Love is one of the good words. Just as no one particularly labors to have words like death, or cruelty associated with themselves or their ideas, so everyone wants to lay claim to love. The devil, however, is quite content for all of us to love love, as long as he maintains the power to define the term. The mainline American church follows mainstream American culture and defines love principally in permissive terms. Love means never requiring others to say they are sorry. God’s love for us, in this scheme, makes our sins insignificant (as well as making the atonement of Christ insignificant.) God winks us into heaven, because we’re so valuable and lovable, and He’s such a swell guy (or girl).
The devil’s goal in promoting this nonsense, is not, in the end, directed at either liberal professing Christians nor those who are not professing Christians. Instead, his enemy is always those who trust in Christ alone. In getting them to embrace this foolish idea of love, he tempts us to deny or at least diminish the sound idea of God’s love. Evangelicals, at least the fundamentalist and the Reformed wings, want to affirm the reality of God’s wrath. He is a just and holy God. His wrath, justice and holiness are more real than we will ever realize. But they ought never to be contrasted with His love. We should not diminish any attribute of God to emphasize any others. The Lord our God is one. The Bible tells us time and again that we are loved by God. Our duty is to believe Him.
This is, in the end, the very end of the work of Christ. God’s goal was not merely that we would end up forgiven for our sins. This was but a step in a longer process whereby we who are by nature children of wrath become His own children. Our justification is in the service of our adoption. Jesus, His beloved Son, suffered for our sins so that we might become by grace His beloved sons.
I spent over a decade of my public ministry seeking to make known this startling reality- that if we are in Christ, we are loved by our heavenly Father as much now as we will ever be. Even when we remember our evangelical theology, even when we sing with our lips that we are justified by faith alone, too many of us too often seem to think that God is angry with us when we sin, and that we keep His anger far from us by not sinning. We long for heaven in part because we know that there we will sin no more. Guilt will no longer stand between us and our Father. The truth is, however, that guilt does not stand between us. Our guilt was driven away as far as the east is from the west two thousand years ago. God’s anger at our sins was spent on Calvary.
Over the past few years I have repented of preaching this message. I no longer believe that I ought to be seeking to persuade people that God loves them now as much as He ever will love them. My goal now is to persuade Christians of this truth, far more shocking still- if you are in Christ, God loves you now as much as He loves His own Son. This is the good news. Not only were our sins forever expunged at Calvary, but the very obedience of Jesus became ours. He is as pleased with us as He is with His first born Son. We are now joint heirs with Him. We are in union with Him.
Believing this precious truth changes everything. So much of our fear, our weakness is driven by a failure to rest in this truth. We long for the approval of men, because we do not believe we have the approval of God. And so we fail to be faithful. Faith, however, is believing God. He has told us that He loves us. He has told us that He has made us His Sons. By his grace may He bless us with hearts that believe Him.