This is a thin book on the difficult doctrine of God’s love by D A Carson. This is not an easy book. So you have been warned.
The author starts off on the distortion of God’s love and gives 5 reasons why the doctrine of God’s love must be judged difficult:
- For those who believe in God, the overwhelming majority hold that this God is a loving being. Yet we know that when informed Christians talk about God’s love, they mean something very different from what is understood by the surrounding culture.
- We live in a culture in which many other and complimentary truths about God are widely disbelieved. The love of God has been sanitised, democratised and above all sentimentalised.
- Post-modernism plays into the problem with which we are dealing. More and more people believe that the only heresy left is the view that there is such a thing as heresy.
- Even within Christian confessionalism, the doctrine of the love of God poses its difficulties. With the world in such chaos, precisely how does one integrate what the Bible says about the love of God with what the Bible says about God’s sovereignty, extending as it does even over the domain of evil?
- The doctrine of the love of God is sometimes portrayed within Christian circle as much easier and more obvious than it really is. And this is achieved by overlooking some of the distinctions the Bible itself introduces when it depicts the love of God.
There are 5 distinguishable ways the Bible speaks of the love of God:
- The peculiar love of the Father for the Son, and the Son for the Father.
- God’s providential love over all that He has created.
- God’s salvific stance toward His fallen world.
- God’s particular, effective, selecting love towards His elect.
- God’s provisional or conditional love, conditional on obedience.
Just to throw in a spanner to show the difficulty of understanding God’s love, consider certain well-known evangelical cliché in the light of the above: God’s love is unconditional. God loves everyone exactly the same way.
It gets even more complex when it comes to God’s love and God’s sovereignty, where the author talks about the compatibility between the sovereignty of God and the responsibility of man. For example, Joseph told his fearful brothers what they intended for evil, God intended it for good. In one and the same event, God was operating and His intentions were good, and the brothers were operating and their intentions were evil. However, God’s sovereignty does not absolve man of his responsibility for the evil he commits. Or consider this: If God is utterly sovereign and all-knowing, what space is there for emotion as we think of them? Yet the Bible clearly has passages that speak of a vulnerable love (of God) that feels pain and pleads for repentance. To the author, we must recognise that all of God’s emotions, including His love in all its aspects, cannot be divorced from God’s knowledge, power and will. If God loves, it is because He chooses to love. If He suffers, it is because He chooses to suffer. God is impassible in the sense that He sustains no “passion”, no emotion that made Him vulnerable from the outside, over which He has no control, or which He has not foreseen. Very well explained.
And then, there is God’s love and God’s wrath. The common view that God is love and He is bound to forgive is an ill-defined notion of God’s love. The Bible speaks of the wrath of God in high-intensity language. Wrath, like love, includes emotion as a necessary component. In itself, wrath unlike love, is not one of the intrinsic perfections of God. Rather, it is a function of God’s holiness against sin. Where there is no sin, there will be no wrath. But there will always be love in God. When God in His holiness confronts His image-bearers in their rebellion, there must be wrath, or God is not the jealous God He claims to be and His holiness is impugned. The price of diluting God’s wrath is diminishing God’s holiness.
To the author, the focus of the book is on the love of God and the various ways the Bible speaks of that love. One cannot adequately grasp the love of God in Scripture without reflecting on the ways in which God’s love elicits our love.
The author concludes beautifully by saying that all these should transform us, so that we in turn perceive the sheer rightness of the first commandment – to love God with heart, soul, mind and strength. As this is the first and greatest commandment, so the first and greatest sin is not to love God with heart, soul, mind and strength. For this there is no remedy, save what God Himself has provided – in love. I felt such a sense of achievement to have read this book and took 5 double-sided pages of notes. I am not sure if I manage to wet your appetite or frighten you off. But go and read the book to get the full content. This book is in our church library.
This book review was written by Elder Tah Wee in 2016.
