What sense the law assigns to love the central
What sense the law assigns to love the central(TOC)
Or supreme place among the divine attributes
From what has been said we are able to determine in what sense the law assigns to love the central or supreme place among the divine attributes. It is evident that this cannot be affirmed after the modern fashion, as if there was nothing in God but love, and every mode of His self-revelation were a form of love. There is that in the character of Jehovah which cannot be reduced to terms of love for the creature, though undoubtedly it must be subsumable, like all that is in Him, under the categories of holiness and righteousness. It is a striking fact that the Torah, as little as the other parts of the Old Testament, contains the proposition, God is love; whereas it does contain the statement that He is a consuming fire (Deuteronomy 4:24). The vocation of the law to perform a ministry of condemnation may explain this. But even though such a proposition did occur, the fact that the other occurs side by side with it should restrain us from putting upon it an interpretation which would bring the law into conflict with itself. And yet even this opening volume of Scripture recognizes with sufficient clearness that in one sense the love of Jehovah for His people transcends all His other perfections. He would not be Himself if He did not punish sin: His righteousness and wrath are necessary elements in His nature. But it would certainly not be in the spirit of the Pentateuch to say that God takes the same intense personal delight in punishing as He does in the exercise of His love. He releases His anger, if we may speak after the manner of men, because conscientiously He cannot do otherwise. He loves because the entire weight of His infinite Being inclines Him to do so. Just as in our human life, what we do from inclination issues from the center of our personality, while what we do from conscientious motives proceeds from the periphery, so in the life of God, though all is equally perfect and necessary, yet Scripture teaches us to recognize degrees in the satisfaction wherewith He contemplates the working of His various attributes in relation to the world. It is a more blessed thing for the Almighty to love than to punish. In an isolated case the strong anthropomorphic pathos of the discourse may lead to a manner of speech which would seem to ignore this principle, as when Deuteronomy says that Jehovah will rejoice in destroying Israel (Deuteronomy 28:63), but, on the whole, the statement just made must be held to reflect faithfully the teaching of the law and of the entire Old Testament on the subject. The elaborate system of sacrifices provided for the expiation of sin bears witness to this. We need not investigate here whether this expiation is conceived of as preventing or as neutralizing the burning of the divine wrath; in either case it is Jehovah Himself who, in His love, by anticipation, protects the sinner from the destructive effects of His own resentment of sin, and thus makes love triumph over wrath. Nay, the law gives formal and emphatic expression to the principle in question when it makes the mercy of Jehovah extend to a thousand generations, whilst His anger is said to reach only to the third and to the fourth of them that hate Him (Exodus 20:5, 6, 7; 34:6, 7 . Cf. Deuteronomy 7:9).