THE BIBLE
Can we trust a book written 2000 years ago?

EYEWITNESS
Did the writers of the New Testament get their picture of Jesus right?

GOD - MAN
Is Jesus really God?

RESURRECTION
Did Jesus really rise from the dead?

RELIGIONS
With so many religions, why Christianity?

SUFFERING
If there is a God, why is there so much suffering?

TRINITY
Understanding the Trinity.

SCIENCE
The complementary nature of Science & Christianity.

FORGIVENESS
What it is and why it matters?

GUIDANCE
How does God guide?

REPENTANCE
What it is and why you can't get to heaven without it.

BORN AGAIN
What does it mean to be converted and born again?

SAVING FAITH
The kind of faith that will get you to heaven

ASSURANCE
Can I know for sure that I am going to heaven?

TRUTH
What is truth and does it matter?

MORALITY
Does it matter how we live? A Christian view of morality.

THE CHURCH
God's vision for his family, the Church. A call to the churches of the new millennium.

PURPOSE
How can I find a great purpose for living?

IDENTITY
Who am I; Finding my true identity as a human being and as a child of God.

SELF-ESTEEM
How can I feel good about my self? The Christian basis for proper sel-esteem.

LIFE AFTER DEATHChristianity's Hope & Challenge.

THE CROSS
Why did Jesus Die? What the Bible says about the Cross.

The cross and the love of God

It is interesting that the New Testament nowhere defines what love is. Paul, in his great chapter on love, 1 Corinthians 13, tells us of the absolute importance of love. He describes how love behaves and he speaks of its lasting value, but he does not actually say what it is. However, we are left in no doubt as to what love is when the Bible speaks of the love of God.

It is significant that when the New Testament mentions the love of God it usually does so in the context of the cross. Consider the following examples: “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son” (John 3:16); God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8); “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). Note John’s statement “This is love”. In the Old Testament, one of the most common words used of God is the Hebrew word chesed. It occurs 148 times, 90 of these in the Psalms. This is a composite word including ideas such as loving kindness, longsuffering, gentleness and goodness and is often translated as “love”. In the New Testament John goes a step further and tells us “God is[43] love” (1 John 4:8, 16). Emil Brunner called this “The most daring statement that has ever been made in human language.” But that statement alone tells us nothing. It is the cross that unpacks its meaning. As Eugenia Price says in Share My Pleasant Stones, “God’s mercy was not increased when Jesus came to earth, it was illustrated! Illustrated in a way we can understand.” Or as John V. Taylor puts it in his thoughtful book on the crucifixion, Weep Not for Me, “The crucified Jesus is the only accurate picture of God the world has ever seen.”

[43] Italics mine.

Love is self-giving for the benefit of others and in God’s case the “others” were those who had rebelled against him. The proof of genuine love is not merely a feeling; it is an action. In Dillistone’s beautiful book, Jesus Christ and His Cross, he mentions that someone once asked the incomparable dancer, Pavlova, what she meant by a certain dance she had performed. She replied, “Do you think I would have danced it if I could have said it?” We tend to think of love in emotional terms, but the New Testament concept of love is more focused on active self-giving. And the greater the cost of that self-giving, the greater the love. It was on the night before his crucifixion that Jesus said to his disciples, “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (John 15:13). Because there never has been, nor could be, a greater cost than that endured by Father and Son on Calvary, this is what defines for all time the true nature of love—and the true character of God. Pastor and Bible teacher Paul Rees said: “The cross does not so much reveal God’s infinite intellect as it reveals his heart.” Someone else has said, “On the Mount of Beatitudes Christ opened his mouth and taught the people: on the mount of Calvary he opened his heart and showed the people.”

As the Greek language had no word to express this kind of self-giving love, the early Christians invented a new one, agapê, to distinguish it from other words which were used of the kind of love that exists between family members and friends, or love with a sexual connotation. Leon Morris made this comment:

Love as men understand it is usually of the nature of eros. It has two outstanding characteristics. It is love of the worthy, or at least that which men think worthy, and it is a love that includes the desire to possess. The love that we see in the cross differs in both respects. It is a love of those whom God knows to be unworthy, and it is a love which seeks not so much to possess as to give. It is a love that proceeds from the essential nature of God, not from something of value in men, which attracts us to Him.

It is worth noting that the New Testament is equally divided between the emphasis it puts on the love of the Father in giving his Son and the love of the Son in sacrificing himself for us. There is a total alignment of wills between them both. It was love that sent the Son and love that brought him. And the goal of both was that we might be included in the family.

This kind of love is beyond our understanding. Alexander Whyte, in Lord, Teach Us to Pray, says:

The love of Christ has no border, it has no shore, it has no bottom. The love of Christ is boundless, it is bottomless, it is infinite, it is divine. That it passes knowledge [Ephesians 3:19] is the greatest thing that ever was said or could be said about it, and Paul was raised up of all men to see that and to say it. We shall come to the shore, we shall strike the bottom, of every other love, but never of the love of Christ!

H. R. Mackintosh, in The Christian Experience of Forgiveness, has a significant comment on why it is beyond our understanding:

We are constantly under a temptation to suppose that the reason why we fail to understand completely the atonement made by God in Christ is that our minds are not sufficiently profound. And doubtless there is truth in the reflection that for final insight into the meaning of the cross we are not able or perspicacious enough. But there is a deeper reason still. It is that we are not good enough; we have never forgiven a deadly injury at a price like this, at such cost to ourselves as came upon God in Jesus’ death. We fail to comprehend such sacrificial love because it far outstrips our shrunken conceptions of what love is and can endure.

But whether we understand it or not, we can begin to experience it. When we surrender our lives to Jesus, then it is this love that is “poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit” (Romans 5:5). Anglican minister, David Watson, told how he was speaking at a University Mission one evening and just before his talk started someone said to him, “Do you see that girl over there. She’s the toughest girl in the University.” She had a reputation of being pretty tough, of sleeping around with many boys, taking drugs, doing all the usual kind of things. She came to see David when he had finished, and said she had asked Christ into her life at the end of his talk. He saw her next day and she told him what she had been doing. “I have just been crying and crying and crying,” (and these were her very words) “because for the last six years I have felt as guilty as hell. And now”, she said, “I can’t really believe that God loves me.” David comments, “During that day all that guilt was coming out and all God’s love was coming in, and she couldn’t believe that God loved her personally.” Michael Green and R. Paul, in New Testament Spirituality, say:

We are a delight to God. He desires us. He seeks our fellowship. Were it needed, he would die again for us. We never know ourselves to be truly loved until we know ourselves to be loved by God.

And when we have put our faith in Jesus, even when we don’t feel this love, we can still trust him and believe it. In this respect it is worth noting that when the writers of the New Testament speak of God’s love they tend to use the past tense—not “he loves us” but “he loved us”, referring to the cross (e.g. John 3:16; Galatians 2:20; 1 John 4:10). Should your circumstances lead you to doubt whether he really does love you, look to the cross. We should not need any greater proof than that. William Walsham How, in his hymn “It is a Thing Most Wonderful” which he wrote in 1872, put this well:

I sometimes think about the Cross

and shut my eyes, and try to see

The cruel nails and crown of thorns,

and Jesus crucified for me.

But even could I see Him die,

I could but see a little part

Of that great love, which, like a fire,

is always burning in His heart.

When we have once experienced this love, then as Jesus’ followers we are also commanded to begin practising it, loving our enemies as well as our friends, as that is what God our Father and role model is like and he expects the same of his children (Matthew 5:43-48). Ray Simpson, in A Holy Island of Prayer, lays down the following challenge:

The tragedy of the second millennium was that the Cross, starting with the Crusades, became an emblem of the sword…The challenge of this third millennium is to let it be what it was and what it still is in its origin—an emblem of unconditional love.

The first Christians did this well, as we read in the early chapters of Acts. The gods feel no love for humans, Aristotle taught. “God so loved the world,” Christians answered. That response changed the standard of living in this world, according to Rodney Stark, author of The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History (Princeton) and a professor at the University of Washington.

One final point. Sadly, this love, amply illustrated by the cross, can be rejected. True love never forces itself on anyone—it allows freedom of response. As Paul explains, “God’s kindness is intended to lead you to repentance” (Romans 2:4). Where there is an unwillingness to respond in repentance there can be only one outcome. Robert Moyer put it like this: “A sinner may go to hell unsaved; he cannot go to hell unloved.”

Home

Copyright

About the Author

E-mail

Links

BUY RESOURCE MATERIAL

Site design by ttdesign.com