The love of God
The love of God
It is not only the justice of God which seems to be incompatible with the prevailing injustices of the world, but also his love. Personal tragedies, floods and earthquakes, accidents which cost hundreds of lives, hunger and poverty on a global scale, the cold vastness of the universe, the ferocities of nature, tyranny and torture, disease and death, and the sum total of the misery of the centuries – how can these horrors be reconciled with a God of love? Why does God allow them?
Christianity offers no glib answers to these agonized questions. But it does offer evidence of God’s love, just as historical and objective as the evidence which seems to deny it, in the light of which the world’s calamities need to be viewed. This evidence is the cross. Let me begin with two verses from John’s first letter.
First, ‘this is how we know what love is: Jesus Christ laid down his life for us’ (3:16). Most people would have no difficulty in telling us what they think love is. They may know that whole books have been written with the purpose of distinguishing between different kinds of love, like Anders Nygren’s Agape and Eros (1930) and C. S. Lewis’ The Four Loves (1960). Nevertheless, they would claim that the meaning of love is self-evident. John would disagree with them, however. He dares to say that, apart from Christ and his cross, the world would never have known what true love is. Of course all human beings have experienced some degree and quality of love. But John is saying that only one act of pure love, unsullied by any taint of ulterior motive, has ever been performed in the history of the world, namely the self-giving of God in Christ on the cross for undeserving sinners. That is why, if we are looking for a definition of love, we should look not in a dictionary, but at Calvary.
John’s second verse is more precise still. ‘This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice (hilasmos) for our sins’ (4:10). In the Romans 3 passage we have just been studying, Paul takes the propitiatory nature of the cross (hilastērion) as the demonstration of God’s justice; here John takes it as the manifestation of God’s love. It is both equally. True love is God’s love, not ours, and he showed it among us (v. 9) by sending his one and only Son into the world that he might die for us and we might live through him. The two words ‘live’ (v. 9) and ‘propitiation’ (v. 10) both betray the extremity of our need. Because we were sinners, we deserved to die under the righteous anger of God. But God sent his only Son, and in sending him came himself, to die that death and bear that wrath instead of us. It was an act of sheer, pure, unmerited love.
We learn from John, then, that although in this world our attention is constantly arrested by the problems of evil and pain, which seem to contradict God’s love, we will be wise not to allow it to be deflected from the cross, where God’s love has been publicly and visibly made manifest. If the cross may be called a ‘tragedy’, it was a tragedy which illumines all other tragedies.
Paul also writes about the love of God in the first half of Romans 5. He refers to it twice, and thereby supplies us with two complementary ways of becoming assured of its reality. The first is that ‘God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us’ (v. 5). The second is that ‘God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us’ (v. 8). One of the most satisfying aspects of the gospel is the way in which it combines the objective and the subjective, the historical and the experimental, the work of God’s Son and the work of God’s Spirit. We may know that God loves us, Paul says, both because he has proved his love in history through the death of his Son, and because he continuously pours it into our hearts through the indwelling of his Spirit. And although we shall concentrate, as Paul does, on the objective demonstration of God’s love at the cross, we shall not forget that the Holy Spirit confirms that historical witness by his own inward and personal witness, as he floods our hearts with the knowledge that we are loved. It is similar to our experience of the Holy Spirit testifying with our spirit that we are God’s children – a witness he bears when, as we pray, he enables us to cry ‘Abba, Father’, because we then know ourselves to be God’s justified, reconciled, redeemed and beloved children (Rom. 8:15–16).
Because of the cross, however, ‘God demonstrates his own love for us’ (Rom. 5:8). It is his very own, sui generis, for there is no other love like it. In what does the demonstration consist? It has three parts, which together build a convincing case.
First, God gave his Son for us. True, in verse 8 Paul affirms simply that ‘Christ’ died for us. But the context tells us who this Anointed One, this Messiah, was. For according to verse 10 the death of Christ was ‘the death of his Son’. If God had sent a man to us, as he had sent the prophets to Israel, we would have been grateful. If he had sent an angel, as he did to Mary at the annunciation, we would have counted it a great privilege. Yet in either case he would have sent us a third party, since men and angels are creatures of his making. But in sending his own Son, eternally begotten from his own Being, he was not sending a creature, a third party, but giving himself. The logic of this is inescapable. How could the Father’s love have been demonstrated if he had sent somebody else to us? No, since love is in its essence self-giving, then if God’s love was seen in giving his Son, he must thereby have been giving himself. ‘God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son’ (John 3:16). Again, God ‘did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all’ (Rom. 8:32). P. T. Forsyth quite correctly added the gloss, ‘he spared not his own Son, i.e. his own Self’.19 It is because of the ultimacy of that self-giving love that Paul added his conviction that along with Christ God will ‘graciously give us all things’. All lesser gifts are comprehended within ‘his indescribable gift’ of his Son (2 Cor. 9:15).
Secondly, God gave his Son to die for us. It would still have been wonderful if God had given his Son, and so himself, only to become flesh for us, to live and give and serve for us on earth. But the incarnation was but the beginning of his self-giving. Having ‘emptied himself of his glory and taken the nature of a servant, he then ‘humbled himself’ and became ‘obedient to death – even death on a cross!’ (Phil. 2:7–8). This was to give himself to the uttermost, to the torture of crucifixion and to the horror of sin-bearing and God-forsakenness. ‘Christ died for us.’ His body died and, as we have seen, his soul died, died the death of separation from God. Sin and death are inseparable, but, whereas usually the one who sins and the one who dies are the same person, on this occasion they were not, since it was we who sinned, but he who died for our sins. This is love, holy love, inflicting the penalty for sin by bearing it. For the Sinless One to be made sin, for the Immortal One to die – we have no means of imagining the terror or the pain involved in such experiences.
Thirdly, God gave his Son to die for us, that is to say, for undeserving sinners like us. ‘Sinners’ is the first word Paul uses to describe us, failures who have missed the target and who invariably ‘fall short of the glory of God’ (3:23). Next, we were ‘ungodly’ (v. 6), for we had not given God the glory due to his name, and there was no fear of God before our eyes (3:18). Paul’s third descriptive epithet is ‘enemies’ (v. 10). That is, we were ‘God’s enemies’, as the NIV explains, for we had rebelled against his authority, rebuffed his love and been defiant of his law (8:7). The fourth and last word is ‘powerless’ (v. 6): it was ‘when we were still powerless’ that Christ died for us. For we had no power to save ourselves; we were helpless. These four words make an ugly cluster of adjectives. Very rarely, Paul argues in verse 7, somebody may be willing to die for a ‘righteous’ man (whose righteousness is cold, austere, forbidding), though for a ‘good’ man (whose goodness is warm, friendly and attractive) someone might possibly dare to die. ‘But God demonstrates his own love for us’ – his unique love – in this, that he died for sinful, godless, rebellious and helpless people like us.
The value of a love-gift is assessed both by what it costs the giver and by the degree to which the recipient may be held to deserve it. A young man who is in love, for example, will give his beloved expensive presents, often beyond what he can afford, as symbols of his self-giving love, because he considers she deserves them, and more. Jacob served seven years for Rachel because of his love for her. But God in giving his Son gave himself to die for his enemies. He gave everything for those who deserved nothing from him. ‘And that is God’s own proof of his love towards us’ (Rom. 5:8, NEB).
Canon William Vanstone has a chapter in his book Love’s Endeavour, Love’s Expense which is entitled ‘The Phenomenology of Love’ (pp.39–54). His thesis is that all human beings, even those who have been deprived of love from childhood, are able to discern authentic love instinctively. He then suggests that ‘if we can describe the form of authentic love, we can hardly look elsewhere for a description of the love of God’ (p.42). Although this conflicts with what I wrote earlier about God’s love defining ours, rather than vice versa, I know what he means and do not want to quarrel with it. He lists three marks of false love, by which its falsity is exposed. They are the mark of limitation (something is withheld), the mark of control (manipulating people), and the mark of detachment (we remain self-sufficient, unimpaired, unhurt). By contrast, authentic love is characterized by limitless self-giving, risk-taking with no certainty of success, and a vulnerability which is easily hurt. I happened to be reading Canon Vanstone’s book while I was writing this chapter, and could hardly fail to observe the parallel (even though it is not exact) between his three marks of authentic love and the three marks of God’s love unfolded by Paul in Romans 5:8. Here is Canon Vanstone’s final summary (p.115). God’s love is ‘expended in self-giving, wholly expended, without residue or reserve, drained, exhausted, spent’. That is, in giving his Son, he gave himself. Next, God’s love is ‘expended in precarious endeavour, ever poised upon the brink of failure...’. For he gave his Son to die, taking the risk of yielding up control over himself. Thirdly, God’s love is seen ‘waiting in the end, helpless before that which it loves, for the response which shall be its tragedy or its triumph’. For in giving his Son to die for sinners, God made himself vulnerable to the possibility that they would snub him and turn away.
Professor Jürgen Moltmann goes even further than this in his attempt to explain how God disclosed his love in the cross. He picks up Luther’s striking expression ‘the crucified God’ (which Luther had himself borrowed from late medieval theology), and like Luther affirms both that God defines himself, and that we come to know him, at the cross. Luther’s theologia crucis, therefore, ‘is not a single chapter in theology, but the key signature for all Christian theology’.20 No theology is genuinely Christian which does not arise from and focus on the cross. In particular, by ‘the cross’ Professor Moltmann means more than anything else the cry of dereliction. It shows, he writes, that Jesus was not only rejected by the Jews as a blasphemer and executed by the Romans as a rebel, but actually condemned and abandoned by his Father (pp.149–152). It therefore prompts the question: ‘Who is God in the cross of the Christ who is abandoned by God?’ ‘All Christian theology and all Christian life is basically an answer to the question which Jesus asked as he died’ (p.4). That is why theology has to be developed ‘within earshot of the dying cry of Jesus’ (p.201). What, then, do we understand of God when we see the crucified Jesus and hear his derelict cry? We certainly see his willingness in love to identify with human rejects. For ‘the symbol of the cross in the church points to the God who was crucified not between two candles on an altar, but between two thieves in the place of the skull, where the outcasts belong, outside the gates of the city’ (p.40). And in that awful experience which ‘divides God from God to the utmost degree of enmity and distinction’ (p.152) we have to recognize that both Father and Son suffer the cost of their surrender, though differently. ‘The Son suffers dying, the Father suffers the death of the Son. The grief of the Father here is just as important as the death of the Son. The Fatherlessness of the Son is matched by the Sonlessness of the Father’ (p.243). It is an arresting phrase. My own wish, I confess, is that Professor Moltmann had emphasized more strongly that it was with the spiritually outcast, not just the socially outcast, that is to say, with sinners not just criminals, that Jesus identified on the cross. He could then have clarified both the nature and the cause of the terrible God-forsakenness. Nevertheless, his outspoken acceptance that the dereliction was real, and is the greatest evidence of God’s love, is moving.