What Kind Of Love?
WHAT KIND OF LOVE?
ROMANS 5:6-8
These verses show clearly how much God loves us.
It is Paul’s way to break into a lyrical passage of praise. We see some passages in his letters: 1 Corinthians 13, the immortal poem on Christian love, is one such flight of language. These verses are in the same style.
The love of God holds the wonder of the writers of the New Testament. Look at 1 John 3:1 and 1 Peter 1:3f. And similarly these three verses. It was “at the right time” that Christ died, no unexpected tragedy, no chance crime, turned by the human imagination into theological propositions. At the proper time, determined by the Providence of God, Christ died.
“The Good Man,” whom Plato had imagined four centuries before in Athens, appeared on earth, and people did to him as Plato had anticipated they would in a quite uncanny prophecy: “The Good Man will be scourged, thrown into chains ... and after enduring every pain he will be crucified” (Plato, Republic 361 E). See also Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53.
In 5:7 the Greek text uses a definite article: “for the good man one will dare even to die.” It is another of those almost unconscious turns of language by which Paul demonstrates his complete familiarity with the common patterns of Greek thought. The Stoics talked of “the Wise Man,” and Greek philosophical debate was prone to such idealizations. Paul was using the language of his day. One so ideally good would be worth dying for.
But, Paul continues, it was not for such a one, but for us—poor specimens of the human race that Christ chose to die. It was for “the ungodly,” “sinners.” Christ’s death for such creatures assures us, therefore, of God’s love. It went far beyond where the greatest human love would dare to go (5:7). This, then, is how God reveals his love, “presents it,” as the opening verb of 5:8 literally says, in its final and unmistakable demonstration.
It is for us to choose whether to accept or to reject, and in such choice fervently, sincerely, frankly made, lies health for the soul. Christians do not claim perfection, but believing as we do that Christ chose to die to reveal to us the truth about our desperate evil and God’s love, we personally accept that sacrifice as our own. Here lies for us reconciliation with our God, a knowledge of forgiveness, and a spring of happiness, assurance and character.