The scriptures teach that God is love (1 John 4:8) and that salvation’s plan, in all its parts, is the fruit of that love. God did not give His Son to die for us, that He might love us; but He loved us and, because of that love, He sacrificed His Son for us.
But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
Romans 5:8 NIV
You might have been told that God only loves you because of Jesus. But this is not true nor biblical! God, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit loved you and agreed on the plan of salvation. The trinity is always unified in everything. God’s love toward us, even when we were sinners, was sufficiently intense to cause Him to give up His Son Jesus to death. Jesus laid down His life willingly (John 10:18; 1 John 3:16). We are not told just when this love began to exist, but it is written:
But he alone is God, and who can oppose him? God does as he pleases.
Job 23:13; James 1:17 CEV
He is always the same and never makes dark shadows by changing.
Therefore, God who is love, has loved us as long as He has been what He is now; but, if He is unchangeable, we cannot say He ever began to love us. Therefore, God’s gifts, Jesus and the salvation inseparably joined to Jesus, are the fruits of God’s everlasting love. But not only is it true that God’s love comes before the giving of Christ as a Redeemer, but it also produces our delivery from sin.
But God was merciful! We were dead because of our sins, but God loved us so much he made us alive with Christ, and God’s gift of undeserved grace is what saves you.
Ephesians 2:4-5 CEV
We are not regenerated and saved, and therefore loved, but loved, and therefore regenerated and saved.
We love Him because he first loved us. God’s love to us has “causative power,” and produces in us love for God. “Love (in us) is of God,” and “He that loves is born of God.” The thought that God loved us before the world began is incomprehensible; yet we have seen that God’s gift of Jesus is a fruit of that love. As grace was given to us in Christ before the world began, so we know that God loved us before the world began. Therefore, there is nothing older than God’s love for us. Thousands of years have come and gone, and yet God’s love exists and bears the most precious fruit.
God’s Love is Not Fickle
No saint can say that he has loved God and obeyed Him, and that God loved him as a consequence; but certainly God loved us, and our loving Him and obeying Him is a fruit of that love.
You cannot believe that God’s love is directed by perfect wisdom, is given fully to us, and that it could possibly be removed at some point. For instance: He loves you today; His perfect wisdom comprehends not only what you are now, but what you ever will be; therefore, he is not disappointed in what He loves. You never can become worse than He knows you will be; and, in fact, He loved you while you were dead in sin, and certainly you can never be worse than dead in sin. Therefore, to say that God will cease to love you is to reject His wisdom, and charge him with misplacing His love, and attribute changeableness to Him.
But, if it is argued that God loves character, and that He loves persons only as they produce that character, we would answer, that every grace of the Christian is produced in him by the Lord; and it is simple nonsense to say that God clothes His people with every benefit of the cross, and then loves them only because of that dress. Instead, He loved us first and then saved us.
But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against these things!
Galatians 5:22-23 NLT
For those who believe in God, He provides the fruit of love in their hearts, so that they can return the love. Therefore, He loves none of us for our good character, but our good character grows out of His love for us. If He had not loved us, given His Son to die for us, regenerated us, and worked in us all that makes up the difference between our present selves and former selves, we could never have good character.
You cannot conceive of an immutable God, with mutable, changeable love, affectionately embracing believers today, and tomorrow casting them down to hell; today calling one an heir of Heaven, beholding his name written in the book of life, and tomorrow erasing that name and disinheriting that heir. The Bible gives no account of such a God; neither do we, poor, sinful, erring beings, need such a God.
God’s Love is Stronger than a Parent’s Love
Have you never thought of the tenderness of a parent’s love toward a prodigal son or daughter? Though that child goes away in sin and disgrace, and others have forsaken and cast the child out of their hearts, yet that good father never stops loving the child, and that mother wets her pillow with tears, as she thinks, in the stillness of the night, of her erring child; and they both lift their petitions to God, to save the wanderer.
Few children know how much parents love them, till the parents are cold in death; so, few Christians know how much God loves them, and how carefully He watches them. We admire pure, disinterested love in parents (love from God for their child); love that floods cannot sweep away; that will follow their offspring as long as life lasts; love unchangeable, unalterable, constant.
Could such a high, noble, and perfect love be possible for parents, and yet God is destitute of it? Should we measure the perfection of creature love by this standard, and throw it aside as too glorious for God?
If God’s love for His children is fickle, changeable, dependent on changing circumstances, alternately given and taken away, then, in my opinion, God’s love is imperfect, and therefore He is imperfect. But if God loves those whom He loves eternally, infinitely, and perfectly, then is His love directed in wisdom, and He is perfect; and one sweet thought here is, that the evidence that He loves me now, or ever did love me, is a certain, unalterable, and irreversible title to Heaven.
The Savior prays:
I am in them and you are in me. May they experience such perfect unity that the world will know that you sent me and that you love them as much as you love me.
John 17:23 NLT
Jesus desires the world to know a great truth here: that as God loves the Son, so he loves His children. And a little further he says: “You loved me even before the world began!” (John 17:24 NLT). So, if God loves us as He loves His Son, and loved His Son before the foundation of the world, then He loved us before the foundation of the world. If the Son lives by the Father, so we shall live by the Son (John 6:57).
God Disciplines Those He Loves
It is for our profit that we are chastened, and not for our destruction. God says:
then I will punish their sin with the rod,
Psalm 89:32-34 NLT
and their disobedience with beating.
But I will never stop loving him
nor fail to keep my promise to him.
No, I will not break my covenant;
I will not take back a single word I said.
And in Hebrews, He speaks:
And I will forgive their wickedness, and I will never again remember their sins. If God doesn’t discipline you as he does all of his children, it means that you are illegitimate and are not really his children at all. No discipline is enjoyable while it is happening—it’s painful! But afterward there will be a peaceful harvest of right living for those who are trained in this way.
Hebrews 8:12; 12:8, 11 NLT
How delightful the thought that God never changes, and that, though we are prone to wander, God never forgets nor forsakes us. Our own experience will bear out this thought. We have left undone the things we should have done, and done many things we should not have done; yet God has not turned his back upon us, and we can sing:
“Oh, Lord, you never change;
But because I stray;
Lord, guide me by your Spirit,
And keep me in your way.”
The Christian may apply the following lines to himself:
“So close, so very close to God,
I cannot nearer be;
For, in the person of his Son,
I am as near as he.
So dear, so very dear to God,
More dear I cannot be;
The love with which he loves his Son,
Such is his love for me.
Why should I ever careful be,
Since such a God is mine?
He watches o’er me night and day,
And tells me, ‘Mine is thine.’”
This is post 8 in a series; you can read the previous post. This post started as the public domain works of J. H. Oliphant. While sections are the same in many ways, I modernized the language and added my thoughts to provide greater clarity for my readers.
Image by Ginger Palmisano from Pixabay
Matt Pavlik is a professional counselor, author, and devoted follower of Christ. With decades of experience in Christian counseling, he writes with theological depth and everyday clarity. His resources—centered on salvation, identity, marriage, and emotional healing—are anchored in Scripture and guide believers to discover the freedom of their identity in Christ and the security of their salvation in Him. He and his wife Georgette, married since 1999, live in Centerville, Ohio, and have four adult children.
[…] is post 9 in a series; you can read the previous post. This post started as the public domain works of J. H. Oliphant. While sections are the same in many […]