Chapter Nine: Knowing God’s Love
KNOWING GOD’S LOVE
Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall trouble or hardship or persecution or famine or nakedness or danger or sword? . . . No, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him who loved us.
ROMANS 8:35, 37
A friend of mine who spends a good amount of time encouraging others found himself distraught over the spiritual struggles of one of his children. In desperation he cried out, “God, I think I’m doing a better job taking care of Your children than You are of mine.” He told me, “As soon as I said it, I repented to the Lord.” Nevertheless, his frustrating experience illustrates a point. Most of us are tempted, from time to time, to question God’s love for us.
I can identify with my friend. Once when one of our children was going through a series of difficult experiences, I said, “God, I wouldn’t treat my child the way You are treating her.” I, too, had to repent of my brash words and work through the assurance in the Scriptures that God’s love is just as real in times of adversity as it is in times of blessing.
It seems the more we come to believe in and accept the sovereignty of God over every event of our lives, the more we are tempted to question His love. We think, “If God is in control of this adversity and can do something about it, why doesn’t He?” Rabbi Kushner chose to believe in a God who is good but not sovereign. Sometimes we are tempted, if only momentarily, to believe in a sovereign God who is not good. Satan, whose very first act toward man was to question the goodness of God, will even plant the thought in our minds that God is up in heaven mocking us in our distress.
But we are not forced to choose between the sovereignty and the goodness of God. The Bible affirms both His sovereignty and His goodness with equal emphasis. References to His goodness and loving-kindness, like His sovereignty, appear on almost every page of Scripture. In our struggles with adversity, we dare not malign the goodness of God. As Philip Hughes said, “That he cares not is just as unthinkable as that he can not.”[1]
The apostle John said, “God is love” (1 John 4:8). This succinct statement, along with its parallel one, “God is light” (1 John 1:5; that is, God is holy), sums up the essential character of God, as revealed to us in the Scriptures. Just as it is impossible in the very nature of God for Him to be anything but perfectly holy, so it is impossible for Him to be anything but perfectly good.[2]
Because God is love, it is an essential part of His nature to do good and show mercy to His creatures. Psalm 145 speaks of His “abundant goodness,” of His being “rich in love” and “good to all,” of having “compassion on all he has made,” and of being “loving toward all he has made” (verses 7-9, 17). Even in His role of Judge of rebellious men, He declares, “I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked” (Ezekiel 33:11).
When we are in the midst of adversity and, as it frequently seems to happen, calamity after calamity seems to be surging in upon us, we will be tempted to doubt God’s love. Not only do we struggle with our own doubts, but Satan seizes these occasions to whisper accusations against God, such as, “If He loved you, He wouldn’t have allowed this to happen.” My own experience suggests that Satan attacks us far more in the area of God’s love than either His sovereignty or His wisdom.
We cannot keep from being tempted, but if we are to honor God by trusting Him, we must not allow such thoughts to lodge in our minds. As Philip Hughes again said, “To question the goodness of God is, in essence, to imply that man is more concerned about goodness than is God. . . . To suggest that man is kinder than God is to subvert the very nature of God. . . . It is to deny God; and this is precisely the thrust of the temptation to question the goodness of God.”[3]
Let’s go back to the two incidents at the beginning of the chapter. In both instances my friend and I questioned the goodness of God. We did just what Philip Hughes warned against. We, even though only momentarily, told God we were more concerned about goodness toward our children than He was; that we were kinder than He is. In our more reasoned moments such thoughts are unthinkable to us, but in times of prolonged adversity, we can begin to entertain such thoughts.
Even righteous Job, who at the beginning of his calamities was able to say, “The LORD gave and the LORD has taken away; may the name of the LORD be praised” (Job 1:21), finally came to the place where he too questioned the goodness of God. He said, “God denies me justice,” and “It profits a man nothing when he tries to please God” (Job 34:5, 9).
If God is perfect in His love and abundant in His goodness, how do we take a stand against our own doubts and the temptations of Satan to question the goodness of God? What truths about God do we need to store up in our hearts to use as weapons against temptations to doubt His love?
There is no doubt that the most convincing evidence of God’s love in all of Scripture is His giving His Son to die for our sins.
This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. 1 JOHN 4:9-10
John said that God is love, and this is how He showed His love, by sending His Son to die for us. Our greatest need is not freedom from adversity. All the possible calamities that could occur in this life cannot in any way be compared with the absolute calamity of eternal separation from God. Jesus said no earthly joy could compare with the eternal joy of our names written in heaven (see Luke 10:20). In like manner, no earthly adversity can compare with that awful calamity of God’s eternal judgment in hell.
So when John said that God showed His love by sending His Son, he was saying God showed His love by meeting our greatest need—a need so great that no other need can even come close to it in comparison. If we want proof of God’s love for us, then we must look first at the Cross where God offered up His Son as a sacrifice for our sins. Calvary is the one objective, absolute, irrefutable proof of God’s love for us.
The extent of God’s love at Calvary is seen in both the infinite cost to Him of giving His one and only Son, and in the wretched and miserable condition of those He loved. God could not remove our sins without an infinite cost to both Himself and His Son. And because of their great love for us, both were willing—yes more than merely willing—to pay that great cost, the Father in giving His one and only Son, and the Son in laying down His life for us. One of the essential characteristics of love is the element of self-sacrifice, and this was demonstrated for us to its ultimate in God’s love at Calvary.
Consider also the miserable and wretched condition of those God loved. Paul said, “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). It is sometimes difficult for those of us who grew up in morally upright or Christian homes to appreciate the force of Paul’s statement, “while we were still sinners.” Because we were generally upright and morally decent people in the eyes of society around us and in our own eyes, it is difficult for us to see ourselves as God saw us, as wretched, miserable, rebellious sinners.
But Paul describes us as being spiritually dead in our transgressions and sins (see Ephesians 2:1). Ezekiel’s vision of Israel as a valley of very dry bones (see Ezekiel 37) would be an apt description of all of us before our salvation. One day a friend and I were marveling about the conversion of one of the more notorious white-collar criminals of our time. I said to my friend, “How dead is dead? Weren’t we just as spiritually dead before our salvation as he was?” Regardless of how morally upright we had been in our unsaved state, we still appeared to God like the house of Israel, nothing more than a pile of bones, bones that were very dry.
Paul continues in Ephesians 2 with his description of our wretched condition. He says we followed the ways of this world (see verse 2), that is, of the ungodly society around us. Not only did we follow the ways of the ungodly society, we even followed the Devil, whom Paul calls the ruler of the kingdom of the air. Perhaps it was not by a conscious, deliberate choice that we followed the Devil, but we did so because we were under his power and dominion (see Acts 26:18; Colossians 1:13). We were actually servants of the archenemy of God. Further, Paul says that we spent our days gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature, following its desires and thoughts (see Ephesians 2:3). We lived for ourselves, our ambitions, our desires, our pleasures. And then, as Paul continues this description of us in our unsaved state, he concludes with the statement that we were by nature objects of God’s wrath. We must not lose sight of the fact that God’s wrath is very real and very justified. We have all sinned incessantly against a holy, righteous God. We have rebelled willfully against His commands, defied His moral law, and acted in total defiance of His known will for us. Because of these actions, we were justly objects of His wrath.
Perhaps you wonder why, in a chapter on the love of God in adversity, I have seemingly digressed so extensively about our sinful condition. I have done so for two reasons: First, that we might see the depth of God’s love, not only in giving His one and only Son, but in giving Him to die for such people as Paul has described us to be.
But I have dwelt on this point for another reason. When we begin to question the love of God, we need to remember who we are. We have absolutely no claim on His love. We don’t deserve one bit of God’s goodness to us. I once heard a speaker say, “Anything this side of hell is pure grace.” I know of nothing that will so quickly cut the nerve of a petulant, “Why did this happen to me?” attitude as a realization of who we are before God, considered in ourselves apart from Christ.
We see then that God loved us when we were totally unworthy, when there was nothing whatsoever within us that would call forth His love.
Any time that we are tempted to doubt God’s love for us, we should go back to the Cross. We should reason somewhat in this fashion: If God loved me enough to give His Son to die for me when I was His enemy, surely He loves me enough to care for me now that I am His child. Having loved me to the ultimate extent at the Cross, He cannot possibly fail to love me in my times of adversity. Having given such a priceless gift as His Son, surely He will also give all else that is consistent with His glory and my good.
Note that I said we should reason. If we are to trust God in adversity, we must use our minds in those times to reason through the great truths of God’s sovereignty, wisdom, and love as they are revealed to us in the Scriptures. We must not allow our emotions to hold sway over our minds. Rather, we must seek to let the truth of God rule our minds. Our emotions must become subservient to the truth. This does not mean we do not feel the pain of adversity and heartache. We feel it keenly. Nor does it mean we should seek to bury our emotional pain in a stoic-like attitude. We are meant to feel the pain of adversity, but we must resist allowing that pain to cause us to lapse into hard thoughts about God.
It may seem cold and even unspiritual to seek to reason through the truths of God’s love in times of heartache, pain, and disappointment. But it is neither cold nor unspiritual. Paul himself, in one of the most ecstatic passages of Scripture, used a form of reasoning—an argument from the greater to the lesser—when he said, “He who did not spare his own Son, but gave him up for us all—how will he not also, along with him, graciously give us all things?” (Romans 8:32). Paul reasoned that if God loved us so much to give us the greatest conceivable gift, then surely He will not withhold any lesser blessing from us. Or to restate this truth in a way more applicable to our present theme: If God’s love was sufficient for my greatest need, my eternal salvation, surely it is sufficient for my lesser needs, the adversities I encounter in this life. If we are going to come to the same heartfelt conviction that Paul had, that no adversity can separate us from the love of God, we must use our minds to reason through the great truths of Scripture even as Paul did.
GOD’S FAMILY LOVE
By God’s grace having trusted Christ as our Savior, we who are believers have been brought into the very family of God. He has covenanted with us to be our God, and we to be His people (see Hebrews 8:10). Through Christ He has adopted us as His children and has sent His Holy Spirit to live within us and to testify with our spirit that we are His children. The Holy Spirit bears witness within us to this filial relationship we have with God when He causes us to cry in our hearts, “Abba, Father” (Romans 8:15-16). It was said that in the Jewish household, slaves were not allowed to use the word “Abba” to address the head of the family. It was a word reserved for the children. Thus Paul’s use of that word is intended to convey to us how deeply the Spirit assures us that we are indeed children of the Most High God, now our heavenly Father.
As our heavenly Father, God loves us, His children, with a very special love, a fatherly love. He calls us His “chosen people, holy and dearly loved” (Colossians 3:12, emphasis added). As incredible as it may seem, “He will take great delight in you . . . will rejoice over you with singing” (Zephaniah 3:17). He delights in us as a father delights in his children. As Matthew Henry observed when commenting on Zephaniah 3:17, “The great God not only loves his saints, but he loves to love them.” God takes great delight in loving us because we are His very own.
In Psalm 103:11, David speaks of God’s fatherly love in this way: “For as high as the heavens are above the earth, so great is his love for those who fear him.” In the last chapter, we saw that God’s ways are higher than our ways, as the heavens are higher than the earth. Here we see that God’s love for His own is as high as the heavens are above the earth. Just as God’s wisdom, like the height of the heavens, cannot be measured, so God’s love for us cannot be measured. It is not only perfect in its effect, it is infinite in its extent. No calamity that may come upon us, however great it may be, can carry us beyond the pale of God’s fatherly love for us.
GOD’S LOVE IN CHRIST
This infinite, measureless love of God is poured out upon us, not because of who we are or what we are, but because we are in Christ Jesus. Note that in Romans 8:39, Paul says that “[nothing] will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” The love of God flows to us entirely through, or in, Jesus Christ. The term in Christ is one Paul uses frequently to refer to our spiritually organic union with Jesus Christ. Jesus speaks of this same union in His metaphor of the vine and its branches in John 15. Just as the branches are organically related to the vine in a life-giving union, so believers, in a spiritual sense, are organically united to Christ. Just as the parts of the body are organically related to its head, so we are spiritually related to Christ in this same way.
It is very important that we grasp this crucial concept that God’s love to us is in Christ. Just as God’s love to His Son cannot change, so His love to us cannot change because we are in union with the One He loves. God’s love to us can no more waver than His love to His Son can waver.
We are constantly tempted to look within ourselves to seek to find some reason why God should love us. Such searching is, of course, usually discouraging. We usually find within ourselves reasons why we think God should not love us. Such searching is also unbiblical. The Bible is quite clear that God does not look within us for a reason to love us. He loves us because we are in Christ Jesus. When He looks at us, He does not look at us as “stand alone” Christians, resplendent in our own good works, even good works as Christians. Rather, as He looks at us, He sees us united to His beloved Son, clothed in His righteousness. He loves us, not because we are lovely in ourselves, but because we are in Christ.
Here then is another weapon of truth that we should store up in our hearts to use against our doubts and the temptation to question God’s love for us. God’s love to us cannot fail any more than His love to Christ can fail. We must learn to see our adversities in relation to our union with Christ. God does not deal with us as, so to speak, “free standing” individuals. He does deal with us individually, but as individuals united to Christ.
GOD’S SOVEREIGN LOVE
In earlier chapters we look extensively at the sovereignty of God over all of His universe. That sovereignty is exercised primarily for His glory. But because you and I are in Christ Jesus, His glory and our good are linked together. Because we are united with Christ, whatever is for His glory is also for our good. And whatever is for our good is for His glory.
Therefore, we can, with scriptural warrant, say that God exercises His sovereignty on our behalf. Paul says in Ephesians 1:22-23, “God placed all things under his feet and appointed him [Christ] to be head over everything for the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills everything in every way.” That is, Christ reigns over the entire universe for the benefit of His body, the church. We have already seen that God’s sovereignty is absolute over the most awesome earthly or spiritual powers and penetrates to the most mundane and minute details of life. Now we see in Ephesians 1:22-23 that this power is exercised by Christ on behalf of the church, which is His body.
It is because the church is His body that Christ exercises His sovereignty on its behalf. That is, in the words of New Testament commentator William Hendriksen, “since he is so intimately and indissolubly united with [the church] and loves it with such profound, boundless, and steadfast love,” Christ’s power is being used for the government of the universe. Hendriksen goes on to say,
It is the closeness of the bond, the unfathomable character of the love between Christ and his church that is stressed by the head-body symbolism. . . . Since the church is Christ’s body, with which he is organically united, he loves it so much that in its interest he exercises his infinite power in causing the entire universe with all that is in it to co-operate, whether willingly or unwillingly.[4]
We can see that it is our union with Christ that guarantees that God’s sovereign power is exercised on our behalf. This, of course, does not mean that, because of our union with Christ, we should not expect any adversity in this life. The Scriptures clearly teach just the opposite. It does mean that those adversities are being controlled by God and used by Him only in ways that His wisdom and love dictate.
This idea of God’s sovereignty being united with His love for the benefit of His people is expressed in another symbol—the shepherd and his sheep—in Isaiah 40. In verses 10-11, the prophet says,
See, the Sovereign LORD comes with power,
and his arm rules for him. . . .
He tends his flock like a shepherd:
He gathers the lambs in his arms
and carries them close to his heart;
he gently leads those that have young.
The juxtaposition in this passage of God’s sovereign power and His gentle care of His sheep is striking. The arm of the Lord in Scripture is always a symbol of His mighty power and strength; and the title shepherd, when used of God, always indicates His tender care and constant watchfulness.
In this passage, God’s sovereign power and tender care are united for the benefit of His people. The same arm that is exercised in power over all the universe is used to gather up His lambs and to carry them close to His heart. No more picturesque symbol of God’s love for us can be given than that of the faithful and tender Shepherd carrying His lambs close to His heart. And we are carried in the arms of sovereign power.
Alexander Carson said,
God’s sovereignty is always to his people in wisdom and in love. This is the difference between sovereignty in God and sovereignty in man. We dread the sovereignty of man, because we have no security of its being exercised in mercy, or even justice: we rejoice in the sovereignty of God, because we are sure it is always exercised for the good of his people.[5]
Professor Berkouwer said, “God’s Providence is not only a matter of Divine invincibility and power, but of the invincibility and power of His love.” And he also said,
This is the comfort, that we stand at the disposal of a merciful heavenly Father to whom we can with confidence abandon ourselves. . . . He makes an eternal covenant of grace with us, and adopts us for His children and heirs, and therefore will provide us with every good thing and avert all evil or turn it to our profit.[6]
The psalmist said, “I have hidden your word in my heart that I might not sin against you” (Psalm 119:11). To murmur against God and to question His goodness is indeed sin. We should work as diligently in trusting God’s love as we do in obeying His commands. If we are going to trust God’s love, we must store up in our hearts these great truths we have looked at in this chapter—God’s love at Calvary, our union with Christ, and the sovereignty of God’s love exercised on our behalf.
God’s love is an objective truth that cannot be contradicted. But it is truth we must store away in our minds and hearts. Then we must use it in the midst of adversity to deal with our doubts, combat the accusations of Satan, and glorify God by trusting Him.