How can you describe God's loving activity in a diagram? It feels so stupid to even try. God wrote a whole Bible, and I try and sum it up in a diagram! I know it is so incomplete but hopefully it communicates something true.
This is what I'm trying to express:
- God's love breaks down into two categories: God's love for the lovely, and God's love for the unlovely. Too often we oppose love to wrath. Or we equate love with mercy. Both are category errors of massive proportions with massive implications. Often I want to ask, "which love are you talking about?"
- God's love for the lovely is initially our problem. But God's love for the unlovely means we are born again into Jesus Christ in whom God's love for the lovely become good news. There is a story. Initially God's love for the lovely (including, but not equal to wrath) is bad news, but it becomes good news if we are found in Christ as it means we are glorified and the enemies of the church are destroyed.
- Everywhere you see an arrow see the Spirit. The Spirit is how God acts, and God's love is always active. The Spirit's principle action is love, so we can call him God's love (although he is also a personal lover).
- I know that the it is a big omission that the diagram doesn't show how God's love for the unlovely is the reason that Jesus Christ is sent to be born in the flesh.
- God's Son becomes flesh in order to experience the wrath that is a result of God's love for his Son. That is amazing love. Or, as the Bible calls it, 'grace'.
- Yes, you've guessed it. God's love for the lovely corresponds to 'the [Lutheran doctrine of] law' - it is good, but death for sinful humanity. God's love for the unlovely corresponds to the 'Gospel' - wonderful undeserved grace!
- God's love for the unlovely is totally incomprehensible. I dare you to make sense of it! It is pure grace, there is nothing in it for God, but he pours it out anyway!
- One of the most amazing things that Martin Luther ever wrote was the final theological thesis of his 1518 Heildelberg Disputation. You could meditate on it for ages:
The love of God does not find, but creates, that which is pleasing to it. The love of man comes into being through that which is pleasing to it.
Thoughts welcome. Praise God for love!
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