Amongst a load of classroom posters explaining various attributes of God/gods.
Just goes to show that even when you say something like 'God is love' you cannot assume people know what you mean...
"By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us" (1 John 3:16)
Listening to: Bach: Violin Concertos (Hahn)
Love can only be fruit, it cannot take the place of the tree of faith. But there is a constant attempt in the legal scheme to substitute love for faith [...]
[In] Luke's story of the woman in the house of a Pharisee who anointed Jesus' feet from an alabaster jar. The Pharisee, Simon, was found outstripped by the woman not only in faith, but also in his pride - the righteousness of the law (which is love). Jesus said to the woman, "Your faith has saved you; go in peace" (Luke 7:50). Her faith came from the preached word heard earlier: "Your sins are forgiven," and this finally revealed what Jesus meant when he told Simon, "Her sins, which were many, have been forgiven; hence she has shown great love" (Luke 7:47). Love, it turns out, is either understood in relation to the law - in which case it is a work and cannot bear our trust - or it is simply what happens when Christ has forgiven a sinner.
(pp.235-236, Steven Paulson, Lutheran Theology)
So, when we preach the law, we tell people to "love the Lord your God". But when we preach the Gospel we call people to "believe the Lord your God", and out of that belief (which is receiving the seed of the promise of God himself and his forgiveness) love springs spontaneously. Love is greater because love is the eternal goal (1 Cor 13:13), but it cannot be found without faith receiving the Spirit in the promise of Christ who creates it.
The Bible is an unusual love story.
The Father chooses Israel to be a bride for his Son. His Son marries Israel at Sinai but she never loved him and never does. Time and again the Son tries to win the heart of his wife only to see her run after other men.
Sometimes he leaves her to it, hoping she will see through the false promises of those who seduce her. Sometimes he disciplines her to try and drive home the horror of what she is doing, but he doesn't kill her because he really loves her (compared with the cultural norm a great mercy). Sometimes he declares his love of her and sometimes he simply tells her to love him. Often he just showers her with gifts to try and win her, even though it makes him look like a cuckold to the nations.
However, as perhaps many of us know from experiences of unrequited love, you cannot persuade someone to love you. You can try all sorts but love isn't something that you can create in another person's heart just as you can't create it in your own. It is called 'falling in love' because it is not something that happens in a planned way.
The husband knows the punishment for adultery is death. Jesus sees his wife commit adultery again and again and knows that the patience of God cannot continue forever. But God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit love Jesus' wife so much that they plan a way to save the woman. The Son will identify with her so completely as one flesh that he will take her place and die for her sins. In fact the wife who has for years acted like she wanted her husband dead, does the murder.
That would be a tragic love story if it ended there, but praise God it doesn't.
The Father raises the Son, but the widow is an unchanged woman. She needs to be born again - to be given a heart transplant where her old heart is killed and she is given a new one. There is only one person who has made that journey from death to life before and in the same way as he identified with her to the uttermost in dying her death, she is indentified with him by dying with him and so being raised with him. In baptism recieved from God by faith this happens - she is made anew with a heart which beats for him and she waits eagerly for the future day when she will marry him to live with him for eternity.
With thanks to Tim Salaska
Commenting on Romans 8 Luther recalls the famous saying of Augustine that "The soul is more where it loves than where it lives".
Steven Paulson explains that if the person you love is on the other side of the country your thoughts, money, time is spent there as much as possible. Inevitably, unless the love ends, the lover and the beloved will move together and the identity of each will be found in the other. As Luther says, "love transforms the lover into the beloved", or as Jesus said "two shall become one flesh".
Paulson, sees Luther then explaining this movement as part of the more significant movement of hope. I'm not sure if that is right, but Luther certainly sees hope as important and performing the same movement.
Luther criticises the philosophers for seeking to understand things by focusing on the present and metaphysics. He sees Paul focusing his attention not on creation itself but on what it is waiting for. Paulson comments:
In the forest a birdwatcher learns to listen for birds more than watch for them. A therapist learns to ignore patient projections and to listen for the true source of pain. A theologian must... learn to hear the creature waiting.
If we want to understand people, and all creation, we need to know what they are hoping for as well as what they love. Because, "hope changes the one who hopes into what is hoped for".
I've met those people who ask you off the bat "what would love to do on your ideal day?" or "what do you love most about your church?" I've also been in interviews where you are asked "where do you hope to be in 5 years?" Those are questions that probe right to the heart who you are so they are questions worth asking people you want to know.
Soon I will be moving jobs and cities. Already relationship dynamics are changing, money is being spent on things I can only benefit from after the move, thoughts are in the place where I will end up. I am becoming what I hope for.
[Tim Keller has a sermon series on the transforming power of the Christian hope]
My song is love unknown,
My Saviour's love to me;
Love to the loveless shown,
That they might lovely be.
O who am I, that for my sake
My Lord should take, frail flesh and die?
The first verse of 'My Song is Love Unknown' is an even more poetic version of Luther's final theological thesis at the Heidelberg Disputation of 1518:
Two things are expressed by both Martin Luther and Samuel Crossman's words:
God does love the lovely too of course, and as I've clumsily blogged before, it worth meditating on how those loves inter-relate.
Americans today often confuse unconditional affirmation with unconditional love. Unconditional affirmation is what your dog gives you. He simply affirms you without challenging your innate desire to be the center of your own universe. That's why it feels so good.
Unconditional love, however, is not the same as unconditional affirmation. Love creates a crisis. And the greater the love, the greater the crisis. For love reaches out for union. For implicit within the gift of love is a calling of the other into relationship. To accept the gift of love is admit into our heart a power from outside ourselves that tugs at our very self-centredness, seeking to draw us into relationship by stirring up in us a desire to love in return the one who gave us the gift of love. Yet, the price of this relationship is a dent in our self-sufficient autonomy, where our selfish ways have thrived unquestioned. And the greater the love, the greater the loss of the right to live for oneself alone. And perfect, unconditional love seeks to stir up an equally unreserved giving of all of ourselves to the other. In short, true unconditional love does not simply affirm us in our self-satisfied self-centredness. True unconditional love provokes the ultimate crisis where we are called to die completely to our desire for autonomy and wholly give ourselves to the one who has already done the same for us.
The true meaning of the Gospel of Grace is this: that God unconditionally calls each of us to seek release from our selfish ways so that we can join the self-giving fellowship of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost, and his love is so at work in us to transform us that one day we will enjoy fellowship with God and one another as much as God enjoys fellowship within Himself.
Unconditional love, as most of us understand it, begins and ends with sympathy and empathy, with blanket acceptance. It accepts you as you are with no expectations. You in turn can take it or leave it.
But think about what God’s love for you is like. God does not calmly gaze on you in benign affirmation. God cares too much to be unconditional in his love.
It is worth reading more of the context of these incredibly insightful quotations. Ashley Null's quotation is from this interview. The Powlison quotation comes from Seeing with New Eyes. Although he has written something very similar (maybe the same) in a little booklet entitled God’s Love: Better Than Unconditional. There are two quite different but complementary summaries here and here. All of those links will give you lots of food for thought.
Here is a bit more Powlison though, from his classic article "Idols of the Heart and 'Vanity Fair'" (HT DB):
The Gospel is better than unconditional love. The Gospel says, “God accepts you just as Christ is. God has ‘contraconditional’ love for you.” Christ bears the curse you deserve. Christ is fully pleasing to the Father and gives you His own perfect goodness. Christ reigns in power, making you the Father’s child and coming close to you to begin to change what is unacceptable to God about you. God never accepts me “as I am.” He accepts me “as I am in Jesus Christ.” The center of gravity is different. The true Gospel does not allow God’s love to be sucked into the vortex of the soul’s lust for acceptability and worth in and of itself. Rather, it radically decenters people—what the Bible calls “fear of the Lord” and “faith”—to look outside themselves.
Incredible stuff! Mind-blowing truths! May we never stop praising and proclaiming God's unconditional love. But in conclusion, I think David Powlison is spot on here:
We do not need to use a vague, abstract word like unconditional when the Bible gives us more vivid and specific words, metaphors, and stories to communicate what God’s love is like.
Richard Dawkins responds to the quesion that, "if there is no God, why by good?"
Posed like that, the question sounds positively ignoble. When a religious person puts it to me in this way (and many of them do), my immediate temptation is to issue the following challenge: 'Do you really mean to tell me the only reason you try to be good is to gain God's approval and reward, or to avoid his disapproval and punishment? That's not morality, that's just sucking up, apple-polishing, looking over your shoulder at the great surveillance camera in the sky, or the still small wiretap inside your head, monitoring your every move, even your every base thought.' As Einstein said, 'If people are good only because they fear punishment, and hope for reward, then we are a sorry lot indeed.'
(p.259, The God Delusion)
It is a fair point, but Lewis explains why Christians motivations to be moral are not necessarily like Dawkins describes:
We must not be troubled by unbelievers when they say that this promise of reward makes Christian life a mercenary affair. There are different kinds of rewards. There is the reward which has no natural connection with the things you do to earn it and is quite foreign to the desires that ought to accompany those things. Money is not the natural reward of love; that is why we call a man mercenary if he marries a woman for the sake of her money. But marriage is the proper reward for a real lover, and he is not mercenary for desiring it. [...] The proper rewards are not simply tacked on to the activity for which they are given, but are the activity itself in consummation.
(The Weight of Glory)
I think there will be varying degrees of reward in the New Creation, but it will be the reward of the joy in the fruit of the works we have done. E.g. if I encourage a brother or sister, or I see someone come to faith in some small way due to God's work through me then I will rejoice in the New Creation in their joy and happiness. The more such works, the more causes of joy I have.
After all. Jesus laid down his life for the reward of "the joy set before him" (Hebrews 12:2), and that joy was that he would have a bride. Paul laboured to plant churches for the reward of his joy in the joy of the churches who would know Christ as a result (1 Thessalonians 2:19).
There is nothing mercenary about that.
Where do we find security in our relationships of love? I'd suggest that there are usually two places:
I think we apply these human ways of thinking to God. They manifest themself like this:
In contrast to both of these the Bible says that God loved us totally freely. We don't deserve his love and he didn't need to give it, but still he set his love on us.
As Susanna Wesley says:
[God] is being itself, and as such must be infinitely happy in the glorious perfections of his nature from everlasting to everlasting; and as he did not create, so neither did he redeem because he needed us; but he loved us because he loved us
(cited in p. 61, Fred Sanders, Embracing the Trinity)
That final phrase is almost lifted from Deuteronomy 7 where, if you follow the logic through, Moses says the same thing:
It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the Lord set his love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples, but it is because the Lord loves you and is keeping the oath that he swore to your fathers (Deut 7:7-8)
Speaking to a friend today he confessed that there is something slightly terrifying about that. God seems to leave us nothing to grasp hold of in order to give us security of his love. We can't point to something in ourselves or in the rules of logic. He simply asks us to trust him personally.
Except, he does do more than that, as the verse in Deuteronomy suggests. He makes an oath. As the author of the letter to the Hebrews says:
"when God desired to show more convincingly to the heirs of the promise the unchangeable character of his purpose, he guaranteed it with an oath, so that by two unchangeable things, in which it is impossible for God to lie, we who have fled for refuge might have strong encouragement to hold fast to the hope set before us." (Heb 6:17-18)
He voluntarily ties his love into his unchangeable nature. In the past he wasn't bound to love us, but now he has freely bound himself to love us in his word of promise.
And when you heard 'word' in that last sentence, I hope you know where you need to go!
This promise is supremely found in the incarnate Son, Jesus Christ, who suffers in our place and is raised again for our justification. All so that we can be adopted and joined into the divine life. So now if we are 'in Christ' God cannot cease to love us without denying his own self, and God's love for us is even more secure than the universe.
As Karl Barth says:
He loves them with the same eternal love with which He loves the Son (Jn. 17:23 ["I in them and you in me, that they may become perfectly one, so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me."])." (my bold, CD IV, 2, 758)
Picking up on the distinction I made in a previous post, God the Father's freely placed love-for-the-unlovely church becomes bound, by the Son's mission in the Spirit, to his love-for-the-lovely Son; and that love-for-the-lovely is so integral to his being that it is as secure as his existence!
Amazing love! How can it be,
That Thou, my God, shouldst die for me?
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:
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!
Hell is a horrible subject to talk about particularly if you have loved ones who you fear may be there or who are walking the road which leads there*. It is also terribly humbling, because you know that it is where you belong too, often more than they.
But if I was talking about it there are a few things I would want to say about God's love in relation to it:
1. Love for the lovely
The love of the three persons of the Trinity for each other’s glory is the primary reason for the existence of hell. God will punish and destroy all who dishonour his name.
The love of God for the beautiful world and significant creatures is the secondary reason for the existence of hell. God will punish and destroy all who have harmed his creation, especially as they will continue to if allowed to live unchanged.
2. Love for the unlovely
The love of God means that he warns us of hell and gives us time to repent. God does not desire the death of the wicked, which is why Jesus warns of hell more than any other person in the Bible.
The love of Jesus means he will go through hell in our place. All of us have rebelled against God, and all of us hurt one another and the world. The only person who hasn’t stepped into our shoes and showed us the full depths of devotion to God and to us when he was forsaken on the cross.
* I accept that talking about hell as a 'place' may not be very accurate, but I have yet to see better, and it was good enough for Jesus.
So far the exclusivity of Christ is understandable. So is hell if we reject Christ.
What is not understandable is that:
Now its getting bizarre. How can it be loving that the Father abandons the Son he loves, and the Son abandons his church (John 16)?
What makes it more incomprehensible is that the ultimate finality of death and judgement is not the final word, but that "bursting forth in glorious day, up from the grave [Love] rose again". And when Love rose again he looked so different that people couldn't recognise him immediately, and he brought with him a new Bride, with a new heart that beats only for him. This new Bride you may also struggle to recognise as the same people as the old Bride. He loved the Bride so much that although he accepted her just as she was, he wasn't content to leave her in that state, but by his love transformed her (see Sebastian Faulks on Mr Darcy and Miss Bennett, and Powlison on why God's love is "better than unconditional")
[Post prompted by the excellent lessons I've been taught by Ray Ortlund's MP3s, Glen Scrivener and Dave Bish's posts, the sad teaching of Rob Bell, and the joyful privilege of being best man at my housemate's wedding this weekend]
I love mankind, but I am amazed at myself: the more I love mankind in general, the less I love people in particular.
(Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov)
Listening to: Radiohead: The Bends
[Rather hasty and unrefined thoughts that I was decided to put down prematurely because of a discussion in comments to a post of Dave Bish]
We can drift into a simplistic dualism when thinking of God's wrath and love. God's anger and God's love can be seen as implacable enemies never to be reconciled, and the cross can be seen as the place where God's love is shown to be stronger. People then seem to drift into either seeing either:
Against this we can say that God gets angry because he cares, not despite caring. He punishes us to bring us to repentance, as a father disciplines his children. Or, he hates all that is destructive and acts to protect his creation, as an artist won't stand by and see his painting be destroyed.
We remember that God is love from all eternity, but God's anger is a recent response of this love to the invasion of sin. Perhaps we could describe God's anger as an 'aspect' of his love.
But I think that perspective can lead to problems too. Anger and sadness with God's acts of punishment are disallowed, and God's love becomes distasteful.
I think the Bible offers a more complex and paradoxical picture of the relationship between God's anger and love than we often allow. We either subsume anger into love, losing both. Or oppose them so completely that God is robbed of his sovereignty and we are robbed of our hope of final victory. I think this paradoxical picture can be seen when considering three different ways in which God acts in anger at sin:
1. People
2. The devil
3. Death
Asymmetrical paradox
We should notice though that the paradox is not equally weighted. It remains a paradox, but God stands asymetrically behind the two sides. God's anger is always done through tools:
Wrestling with God
This is not an impractical thing to wonder about. If we want to escape punishment we have to believe that it is under God's control, but we also have to believe that he has acted, and is acting, to save us from it.
We want to protect every part of the truth that "one appeals to God against God" (p. 213, Bayer, Martin Luther's Theology).
