Nov
21
God’s Love in Scripture
This is my third and final post citing from J.I. Packer’s contribution to Hell Under Fire (2004), following “Universalism and Salvation” and “Biblical Teaching on Eternal Punishment”. Packer explains (or reminds us of) how God’s love is expressed in His Word and, among other things, that God’s “revealed plan of love” is centered always on Jesus Christ.
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“How is the biblical truth about God’s love to be ascertained? By contextual, analogical, author-specific, focus-specific exegesis of Holy Scripture, as we indicated earlier. ‘Love’ is a much-abused word in our culture, having been cheapened to mean liking and wanting things for oneself (‘I love ice cream/music/skiing/sex,’ etc.), or liking and indulging particular people (‘I love my son so I give him everything he wants’). The Bible’s presentation of God’s love for his creatures is, however, quite different from all of that.
In Scripture, God’s love appears framed by three realities. The first is his ownership of, and dominion over, all that he has made — that is his universal lordship. He is always God on the throne and in control. Second is his holiness, the quality whereby he requires virtue and purity of us, recoils from our vices and rebellion against him, visits the vicious with just judgment for what they have done, and vindicates himself by establishing righteousness in his world. The third reality is everybody’s actual sinfulness and constant failure to match God’s standards and obey his Word. It is within this framework that the divine way of acting — which the Old Testament usually calls goodness and loving-kindness (covenant love) and the New Testament calls agape and charis (grace) — finds expression. Its relational form is always that of being mercy from the holy Lord to persons who do not deserve any good gift from his hand….
In all God’s purposes of saving sinners through his love, the exalting of the Lord Jesus Christ — Son of God and Savior, our Mediator and Redeemer — is centrally significant, and the supreme privilege of those who experience God’s saving love is to know that they are the appointed and predestined means to that end (Eph. 1:3-14; Col. 1:13-20,27-28; 2:6-7; 3:1-4; Rev. 5; 19:6-16). Every aspect of salvation is the fruit of God’s free, sovereign, holy, Christ-exalting love….
What then is God’s revealed plan of love? It is a restorative plan for a fallen world. The entire human race is guilty and corrupt (Rom. 1:18-3:20), and God has chosen to create a new humanity through, in, and for Christ, his incarnate Son. For this he has chosen, redeemed, and now calls into faith and newness of life a multitude of Jews and non-Jews, from every tribe and language and people and nation (Rom. 8:39-9:29; Eph. 1-3; 5:25-27; Rev. 5:9-14; 7:9-17). Paul pictures them as a body of which Christ is the Head (leader, command center, and life-imparting authority) and in which all Christians are functioning units (Rom. 12:4-8; I Cor. 12; Eph. 4:11-16). With, through, and under Christ, these persons will finally constitute God’s new Jerusalem, from which the vicious and ungodly will be excluded (Rev. 21:1-22:5; note esp. 21:8,27).
Such is God’s strategy of love, from which Christian believers, looking back, draw the assurance of their faith in Christ and, looking forward, draw the confidence of their hope in Christ. They are ‘in the know’ as to what God has done, is doing, and will do, and because of this knowledge, unthinkable evils and hostilities find them unsinkable in their faith, hope, and love Christward and Godward, as the book of Revelation celebrates.
That this plan of love contains elements of mystery — that is divine fact beyond our full understanding — is not a new discovery. The question ‘Why has God chosen to show his sovereign mercy in saving this sinner and not that one?’ is as old as Augustine, and probably as old as the apostle Paul (see Rom. 9). We do not know why, and it looks as if we will never be told; our part is not to ask or try to guess why, but to praise God for his love to us whom he has called….
What we know is that everyone, including ourselves, deserves condemnation, rejection, and eternal punishment in hell, so that it is supreme agape that God should go into the business of saving sinners at the cost of the humiliation and death of his Son. It is surpassingly marvelous that God should save many; it is, indeed, a wonder that he should save any, and it was certainly ‘Amazing grace!… that saved a wretch like me.’ Knowing these things must and will keep us in endless praise, both here and hereafter, and praise will preempt any puzzlement about God’s revealed and unrevealed ways.”
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Wow. That’s a lot of info right there, a lot to unpack and ponder. In fact, you might say it’s both a summary of the gospel and a crash course in basic Christian theology.
