, add a caveat and warning that one should never perceive such aspects of God in absolute or lean towards a particular inclination and hold a skewed perspective of the entire body, i.e., God’s love is not just the Intra-Trinitarian love, and not just His sacrificial love; it is an amalgamation of everything good that comes out of goodness, of Love itself.

As a conclusion to this part and prelude to the rest of the chapters where I will expound on the examples of love mentioned here, I should now pose a question on 1 John 4:19 – “ We love because he first loved us. ” From a philological perspective, the conclusion that “we love” leading from the premise that God “first loved us” seems to be rather fallacious. Rather perplexing. Did John mean that I love my family, my spouse, my friends, and even my pet kitten because God loves me? Was he talking about the capacity to love, or the act of loving (in continuous tense) that we are presumed to be executing presently? Regardless if it were the former or latter, how is it derived from the premise that it is because God “first loved us”?

Didn’t I tell you the love of God is rather abstruse? Not as simple as your “love is only a feeling” axiom eh?

“ When years of 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. ”

- Last two stanzas of The Love of God