Owen on How God's Love and Our Love Differ

One more post on chapter 3 of part 1 of John Owen's classic On Communion with the Triune God.  Toward the end of this chapter, Owen shows "wherein God's love and our love differ."  He sets forth three ways.

"First, the love of God is a love of bounty; our love unto him is a love of duty."

Commenting on the nature of this infinitely full love, after talking about how bountiful and overflowing it is, Owen says that the love of the Father "is the love of a spring, of a fountain--always communicating--a love from whence proceeds everything that is lovely in its object.  It infuses into, and creates goodness in, the persons beloved."  Divine love communicates, bestows, creates, infuses all manner of good things in the objects of love.  God loves us too well to leave us as we are.  He will make us reflect the image of the Son of his love, and it his peculiar and rich love communicated that brings this about. 

"Our love unto God is a love of duty, the love of a child. . . .  It is indeed made up of four things: (1) rest; (2) delight; (3) reverence; (4) obedience." 

"Second, they differ in this: The love of the Father unto us is an antecedent love; our love unto him is a consequent love."

One verse will do here:  "In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins" (1 Jn. 4:10).  As Owen puts it, "his love goes before ours."  There is nothing in us, no love flowing from us, antecedent to the Father's love that moved him to love us.  He simply loved us because he loved us.  God is love.  And infinite love tends to overflow lavishly and needs no prior impetus to cause the overflowing. 

"Third, they differ in this also: The love of God is like himself--equal, constant, not capable of augmentation or diminuition; our love is like ourselves--unequal, increasing, waning, growing, declining."

This third heading says enough on its own, and anyone who knows anything of the glory of God and of the instability of the self knows what is intended here.

So again and always, all praise be to God who is love, who overflows in love, whose love then overflows from us back to him again and then out to others in communion with him--all through the Lord Jesus in the energy of the Holy Spirit.  For from him and through him and to him are all things, to him who is the great three-in-one and one-in-three be the glory forevermore!  Amen!