God's Great Love
We are saved by grace and depend wholly on the love of God in our salvation.
Scripture
Commentary
The goodness of God in converting and saving sinners heretofore is a proper encouragement to others in after-time to hope in his grace and mercy, and to apply themselves to these. God having this in his design, poor sinners should take great encouragement from it. And what may we not hope for from such grace and kindness, from riches of grace, to which this change is owing?
God himself is the author of this great and happy change, and his great love is the spring and fontal cause of it; hence he resolved to show mercy. Love is his inclination to do us good considered simply as creatures; mercy respects us as apostate and as miserable creatures. Observe, God’s eternal love or good-will towards his creatures is the fountain whence all his mercies vouch-safed to us proceed; and that love of God is great love, and that mercy of his is rich mercy, inexpressibly great and inexhaustibly rich.
7 Beloved, jlet us love one another, for love is from God, and kwhoever loves has been born of God and knows God. 8 lAnyone who does not love does not know God, because mGod is love. 9 In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that nGod sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. 10 In this is love, onot that we have loved God nbut that he loved us and sent his Son to be pthe propitiation for our sins. 11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. 12 qNo one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and rhis love is perfected in us.
But we, too, are instructed by it, that the mercy of God, who was pleased to admit our fathers into the number of his own people, deserves to be held in everlasting remembrance. The calling of the Gentiles is an astonishing work of divine goodness, which ought to be handed down by parents to children, and to their children’s children, that it may never be forgotten or unacknowledged by the sons of men.
Paul ascribes the dramatic and marvelous change that has taken place, in his own life and in that of the others, to the mercy, love, and grace of God. Love is basic, that is, it is the most comprehensive of the three terms. Paul says, “God, being rich in mercy, because of his great love with which he loved us … made us alive,” etc. This love of God is so great that it defies all definition. We can speak of it as his intense concern for, deep personal interest in, warm attachment to, and spontaneous tenderness toward his chosen ones, but all this is but to stammer. Those, and those only, who experience it are the ones who know what it is, though even they can never fully comprehend it (3:19). They know, however, that it is unique, spontaneous, strong, sovereign, everlasting, and infinite (Isa. 55:6, 7; 62:10–12; 63:9; Jer. 31:3, 31–34; Hos. 11:8; Mic. 7:18–20; John 3:16; 1 John 4:8, 16, 19). It is “the love that has been shed abroad in our hearts” (Rom. 5:5), “his own love toward us” (Rom. 5:8), the love from which no one and nothing “will be able to separate us” (Rom. 8:39).
Being saved by grace is the opposite of being saved by merit, the merit that supposedly accrues from inherent goodness or from strenuous effort. Cf. 2:8, 9. The expression clearly indicates that the ground of our salvation lies not in us but in God. “We love him because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). This sovereign nature of divine love in its various aspects is illustrated in such beautiful passages as Deut. 7:7, 8; Isa. 48:11; Dan. 9:19; Hos. 14:4; John 15:16; Rom. 5:8; Eph. 1:4; 1 John 4:10.
Consider the experience of all Christians: only after conversion do they perceive the abomination of sin, its origin and its end, destruction. Here can man only reflect.—Most men appear well, but if they had at one time the thoughts and feelings which so often steal in upon them, in externally manifest and accomplished deeds before their eyes, their body would seem to them like a shroud, and their heart like a corpse, of a beloved one indeed, yet full of stench
In evil there is system, progress, growth, development; a prince too and rulers, spirit and law; evil, darkness is a kingdom also, and at its head is a prince, the chief of the devils; from frivolous, temperate sinners to premeditated villains, and from sinful men to fallen angels, and among these there is gradation and connection, a kingdom, without peace and happiness, it is true.
Selfishness is a destructive pervading disease of one’s own Ego, which dies of it. To live for self and only for self is a poor, pitiable life. What kind of a wife is that who will not live for her husband? what kind of a man is he who will not live for his calling? what kind of a human being is that who will not live for his God, but only for his lusts, capable of no sacrifice, except petty alms if he is rich; noble before men, before God a tatter, honored before men and yet the object of Divine wrath and of His sentence to perdition?
It is a sad contradiction among men, that they speak of the “dear God” [the common German phrase: der liebe Gott and say, He is love, while no one is to them more uncomfortable and obnoxious than the Church, which makes this a matter of earnest, preaching of the love of the Father in Christ the Crucified and Risen One; they are tolerant toward sins in themselves and others, aye, toward vile sins, fornication, suicide, if there is any respectability about it, but tolerant toward the living and active members of the church they are certainly not, that is impossible for them. What then do they think of the love of God?
He who does not walk in God’s way, following the guiding star of God’s will, gets other blind guides, and is induced to cut such capers, that he is plunged into extreme corruption.—The saints are free confessors of their sins, having no desire for hypocrisy to justify themselves.
All men are equally corrupted by original sin, although the corruption breaks out in various ways.
Reason is a glorious gift of God, as the deprival of the same, madness, is a great misery and judgment. But it is much weakened and darkened through the fall, and hence inclined to many errors and prejudices, permitting itself to be abused.
We are really quickened in Christ, by Christ and with Christ. Therefore we have a real not a fancied life, and there is as great a difference between a natural and a regenerated man as between those physically dead and alive.—Believers not only become blessed in the future, but they are really blessed, although their blessedness is still imperfect.—Without grace no one can believe, and without believing no one can partake of grace.—We are God’s work as regards creation; but if we do not become so as regards sanctification and the application of redemption, we remain outside the fellowship with God.—Regeneration is a real creation and the source of all spiritual life.
Living men cannot exactly understand that they are to regard themselves as dead through trespasses and sins. Weak they prefer admitting as applicable to them; and indeed the word of God does occasionally describe us as weak, as sick. But the Spirit of God does not mean this, as men gladly explain it. They confess themselves weak with the persuasion that they can make themselves better and become strong by self-improvement. The word of God, however, means a weakness, in which self-help is no longer possible, where the hope of recovery rests solely on the presence and power of the physician. As certainly as the body without the soul is dead, so certainly is the soul without the Spirit dead.
If God’s breath does not breathe afresh upon us with the power of the Divine nature, then education however careful, culture however refined, is mere patchwork and tinsel, no pure truth, no pure power from God, no new birth, no heavenly life.—We can learn from the reports of the gospel messengers, in what forms, in what follies and enormities the kingdom of superstition and unbelief has down to our days, multiplied and established itself. Every recollection of the holy and eternal, every trace, every presage of the unknown God in the human soul, has been degraded and distorted into the silliest and most infamous fictions and lies, into the most miserable and sinful abortions of idolatrous forms and worship.—Notice the language of Scripture. One and the same word in the text signifies unbelief and disobedience, for both these poisonous plants proceed from one and the same bitter root of the heart. You do not look with pleasure on Him, Whom you will not obey; you do not keep Him in mind, nor inquire after Him.—Is thy obedience poor, then thy faith is not earnest; is thy faith not vital and genuine, then there is no child-like, earnest obedience.
Those are dead, who have died to all that is good and godly, in whom the spirit is benumbed and the flesh alone is active. There are grades of death as well as of life. Spiritual death manifests itself in the entire lack of knowledge respecting spiritual things, of desire, love, power for good; all taste for the Divine, all longing for God is wanting. This death is the result of sin. Christianity found the world dead and reanimated it. To be without God, without Christ, is death. The first stirring of life is anxiety about ourselves, the consciousness of misery and sin.
Fearful is the power, which the course, the spirit of the world, maintains over man. It distorts all his ideas. We must agree with it, if we would have peace, honor, respect and power; those who oppose it, are regarded with wrath. The origin of this spirit is in the prince of darkness. He who stands outside of Christ, stands in fellowship with Satan; for he thinks and lives in accordance with the maxims of the evil spirit
The bodily resurrection of Christ has as a consequence a spiritual resurrection of men.—It is contrary to the proud consciousness of man, to live by the grace of God, and yet he cannot live by any thing else than grace. All is of grace: that we may hear the gospel, God opens our understanding, and makes our hearts willing to believe.
Before God looked upon thee in love and pity, and said unto thee,. “Live!” thou wast dead. That is to say, as far as spiritual things are concerned, thou wast insensible,—insensible alike to the terrors of divine wrath and to the melodies of divine love. Thou couldst even lie at the foot of Sinai, and not shake with affright
What is even worse, we were complaining and murmuring. Do you not remember, in your unconverted state, my friend, how scarcely anything seemed to please you?
To make the deformity of our character still worse,—we were all the while proud,—as proud as Lucifer. We had not any righteousness of our own, yet we thought we had. We were far off from God by wicked works, yet we stood before him, like the Pharisee in the temple, and thanked him that we were not as other men! We were quite content, though we had nothing to be content with. We were “wretched, and miserable, and poor, and blind, and naked,” yet we said that we were “rich, and increased with goods, and had need of nothing.” As for shedding penitential tears, we left that work to those who had sinned more deeply than we had, for we imagined that we had kept all the commandments from our youth up. Thus we despised the Saviour because we exalted ourselves. We thought little of Christ because we thought much of ourselves. And so, in our pride, we dared to strut before the eternal throne as if we were some great ones, though we were but worms of the dust. I think that it is one of the most difficult things in the world to love a proud man. You can love a man, even though he has a thousand faults, if he is not proud and boastful; but when he is very proud, human nature seems to start back from him; yet God, in his “great love wherewith he loved us, even when we were dead in sins,” loved us although we were proud, and loved us out of that sinful state.
Well, first of all, he remained faithful to his choice of us. He had chosen his people or ever the earth was, and he did not choose them in the dark. He knew right well what their nature would be, and also the practice which would grow out of their nature; so that nothing that has happened has ever surprised the Lord concerning any one of his people. He was well aware beforehand of all their corruption and filthiness; so, when he saw them acting as I have described, he did not turn from his purpose to save them. Blessed be his name for this. It is one of the wonders of his grace, and proves the greatness of his love.