Understanding God's Love – Part 10

Conclusion

We must maintain a carefully balanced perspective as we pursue our study of God's love. God's passionate love for the world cannot be isolated from His particular love for the elect and vice versa. Nor is God's provisional love and His particular love in opposition to each other like some kind of yin-yang principle. The various kinds of God's love are constant, perfect, without ebb and flow.

Some people say, "I don't like this kind of tension." But here is my advice: Learn to live with the tension. People don't like the fact that the Scripture speaks to these issues with tension and they want to remove the tension, but the reality is that there is tension and we better leave it there, because the Bible leaves it there.

Where does The Shepherd's Bible College stand then? Well, we aren't Arminian because the Bible doesn't teach Arminianism. And we aren't hyper-Calvinists because the Bible doesn't teach hyper-Calvinism either. We must endeavour to maintain a biblically balanced approach.

I think that when we discuss God's love and dealings with humankind, we need to stop using sentences that begin "Yes, BUT . . ." and start using sentences that begin, "Yes, AND . . ."

Don't set these five concepts of God's love against each other as if they are mutually exclusive. Instead, embrace all of them equally, and learn to live in the tension.

God Himself is immutable – unchanging. He is not loving one moment and wrathful the next. His wrath coexists with His love; therefore the two never contradict. Such are the perfections of God that we can never begin to comprehend these things. Above all, we must not set them against one another, as if there were somehow a discrepancy in God. God is always true to Himself and true to His Word (words adapted from John MacArthur, The Love of God (Dallas: Word Publishing, 1996), 18).

Ephesians 3:19 explains that Christ's love surpasses knowledge. May we rest in the knowledge of what God has revealed of Himself in Scripture, determine not to go beyond what stands written (1 Corinthians 4:6), and learn to live in the biblical tension of a love that cannot be fully understood by limited human minds.