Sermon Tone Analysis

“How have you loved us, Lord?”

How do we know if God loves us?

God do we know if God is really “good”?

If we are honest with ourselves, we often base our sense of God’s love for us on our circumstances.

If we feel blessed, healthy, prosperous, secure, and so on, we feel that God is being good to us, so he must love us.

SATS is a case study of this.

We have enjoyed an extended season of blessing, favour, peace, and prosperity.

As a result, we feel secure in God’s love and blessing.

Maybe you have enjoyed an extended season of peace and prosperity in your life.

Your family life, business life, health, and so on are well.

Your world is in equilibrium.

God is good.

He loves you.

It all makes sense.

Do you realise how inadequate it is to base your belief about whether God is good and whether he loves you on how well things are going at the moment?

This week we prayed for a friend of one of our staff, a missionary whose daughter was carrying twins.

She was diagnosed with Stage 4 Leukemia 10 days ago, and five days later she and her babies were dead.

In our staff team of about 50 believers, all of whom love Jesus, about five are struggling with chronic health conditions.

Two of our ladies are separated from abusive husbands.

Is God still good when our worlds fall into disorder?

Does he still love us when we are hurting?

This was the exact question that the people of God were struggling with in .

Take a look at the opening verses.

The opening sentence is the introduction to the book.

The book describes itself as “a prophecy.”

The word translated prophecy denotes a burden that the prophet bears, usually a word of correction or warning to God’s people

The book itself is written in the form of a disputation.

Each section opens with God’s announcing a truth.

Next the people dispute God’s claim, the question its truthfulness.

Then God explains himself.

This is what you see in verse 2.

The Claim: “‘I have loved you,’ says the LORD.”

The Dispute: “But you ask, ‘How have you loved us?’”

To understand their retort, we need to understand their circumstances.

The Jews had returned from exile in Babylon about 60 or 70 years earlier, but their circumstances were challenging.

They knew the stories about God’s power and blessing upon their ancestors, but they were under the rule of the Persian Empire.

Life was a daily struggle to survive.

Against the backdrop of daily struggles and disappointments, which had continued for decades (just think of Zimbabwe), they were asking, “Where is the evidence of God’s love for us?”

So when the prophet announce’s God’s Word: “I have loved you!” they retort with a sceptical, doubting, “How have you loved us?”

In response God offers two proofs of his love for them.

The two proofs are applicable to us, but we need to contextualise them into the NT reality.

(The heavy theology is all in point 1, so we shall spend most of our time on it.)

1. God’s redemption proves his love

The language of election; not about “Jacob” the man and “Esau” the man, but about the two peoples who would come from them.

God chose the descendants of Jacob rather than the descendants of Esau to be his people.

The Israelites came from Jacob, while the Edomites descended from Esau.

God chose the Israelites to be his people, to receive his revelations, to experience his redemption, and to enter into his covenant.

Although Jacob and Esau were brothers, only one of the two nations they fathered was singled out by the Lord to have these special privileges—Israel!

What is the nature and purpose of this election?

In nature, it is corporate election.

God chose a people to be the special beneficiaries of his revelation and redemption.

Not every Israelite was saved, and not every non-Israelite was condemned.

Indeed, only a remnant of Israel was ever faithful to Yahweh, and there were non-Jews who had faith and were redeemed (Ruth, Nineveh, etc.).

In purpose, it is election unto service.

God chose Israel to know him so that they could make him known, to be blessed in order to be a blessing.

They were the beneficiaries of his redemptive work, not because they were superior, but because they were to be agents of his mission to the world.

The election of Israel was not about God arbitrarily predestining certain individuals to be saved while bypassing all the rest to be damned.

It was about God choosing a people to whom he could reveal himself, so that they in turn could make him known to the world.

What do we make of this language of God loving Jacob while hating Esau?

In Scripture, “loving X, hating Y” is used in two metaphorical senses.

Firstly, to love someone can mean to choose them.

Secondly, to hate someone can mean to love them less, that is, to prioritise them less.

Secondly, to hate someone can mean to love them less, that is, to prioritise them less.

Example from Deut.

Secondly, to hate someone can mean to love them less, that is, to prioritise them less.

In these verses, God loved Israel by choosing to set his affection on them in a way that he chose not to set it on Esau’s descendants.

Matthew 10:37

If we turn to the NT, in what sense does God love (choose) some, but hate (reject) others?

Our passage is actually quoted in , which lies at the centre of the debate between Calvinists and Arminians.

To me, not only , but the whole book of Romans, indeed the entirety of the gospel, life itself, and more than that—the person and work of our Lord Jesus Christ and the Creator God—make no sense if the election about which we read there is not also corporate and missional.

It is all about God choosing a new people, the church, in place of his old people, national Israel, to be the objects and agents of his special love.

I want to discuss , which quotes this verse.

There too I want to make the point that election for salvation is corporate and missional.

Although God can make some vessels for destruction, he does not.

It is that kind of theology that led to and undergirded Apartheid.

To read it as God arbitrarily choosing to save some while ignoring the majority of human beings, thereby sentencing them to damned eternity, does not fit any understandable concept of his love or his gospel.

I think it was John Wesley who said that is the kind of love that makes one’s blood run cold.

Let us look at two more verses from .

Rom 9:22-23

You need to listen closely so as not to miss the point.

The verse does NOT say that God created some people as objects of wrath for destruction and others as objects of mercy for salvation.

It says What if God were to have done so?

Even if he had done so, he would be just, but everything we learn about him in Scripture and in Christ should teach us that he would never have done so.

Although God can make some vessels for destruction, he does not.

And by the way, it is that kind of theology that led to and undergirded Apartheid.

So what is the NT parallel to “Jacob I have loved, Esau I have hated”?

I think it lies in Ephesians 5:25.

Although there is some deep theology involved in verse 2, the main point is quite simple.

For Israel, the fact that God chose them and redeemed them (the Exodus was the event that defined their redemption) was the supreme proof of his love for them.

For us, the supreme proof of God’s love is the fact that Jesus came to earth and died for our sins.

He is it.

When we question God’s goodness, we need to look at Jesus.

When we doubt God’s love, we need to look at Jesus.

Although there is some deep theology involved in verse 2, the main point is quite simple.

For Israel, the fact that God chose them and redeemed them (the Exodus was the event that defined their redemption) was the supreme proof of his love for them.

For us, the supreme proof of God’s love is the fact that Jesus came to earth and died for our sins.

He is it.

When we question God’s goodness, we need to look at Jesus.

When we doubt God’s love, we need to look at Jesus.

2. God’s forgiveness proves his love