• 1 John 4:8 -- He that loveth not knoweth not God; for GOD IS LOVE.



• 1 John 4:16 -- And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us. GOD IS LOVE; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.

There are many today who talk about the love of God but who are strangers to the true God and the true nature of His love. Most professing Christians reduce God's love to where it is no more than a weak, sentimental disposition toward sinners patterned after human emotion. The common belief today amongst professing Christians is that God loves everyone and is trying to save everyone. They believe God's love is expressed in sending Christ to make sinners savable if they would just comply and meet the condition of faith. This is the view of God's love promoted by universal notions of Christ's atonement and conditional salvation. Most who believe this agree that the majority of sinners will not comply and perish anyway, so that the majority of the objects of God's love will be eternally condemned. Here is where we need to see the implications of such thoughts and have our thoughts brought into conformity to God's revealed truth.

(1) It puts no real saving value and power upon God's love. It says God loved sinners, but His love could not keep them out of hell. They perished anyway. This says that God loves no one sinner enough to make that sinner's salvation certain. Some object that God loves man so much that He would not infringe upon man's right to choose and do as he pleases, and that He as a result of love conditioned salvation on the sinner. Think about this -- Is it love to condition salvation on sinners who by nature love darkness and hate light, who by nature are ungodly and bound by the powers of darkness? That kind of love would doom every sinner to hell. This brings us to the next implication.

(2) It exalts human love above God's divine love. Love demands that we engage all our faculties on behalf of the objects of that love. If one of our children were drowning, and we had the power to save them, but we did not because we didn't want to infringe upon their right to choose to jump into deep water, would that be love? Of course not. That would be foolish. This is what such views of God's love imply. It says God has the wisdom and power to save them, but He does not because He doesn't want to violate their free will and dignity.

(3) It is opposed to Scripture. The Bible tell us God does not love everyone without exception. "Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated" (Rom. 9:13). There was no cause in Jacob for God to love him, but there was every reason for God to hate both Jacob and Esau. Also, the Bible says nothing shall "separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord" (Rom. 8:39). Nothing will separate God's love from the objects of that love. God's love has a goal and an object, and all whom God sets His love upon shall be participate in the accomplishment of the goal for which His love aims. Those whom God loves in redemption and whom He intends to save shall be saved.

I. GOD IS LOVE (1 John 4:8,16) -- Love is God's very nature. The love of God in 1 John is God's benevolence toward sinners seen in His purpose to save sinners in Christ and the fact that He has engaged all of His attributes to save them based on the mediatorial work of Christ --

• 1 John 4:9 -- In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent His only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through Him. {10} Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.

Specifically, God's love here is His purpose to glorify Himself by saving sinners and giving them the whole inheritance of eternal life and eternal glory in heaven based on the righteousness of Christ. This is God's redemptive love for His elect, the ones whom He foreknew or fore-loved before the foundation of the world. What we need to recognize is that in the Scriptures there are different kinds of love. Even when we see scriptures that speak of God's love, we need to define it in its context. The kind of love God shows is determined according to the purpose for which God intends and the object upon which the love is exercised. This does not mean that the attribute of love in God changes. It does not change, but, it may in its demonstration and goal it assume different forms. For example --

A. Love of approbation -- This love is exercised towards a worthy object, one who is deserving of love. It is of the nature of love of goodness and holiness. This is why sinners by nature do not know the true nature of God's love. We by nature do not see or even consider that God loves Himself first and foremost. We know that our own self-love is sinful, and so we automatically think of God's love in our own terms and contexts. The reason self-love is wrong in ourselves is because we are sinners and not deserving of God's love. Our self-love causes us to be selfish, and it causes us not to love our neighbor as we ought. We are commanded to love our neighbors as much as we love ourselves. If we could do this, self-love would not be evil. But God is deserving of all love because of the goodness and holiness of His nature.

All three Persons of the Godhead are deserving of the highest love. So God loves first and foremost Himself. Therefore we see that the goal of God's love is His own glory. His goal is the glory of all the attributes He engaged in each exercise of love (Rom. 11:36). No sinner can be the recipient of this kind of love, because no sinner deserves it. All we can earn and deserve from God based on our efforts is wrath and condemnation.

B. Love of affection and purpose -- This love can be exercised towards those who deserve it and those who do not deserve it. For example, this love arises from mutual relationship such as all the Persons of the Trinity toward each other because they deserve each other's love. Their mutual relationship is one of essence in the very nature and being of God. This love is exercised toward the undeserving when God establishes a mutual relationship with men. For example, when God chose Israel as a nation to accomplish His purpose through them, He exercised this love of affection and purpose toward them. Now this was not His redemptive love. If it were, the whole nation would have been eternally saved. We read in Deuteronomy 7:7-8 how God loved them --

• Deuteronomy 7:7 -- The LORD did not set his love upon you, nor choose you, because ye were more in number than any people; for ye were the fewest of all people: {8} But because the LORD loved you, and because he would keep the oath which he had sworn unto your fathers, hath the LORD brought you out with a mighty hand, and redeemed you out of the house of bondmen, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.

Is not God's love everlasting and unchangeable? Does not God's love demand that He engage every attribute of His character for the eternal blessedness of its objects? Here is where we must make a distinction. A literal translation would be "to cling" or "to join" by way of purpose to preserve. This is perfectly consistent with God's character. God, for a limited period of time and for His specific purposes, set His affection upon and joined Himself in a temporal way to this nation. He set His mind to deliver and preserve them and engaged certain attributes of His character towards this nation in a temporal and temporary sense.

So this love is typical love in the same way that an atonement made by the blood of animals was a typical atonement. There is always a vast difference between any type and the substance. There is a vast difference between the blood of a lamb and the blood of Christ. The blood of a lamb accomplished atonement in a temporal, temporary and ceremonial way. The blood of Christ accomplished atonement in an eternal way. So, the love of God towards this nation was the fact that He engaged certain attributes of His character to deliver and protect them temporally and providentially, not eternally, but for a limited period of time until Christ came. The everlasting love of God towards His elect is the fact that He engaged every attribute of His character to deliver and protect them eternally in Christ. It is from this love of affection and purpose that the next kind of love springs.

C. Love of mercy and grace -- This is God's everlasting, eternal, redemptive, covenant love toward His elect in Christ. This is love that demands He engage all His attributes for the eternal good of its objects. This is His love that provided what His holiness demanded in the Person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ to work out a righteousness that demands the salvation and final glory of all the objects of this love. Its very nature considers the guilt, defilement, and sinfulness of its objects. It is exercised only towards those who are undeserving and unlovely. This is the love of God with which we will deal in the rest of this lesson.

II. GOD'S LOVE IN SALVATION --

• John 3:16 -- For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

God is the only source and originator of salvation. His love is the cause of salvation. When God chose a people before the foundation of the world, He set His love upon them. He conditioned all of their salvation on Christ and determined to send Christ into the world to fulfill those conditions by establishing an everlasting righteousness of infinite value whereby He could be just and justify the ungodly. God's love is accompanied with infinite power and wisdom to remove all obstacles that would hinder the eternal salvation and final glory of the objects of His redemptive love. His love also provided every means to insure their final glory in Heaven. This kind of love is powerful and effectual toward its objects. This love is in Christ Jesus. This love gives ungodly sinners every reason to trust God and flee to Christ for all salvation. Consider the nature of this love.

A. It is totally undeserved and uninfluenced --

• Ephesians 2:4 -- But God, who is rich in mercy, for His great love wherewith He loved us, {5} Even when we were dead in sins, hath quickened us together with Christ, (by grace ye are saved;)

There was nothing in any of the objects of God's love to deserve it. It was just the opposite. God's love is exercised towards ungodly idolaters, those upon whom His wrath abides before they are united to Christ. We read how that God loved Jacob and hated Esau. People are amazed that God could hate Esau. But we should be amazed that God loved Jacob. There was nothing in Jacob or Esau to influence God to love either one. Both deserved God's wrath. Why God chose Jacob and not Esau is known only to God. But we know Esau was just as responsible to believe God's promise of salvation in Christ as was Jacob. Esau rejected God's love revealed in Christ and scorned God's glory.

God's love is sovereign. God loves differentiates and distinguishes, but not on the basis of anything in or done by the objects of His love. God did not look down through time and set His love upon those whom He foresaw would believe. He set His love upon guilty sinners. We know that all whom God loves will eventually come to faith and repentance, and they will come to love Him. But God does not love us because we love Him. We love Him because He first loved us --

• 1 John 4:19 -- We love him, because he first loved us.

B. It is eternal --

• Jeremiah 31:3 -- The LORD hath appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee.



• Ephesians 1:4 -- According as He hath chosen us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and without blame before Him in love: {5} Having predestinated us unto the adoption of children by Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the good pleasure of His will,

God is eternal and so is His redemptive love. There never was a time that God did not love His people. This poses a very important question -- "How could God love us while we were under His wrath?" Remember, God's love is His purpose to save guilty, condemned sinners based on the righteousness of Christ alone. God's redemptive love has always been in Christ and by virtue of what Christ has accomplished according to the good pleasure of His own sovereign will. So even while we personally were under God's wrath, God had already set His love upon us and purposed to save us based on the righteousness of Christ. When we were brought out from under God's wrath, united to Christ, God did not change, but we did.

C. It is immutable -- As God is immutable, so is His redemptive love. His love remains ever the same. It never varies towards its objects because it is not conditioned on any of its objects. God's redemptive love always views its objects in Christ. Therefore, God will in no case cast us out, and nothing can separate us from His love --

• Romans 8:35 -- Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? {36} As it is written, For thy sake we are killed all the day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter. {37} Nay, in all these things we are more than conquerors through him that loved us. {38} For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, {39} Nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.

D. It is holy and powerful and gracious -- Consider John 3:16 again --

• John 3:16 -- For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

This verse does not teach a universal atonement claiming that God loves everyone without exception and that Christ died for everyone without exception. This verse is not speaking of how many God loved nor how many for whom Christ died. It is speaking of the magnitude of God's love and what this amazing love provided in and by God's dearly beloved Son. God "SO" loved the world. The "world" here does not refer to every person in the world without exception. The word "world" is another word that must be qualified and defined by its context. For example, read 1 John 5:19 --

• 1 John 5:19 -- And we know that we are of God, and THE WHOLE WORLD lieth in wickedness.

Most would agree that the word "world" in this verse does not refer to every person in the world. In fact, the Apostle John here is dividing the world up into two groups of people. One group includes all those who are "of God." The other group includes all those who "lieth in wickedness," or, literally, "lies in the power or under the control of the evil one." So here we would all agree that the word "world" must be qualified and defined by its context. It must be qualified and defined in its context in John 3:16 also.

In John 3:16 the word "world" refers to God's elect out of the world, all upon whom He set His redemptive love, all who would believe in Him. "World" is qualified by "whosoever believeth." God determined to preserve this world by setting His love upon a remnant according to the election of grace. He "SO" loved His elect that He sent His Son to fulfill the conditions of their salvation. God purposed to save a multitude of guilty, hell-deserving sinners, but He could not save them unless His holiness and justice were satisfied. Therefore He conditioned all of their salvation upon God the Son, and He sent Him to become incarnate, obey the law, suffer and die to provide a righteousness that would insure their salvation.

III. A SAVING VIEW OF GOD'S LOVE RESULTS IN LOVE TO HIM --

• Romans 5:5 -- And hope maketh not ashamed; because the love of God is shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Ghost which is given unto us. {6} For when we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly.

It is true that love bestowed results in love returned. Wherever a sinner has a saving view of God's love and understands the true nature of God's love, that love will be returned. Here the Apostle Paul speaks of God the Holy Spirit shedding God's love abroad in the hearts of converted sinners. This is done when sinners realize the true nature of God's love in sending Christ to fulfill all the conditions of our salvation. This is accomplished when we see that God's love provided in Christ an everlasting righteousness that insures our salvation and final glory. This is done when we realize that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ. Who would not love a God who freely gives undeserving, guilty sinners all things based on the obedience and death of His beloved Son?

As long as we think that salvation or any part of it is conditioned on our faith, repentance, perseverance, etc., or as long as we suppose that any of the objects of God's love could finally perish in hell, we do not know the true nature of God's love, and we cannot trust Him fully nor believe in the Lord Jesus Christ. This means we cannot have justifying faith and we cannot love God to any degree that would enable us to serve Him as motivated by the certainty of salvation and final glory based on the righteousness of Christ. Therefore, the love of God cannot be shed abroad in our hearts.

It is this love shed abroad in our hearts that keeps us from speaking peace where sinners are either ignorant of or not submitted to the righteousness of Christ revealed in the Gospel. Remember, this love regards first and foremost the honor of God's redemptive character. God loves Himself first, and He will not compromise His glory to save any sinner apart from this knowledge. One of the main evidences that God has been glorified in our hearts and that we have His love in us is when we will not compromise His glory in salvation by speaking peace where there is no peace.