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Oct 08, 2022 07:00am

Attributes of God, Part 7

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For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, . . . that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have strength to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled with all the fullness of God. Ephesians 3:14, 17–19

To write about something that Scripture declares “surpasses knowledge” is a daunting task—perhaps even more so than writing about any other attribute of God. The love of God is an infinite diamond. To thoroughly examine every facet and beam of light that refracts off those facets would be impossible for finite humans. So rather than try to hold it at every angle, we will focus on just a few.
If we were to ask the question “Who is God?” (which is essentially what we’re doing when we study his attributes), we could answer it with this statement: “God is love” (1 John 4:16b).
Or to put it another way, love is essential to God’s being. In his book Deeper, Dane Ortlund says, “Love, for the God of the Bible, is not one activity among others. Love defines who he is most deeply. Ultimate reality is not cold, blank, endless space. Ultimate reality is an eternal fountain of endless, unquenchable love.”
And God’s love is precisely that—endless. It is eternal. Since God himself is eternal, and God is love, it naturally follows that his love is also eternal. He cannot cease to be a part of himself. Psalm 100:5 says, “For the LORD is good; his steadfast love endures forever, and his faithfulness to all generations.” Similarly, Psalm 103:17 echoes, “But the steadfast love of the LORD is from everlasting to everlasting on those who fear him.”
And because God’s love is essential and eternal, it is also self-initiated. He did not wait until there was another object to set his love upon (humans) before he loved; his love necessarily always existed within himself before the foundation of the world and flowed between the persons of the Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Jesus speaks of this love in John 17:24:
“Father, I desire that they also, whom you have given me, may be with me where I am, to see my glory that you have given me because you loved me before the foundation of the world.”
God did not wait for us to love him first before he loved us—we did not initiate his love. God does not pour his love out on us because we said I love you, and God thought, Wow, that’s so nice. I guess I’ll love them back. The Bible says that we are able to love God because God first loved us (1 John 4:19). God loves us because it is his nature to love, not because of anything we did or anything he saw in us.
The love of God crushes the notion that love is something we can earn.
There is a country love song with the lyric, “I don’t know what I did to earn a love like this, but baby, I must be doing something right.”
This is our human notion of love. We tend to think of it more as earning a paycheck from a job or interest on a deposit—if we can just be good enough or do enough of the right things, we can win someone’s love; if we make enough investments over time, it will eventually pay out. If we can show God, or society, or whoever that we are a genuinely kind and decent human being, we will be rewarded in the end. We have a hard time believing that we can get something for nothing. That’s not the way our society works. But it is how God’s love works.
The Bible says that while we were unlovable, even while we were God’s enemies, he still loved us:
“God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. . . . For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life” (Romans 5:8, 10).
The Bible is clear there is nothing we contribute to the equation of God’s love for us; while we were dead in our sins, unable to love God, he set his love upon us:
“But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved . . . And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God” (Ephesians 2:4–5, 8).
And similarly, the apostle John says, “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins” (1 John 4:10).
We have nothing to boast about, no credit to take, and no ounce of deservedness in us. This should not only cause us to live in ceaseless praise of the merciful and gracious love of God, but also to extend that love to others. John’s whole appeal and argument in his first letter is for us to love one another based on the fact that we have been loved by God.
There are many ways the people around us can be unlovable—we may disagree with our spouse’s decision or behavior, our children may disobey us, someone may cut us off on the road, or even worse, may legitimately harm or abuse us. But God calls us to love as we have been loved, not by the world but by him. He calls us to love when it is hard; he calls us to love when there seems to be absolutely nothing lovable in the person at that moment. He even calls us to love our enemies—to love when we will most likely get nothing in return. When this seems too tall of an order to fill, remember that God is not asking us to do something he did not first do himself, but rather, he personified love and showed us its sacrificial nature by dying for those who hated him. And there is no greater love than that.