The Love of God
Notes
Transcript
Handout
Does God love the elect more than the unelect, or does he love them the same?
If you want to understand more about the love of God, I encourage you to read The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God by, D. A. Carson. I am indebted to his work on this topic.
If I am to answer this question we will need to understand two things.
First, we will need to define the elect and the unelect.
Second, we will need to have a working knowledge of the love of God in all its facets.
Scripture defines the elect in three ways.
Scripture defines the elect as the entire nation of Israel (Exodus 6:7 ; Ezekiel 20:5).
7 I will take you to be my people, and I will be your God, and you shall know that I am the Lord your God, who has brought you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians.
Scripture defines the elect as the remnant of Israel (Romans 11).
1 I ask, then, has God rejected his people? By no means! For I myself am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, a member of the tribe of Benjamin.
2 God has not rejected his people whom he foreknew. Do you not know what the Scripture says of Elijah, how he appeals to God against Israel?
3 “Lord, they have killed your prophets, they have demolished your altars, and I alone am left, and they seek my life.”
4 But what is God’s reply to him? “I have kept for myself seven thousand men who have not bowed the knee to Baal.”
5 So too at the present time there is a remnant, chosen by grace.
6 But if it is by grace, it is no longer on the basis of works; otherwise grace would no longer be grace.
Scripture defines the elect as the church as whole and as individuals (John 15:16-19; Romans 8:29-30; Ephesians 1:3-6; 5:25-27).
3 Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places,
4 even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love
5 he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will,
6 to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved.
Now that we understand the Scripture’s view of the elect, we can easily define the unelect as those whom the Trinity has not chosen to receive salvation and be his children.
The question given is not whether God loves, but to the degree he loves. Does he love everyone the same or does he love the elect more?
To answer this we have to have a working knowledge of the love of God in all its facets. There are five major facets of the love of God. No facet is independent of another, neither is God’s love independent of his other attributes. All inform each other in perfection, for he is God.
D.A Carson writes: ‘The theme of the love of God is not soon exhausted either in our experience or in our theology. Doubtless it will occupy our reflection and call forth our adoration in eternity.” (Carson, D. A. The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God. Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2000.)
The first facet to consider is God’s intra-Trinitarian love, that is the love shared by Father, Son and Holy Spirit from eternity past. This shared love is the source of all love and the model which John is drawing from in 1 John 4. We also see this love expressed through Jesus in action with the Father and the Holy Spirit in the Gospels.
7 Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God.
8 Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.
God, then, is the one who defines love. He gives a fairly robust definition for us to model in Matthew 5 and 1 Corinthians 13. We want to make sure that we are applying God’s definition of love when we are answering the question of how much does God love.
44 But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you,
The second facet to consider is God’s providential love. This love is expressed in verses like Matthew 5:45
45 so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.
The fact that he continues to sustain creation and bring provision to individuals in the world regardless of person or creed speaks to his providential love for all his creation.
The third facet to consider is God’s desired or yearning love expressed in him warning the world of judgement and his invitation and command to repent and believe in Jesus. We see this clearly in these passages John 3:16-18; 1 Timothy 2:3-6; 2 Peter 3:9.
16 “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.
17 For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the world might be saved through him.
18 Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.
This would be the unelect part of the question. We see here clearly that God loves sinners. This is where we have to be careful of bringing a cultural definition of love into the mix. We do this with the quite common phrase of, “God loves the sinner, but hates the sin.”
This is done because the human experience tends to say that love and hate are mutually exclusive. That is not so in God’s economy. He does not separate sinner from sin and chooses to both love and hate the sinner . See Proverbs 6:16-19 for an example of God hating sin.
D.A. Carson writes, “God’s wrath is not an implacable, blind rage. However emotional it may be, it is an entirely reasonable and willed response to offenses against his holiness. But his love, … wells up amidst his perfections and is not generated by the loveliness of the loved. Thus there is nothing intrinsically impossible about wrath and love being directed toward the same individual or people at the same time. God in his perfections must be wrathful against his rebel image-bearers, for they have offended him; God in his perfections must be loving toward his rebel image-bearers, for he is that kind of God.” (D. A. Carson, The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2000), 69.)
The fourth facet to consider is God’s conditional love toward his covenant people. This is best expressed through Hebrews 12:3-11 speaking of the discipline of the Lord upon those whom he loves. The book of 1 John is loaded with the concept of keeping in the love of God. Jude 21 says.
21 keep yourselves in the love of God, waiting for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ that leads to eternal life.
The fifth facet to consider is God’s love for the elect, those he has chosen to bring into the fullness of his glory. We already covered those passages in the beginning of the sermon. (Exodus 6:7 ; Ezekiel 20:5; John 15:16-19; Romans 8:29-30; Romans 11; Ephesians 1:3-6; 5:25-27).
I think the idea of, “Does God love the elect more?” is the result of God’s election, making me think of Titus 3:3-7.
3 For we ourselves were once foolish, disobedient, led astray, slaves to various passions and pleasures, passing our days in malice and envy, hated by others and hating one another.
4 But when the goodness and loving kindness of God our Savior appeared,
5 he saved us, not because of works done by us in righteousness, but according to his own mercy, by the washing of regeneration and renewal of the Holy Spirit,
6 whom he poured out on us richly through Jesus Christ our Savior,
7 so that being justified by his grace we might become heirs according to the hope of eternal life.
It would seem, from a human perspective, that he loves the elect more since he chose them for a relationship with him. Yet I would caution us in reading the human experience of love into the love of God. We can definitively say he loves the elect differently than the unrepentant, since the results are drastically different. Paul, in Romans 9:13-16, wrestles with the question of election. We will be working through this section of Romans on Wednesday night.
13 As it is written, “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.”
14 What shall we say then? Is there injustice on God’s part? By no means!
15 For he says to Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.”
16 So then it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy.
God is the one who chooses how he will express his love. Is it more or less for certain individuals? It would appear so from a human perspective. I think what is more important to remember is that God has chosen to love everyone, but that expression of love is different, depending on what facet of love you are functioning in, and also remembering that these facets are interdependent on all of who God is.
I would like to end with Romans 5:3-9.
3 Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance,
4 and endurance produces character, and character produces hope,
5 and hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.
6 For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.
7 For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die—
8 but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
9 Since, therefore, we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God.
God loves everyone. It is difficult to measure the degrees of love in the different facets of his love. The real questions is, will you respond to his expressed love in Jesus?