The Wrath of God as an Expression of the Love of God

So far from God's wrath being in opposition to God's love, the wrath of God is actually an expression of his love. Michael Reeves explains:

His love is not mild-mannered and limp; it is livid, potent and committed. And therein lies our hope: through his wrath the living God shows that he is truly loving, and through his wrath he will destroy all devilry that we might enjoy him in a purified world, the home of righteousness. 

 To illustrate, Reeves points us to the personal wrestlings of Croation theologian Miroslav Volf, who pens these powerful words:

I used to think that wrath was unworthy of God. Isn't God love? Shouldn't divine love be beyond wrath? God is love, and God loves every person and every creature. That's exactly why God is wrathful against some of them. My last resistance to the idea of God's wrath was a casualty of the war in the former Yugoslavia, the region from which I come. According to some estimates, 200,000 people were killed and over 3,000,000 were displaced. My villages and cities were destroyed, my people shelled day in and day out, some of them brutalized beyond imagination, and I could not imagine God not being angry. 

Or think of Rwanda in the last decade of the past century where 800,00 people were hacked to death in one hundred days! How did God react to the carnage? By doting on the perpetrators in a grandparently fashion? By refusing to condemn the bloodbath but instead affirming the perpetrators' basic goodness? Wasn't God fiercely angry with them? Though I used to complain about the indecency of the idea of God's wrath, I came to think that I would have to rebel against a God who wasn't wrathful at the sight of the world's evil. God isn't wrathful in spite of being loving. God is wrathful because God is love.

—Michael Reeves, Delighting in the Trinity: An Introduction to the Christian Faith (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2012), 119-120.

What Do I Love When I Love My God?

Augustine:

But what do I love when I love my God? Not material beauty or beauty of a temporal order; not the brilliance of earthly light, so welcome to our eyes; not the sweet melody of harmony and song; not the fragrance of flowers, perfumes, and spices; not manna or honey; not limbs such as the body delights to embrace. It is not these that I love when I love my God. And yet, when I love him, it is true that I love a light of a certain kind, a voice, a perfume, a food, an embrace; but they are of the kind that I love in my inner self, when my soul is bathed in light that is not bound by space; when it listens to sound that never dies away; when it breathes fragrance that is not borne away on the wind; when it tastes food that is never consumed by the eating; when it clings to an embrace from which it is not severed by fulfillment of desire. This is what I love when I love my God.

—Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (New York: Penguin, 1961), 212.

Loving People in God

St. Augustin's God-besotted God-centeredness in the Confessions is well known. Reading through the Confessions, I'm struck also by how God-centered is Augustin's thinking about love for people. The following quotations from book 4 will give you a good feel for this (italics mine).

In a section discussing friendship, Augustin confesses to God:

Blessed are those who love you, O God, and love their friends in you and their enemies for your sake. They alone will never lose those who are dear to them, for they love them in one who is never lost, in God, our God who made heaven and earth and fills them with his presence, because by filling them he made them (79–80).

Then in a portion discussing delighting in things of this world, Augustin addresses those who would delight, among other things, in souls:

If your delight is in souls, love them in God, because they too are frail and stand firm only when they cling to him. If they don't, they go their own way and are lost. Love them, then, in him and draw as many with you to him as you can. Tell them "He is the one we should love. He made the world and he stays close to it" (82).

Oh for more Augustinian God-besotted God-centered love for people!

—Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (New York: Penguin, 1961).

Love (2)

Immortal Heat, O let thy greater flame
    Attract the lesser to it: let those fires,
    Which shall consume the world, first make it tame;
And kindle in our hearts such true desires,
As may consume our lusts, and make thee way.
    Then shall our hearts pant thee; then shall our brain
    All here invention on thine Altar lay,
And there in hymns send back thy fire again:
Our eyes shall see thee, which before saw dust;
    Dust blown by wit, till that they both were blind:
    Thou shalt recover all they goods in kind,
Who wert disseised by usurping lust:
    All knees shall bow to thee; all wits shall rise,
    And praise him who did make and mend our eyes.

—George Herbert, The Complete English Poems (New York: Penguin, 1991), 48.

For Love of Your Love, O Lord, I Recall the Chains from which You Released Me

Recently I read sections 1 and 2 of book 2 of Augustin's Confessions as part of my "devotional" reading. And this portion carries me back to the sins of my youth as so much of what Augustin recalls recalls for me what I don't recall so well left to myself. It felt like a wave breaking over my life that carried up from my past onto the shore of my present the evils from which God has wondrously now rescued me for almost longer than I was immersed in the mire of sin. I'm exceedingly grateful to God and moved with "love of [his] love."

Here are portions of the portions that move me so deeply:

I must now carry my thoughts back to the abominable things I did in those days, the sins of the flesh that defiled my soul. I do this, my God, not because I love those sins, but so that I may love you. For love of your love I shall retrace my wicked ways. The memory is bitter, but it will help me to savor your sweetness, the sweetness that does not deceive but brings real joy and never fails. For love of your love I shall retrieve myself from the havoc of disruption that tore me to pieces when I turned away from you, whom alone I should have sought, and lost myself instead on many a different quest. For as I grew to manhood I was inflamed with desire for a surfeit of hell's pleasures. Foolhardy as I was, I ran wild with lust that was manifold and rank. In your eyes my beauty vanished and I was foul to the core, yet I was pleased with my own condition and anxious to be pleasing in the eyes of men.  

I cared for nothing but to love and be loved. But my love went beyond the affection of one mind for another, beyond the arc of the bright beam of friendship. Bodily desire, like a morass, and adolescent sex welling up within me exuded mists that clouded over and obscured my heart, so that I could not distinguish the clear light of true love from the murk of lust. Love and lust together seethed within me. In my tender youth they swept me away over the precipice of my body's appetites and plunged me in the whirlpool of sin. More and more I angered you, unawares. For I had been deafened by the clank of my chains, the fetters of the death that was my due to punish the pride in my soul. I strayed still further from you and you did not restrain me. I was tossed and spilled, floundering in the broiling sea of my fornication, and you said no word. How long it was before I learned that you were my true joy! You were silent then, and I went on my way, further and further from you, proud in my distress and restless in fatigue, sowing more and more seeds whose only crop was grief.

—Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (New York: Penguin, 1961), 43–44.

Do You Know Who You Are?

Do you know who you are? I'm talking to you, Christians. I mean, do you really understand who you are in God's Son? Consider the address of the saints of Colossae in Colossians 3, addressed by Saint Paul in his ancient letter to them. 

Verse 12 of Colossians 3 addresses you—my brothers and sisters in Jesus—as “God’s chosen ones,” or it could be translated, “the elect of God.” This description—don't miss it!—is so precious. Israel of old was God’s elect. And as Israel of old was called sovereignly and freely, so also “you were called.” See verse 15: “you were called in one body.” You were summoned to be joined to Jesus, to belong to Jesus’ body. And, the “elect of God” are also described as “holy” and “loved.” You are “holy” and “loved.”

To understand the power and preciousness of these “oppulent appellations,”[1] consider the love language of Deut. 7:6-8. (By the way, I’ll just say parenthetically: this ought to be your “love language,” our love language.)  In Deuteronomy 7:6-8, these three concepts of election, holiness, and being loved come together so beautifully. 

For you are a people holy to the LORD your God. The LORD your God has chosen you to be a people for his treasured possession, out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth. It was not because you were more in number than any other people that the LORD set his love on you and chose you, for you were the fewest of all peoples, but it is because the LORD loves you and is keeping the oath that he swore to your fathers, that the LORD has brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.

To be holy, as perhaps you know, is to be set apart for God’s special use and purposes. And this holiness is the result (note this well), not the cause, of God’s election. God’s choosing of a people calls them to be holy, set apart with a special status, to be used for God’s good and glorious purposes.

Now although God’s election makes a people holy, it is not election that makes God’s people loved. God’s love is what moved him to elect a people. His love elects, his love chooses.

Two texts on this love. Jeremiah 31:3 says, “I have loved you with an everlasting love.” Before you were created, God loved you, he set his affection on you. And Ephesians 1:4-5: “In love he predestined us . . . through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will. . . .” So his love moved him to predestine, to elect. You are elect, because you were loved, but you were not loved and elected because you were holy, but God’s love and election made you holy. For as Colossians 2:13-14 tells us: “When you were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh, [it was then that] God made you alive together with Christ, having forgiven us all our trespasses, having wiped out that record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands.” He put it away, “nailing it to the cross.” Loved. Elected. Forgiven. Made holy.

And so with these descriptions—chosen, holy, and loved—it’s clear: the Church is being understood as the new Israel in the second Adam, as a new humanity in Jesus. Doug Moo says this:

The Christians in Colossae . . . have the privilege of belonging to the historical people of God. The ‘new self’ is the ‘new Israel.’ This identification is clearly indicated in the description of the Colossians as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved. All three are standard ways of describing Israel in the Old Testament and the church as the people of God in the New Testament.[2]

---

[1] Kent Hughes, Colossians and Philemon: The Supremacy of Christ (Wheaton: Crossway, 1989), 101.

[2] Douglas J. Moo, The Letters to the Colossians and to Philemon (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008), 275.

Who Handed Jesus Over to Die?

"Who delivered up Jesus to die? Not Judas, for money; not Pilate, for fear; not the Jews, for envy—but the Father, for love!" 

—Octavious Winslow, No Condemnation in Christ Jesus (London, 1857), 358. 

Twelve Lessons Learned on Vacation: Part 3

Next I want to expand a little on this lesson among the twelve:

1. Don't try to get out of a vacation more than it can give.

Expectations. They're huge, aren't they? Without them, we couldn't get on in the world. But oftentimes by them we set ourselves up for disappointment or a fall. I suppose many approach a vacation with certain expectations that are not often gratified, and they then suppose that the next one will go better and be more fulfilling.

To point out one expectation that we had in our recent trip to Mexico, we assumed it'd be in the 80s, being so far south. Wrong. That's what it is, apparently, inland. On the ocean, it's usually cooler this time of year. It was mid-70s for about four to five of the days we were there, sunny and warm enough to swim. But two days were chilly, maybe in the low 60s at the warmest part of the day, accompanied by gusty winds. I didn't even bring any long sleeve shirts. That was disappointing. Em also got a UTI. I got a cold. These thwarted some of our expectations.

But we did not go into the vacation looking for some sort of ultimate fulfillment or satisfaction. Vacations can't give that. We knew we'd enjoy many pleasant creation goods, but what struck me repeatedly was how ultimately unsatisfying all those pleasant things were. The food was great. Drinks were unlimited. Leisure and entertainment abounded. The place was beautiful. We were comfortable and care-free. People waited on us. That's the life, right?

Wrong. Not for us anyway, for we've tasted eternal life. All of these things

The Agony

            Philosophers have measur’d mountains,

Fathom’d the depths of seas, of states, and kings,

Walk’d with a staff to heav’n, and traced fountains:

            But there are two vast, spacious things,

The which to measure it doth more behove:

Yet few there are that sound them; Sin and Love.

            Who would know Sin, let him repair

Unto mount Olivet; there shall he see

A man so wrung with pains, that all his hair,

            His skin, his garments bloody be.

Sin is that press and vice, which forceth pain

To hunt his cruel food through ev’ry vein.

            Who knows not Love, let him assay

And taste that juice, which on the cross a pike

Did set again abroach, then let him say

            If every he did taste the like.

Love is that liquor sweet and most divine,

Which my God feels as blood; but I, as wine.

—George  Herbert (1594-1633)

The Beautiful and the Ugly

See Pastor Steve Brandon's post on these two views of marriage when the going gets tough. Here we have the ugly over against the beautiful, infidelity versus faithfulness, lies face to face with the gospel. (Be sure to watch the two videos.) Which will yours be? By the grace of God, as for us, we already settled this one at the altar. As we declared then—all to the glory of God, whose faithfulness in Christ endures forever!

God is Love

Commenting on 1 Jn. 4:16, Jonathan Edwards says this of the Spirit:

The Apostle tells us that 'God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him.' Which confirms not only that the divine nature subsists in love, but also that this love is the Spirit: for it is the Spirit of God by which God dwells in his saints, as the Apostle had observed in the thirteenth verse, and as we are abundantly taught in the New Testament. 

—Jonathan Edwards, "Discourse on the Trinity," Works, vol. 21, pp. 109-144.

Grace and Mercy Grounded in Love

Yesterday's Lord's Day sermon on Eph. 2:1-10, preached by NCC pastor Andrew Fulton, provided liberating food for the dull duty-bound believer. More than that, though, good as that was for me, it also stirred me to contemplate more clearly the nature of grace and mercy in relation to love, which I've wondered at for years. I think the Lord has given me some light.

So what is the mercy of God, what is the grace of God, and what is the love of God? And how do grace, mercy, and love relate? This text—Eph. 2:4-5—brings these together plainly and brightly. First, I'll give definitions that I believe are governed by the context of this text. Then I'll try to bring them together.

So what is the mercy of God? Simply stated, mercy is God not giving us what we do deserve. This is the negative side, we might say. Born and dead in transgressions and sins (Eph. 2:1), God's mercy comes in and pities the suffering and misery of our condemnation and judgment under the Judge's just wrath. And God withholds exactly what we deserve. He does not condemn the guilty.

So then, what is the grace of God? Well, it is the positive side: grace is God giving us what we don't deserve. Grace gives us a free gift we didn't and can't earn. Grace gives lavish generosity to those who've been stubbornly and persistently stingy and sinful. It moves way beyond mercy.

Mercy says, "I will not sentence you to death, a death that is your due for rebelling against the law of the Lawgiver, for spitting in the face of your good and kind King, for worshiping (delighting in and desiring and loving) the creature and creation rather than (supremely delighting in and desiring and loving) the Creator—who is blessed forever! Amen!" (Rom. 1:25). So speaks Mercy. 


But Grace comes in, wonder of wonders, and says, "I will move beyond granting pardon. Wonderful as mercy is, I will do more. I will seat you in the heavenlies in my risen and exalted Son and make you a co-heir of all that is his (Eph. 2:6; cf. Rom. 8:17). The tripersonal God of infinite love and joy and sweetness will be your everlasting portion and treasure and enjoyment. I know you spit in my face. I know you disregarded my glory. And so I showed you stunning mercy. But that's not all. I also want to make you my son, with all the privileges and possessions of that status." So speaks Grace.


Well then, what is love, if it's not what's already been described? It is this: love is the infinite fountain-like heart of God that pours forth mercy and grace on greasy ingrates from all eternity and on into all eternity. "Because of the great love with which he loved us" (Eph. 2:4). Notice that love grounds the mercy that's gone before to deal with our condition in Eph. 2:1-3. And notice that love then also grounds the grace that lavishes upon us what follows in Eph. 2:5-7. Love is the bottom of all the free mercy and grace of God that comes to us through Christ in the gift of his Spirit. 


And this Holy Spirit is the love between the Father and the Son, now poured out through the risen and living Savior and Lord of all—on us—on dirty, grimy, slimy, unholy idolaters. This Spirit is the life of God given to us in union with the risen Son—we who were cold corrupting corpses in trespasses and sins. Now, because of grace and mercy, bottomed in eternal love, now we live with the very life of the risen Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit. He made us alive with him—by grace you have been saved! (Eph. 2:5). O praise the glory of this great triune grace! (Eph. 1:6, 12, 14). This is the free, unfettered gift of God—so no boasting! (Eph. 2:8-9). Except of grace, glorious grace. God's grace.


So love is the bottom of this grace and mercy, the eternal love of the Father, Son, and Spirit (Eph. 1:4). But how may we know this love? What does it look like? I'm glad you asked, for I'm glad to tell you. It looks like this: "We know love by this, that he laid down his life for us" (1 Jn. 3:16); "God did not spare his own Son" (Rom. 8:32); "God gave his only unique Son" (Jn. 3:16); "Christ loved me and gave himself for me" (Gal. 2:20). Love looks like the cross. Love looks like Christ crucified. Love looks like the King killed. For you, and for me. 

Authentic Christian Experience: A Sense of God's Love on the Heart

"Hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been shed abroad in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who was given to us" (Rom. 5:5).  In On Communion with God, John Owen rightly points out that this is God's love for us, not our love for God, as the context makes crystal clear.  With genitival phrases, context is all.  Hermenuetics 101.  Owen got it.  Owen then says that the love of God in Scripture speaks of either God's love of purpose to do us good or of the love of acceptance and approval with God. 

Now, for the heart of this post, and the heart of Christianity: experiencing God's love on the heart. Owen asks this question: "Now, how can these [God's love of purpose to do us good and God's love of acceptance and approval] be shed abroad in our hearts?" Answer: "Not in themselves, but in a sense of them—in a spiritual apprehension of them." That's it. That's what's often missing in intellectualistic forms of religion that try to pass for Christianity.

To be sure, Christianity embraces the mind, the intellect. But that's not all. If that's all one has, a cognitive experience of the faith, one does not have Christian experience. Christian experience always includes this sixth sense of divine realities on the heart, melting it, moving it, satisfying it, rejoicing it. God's love is apprehended spiritually, that is to say, by the Spirit shed abroad in our hearts as we behold the glory of the once-crucified and now-risen Lord Jesus, who loved us and gave himself for us. A sense of this on the heart, really tasted, really perceived, is worth more than ten thousand worlds, worth more than all the pleasures, experiences, and evidences this world can afford. And it goes infinitely deeper, down into the depths of eternity past, taking us into eternity future—and there holds us in divine love, sent by the Father, purchased by the Son, shed abroad by the Holy Spirit.

The Christian's Duty of Holding Immediate Communion with the Father in Love

Chapter 4 of part 1 of Owen's On Communion with God provides exhortations unto communion with God along with directions in it and observations from it.

Owen exhorts:  "It is a duty for Christians to hold immediate communion with the Father in love."  After urging his readers to look to the Father as love, he exults in whose love this love is.  It is the love of an all-sufficient and infinitely self-satisfied God whose triune life amidts of no defect or lack.  God the Father infinitely delighted in his own glorious excellencies and perfections beheld in his Son from all eternity.  In the fellowship of the Son through the Spirit of their love, he might have rested and delighted himself forever.  So his love for creatures and requirement of love from them is not due to any need or deficiency in God.

Owen then describes the kind of love this is.  It is eternal, free, unchangeable, distinguishing.  The Father's love was fixed on his people before the foundation of the world.  And nothing in us moved him to this love.  It is wholly undeserved and has as its spring the Father's mere good pleasure and will.  It is constant, for God is immutable.  His love is a steadfast and comitted love.  And, last, but certainly not least precious, God's love is distinguishing, discriminating.  It is not promiscuous, at least not in one very important respect.  It is a particular love for his holy people, not for all, a love that sends his Son to die for them to secure sharing in the truine life and love of God forever and ever. 

So Owen urges all to look to the love of the Father so as to receive it.  And, "let it have its proper fruit and efficacy upon your heart" in the return of love back to God again.  He then gives considerations to help us in the duty and daily practice of receiving the Father's love and making suitable returns in love back to him. 

"So much as we see of the love of God, so much shall we delight in him, and no more," says Owen.  If this is so, and if we were created to glorify God by enjoying him forever, then this is no small matter.  May the Father be pleased to grant to us a fuller enjoyment of his love as the blood-bought gift of the Son in the strength of the Spirit—to the praise of the glory of his grace, freely bestowed on us in the Beloved.

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!