Understanding God's Love – Part 8

Imbalanced Approaches

If God's love for His creation (i.e., provisional love) and for the world (i.e., passionate love) are overemphasized while His love for the elect (i.e., particular love) and for those who obey Him (i.e., provisional love) are negated, then the result is Universalism – the idea that God so loves everyone that He would never send any of them to an eternal punishment. The heresy of Universalism comes as a result of the misappropriation of God's love for sinners.

Similarly, if we overemphasize God's love for the world (i.e., passionate love) to the neglect of the other aspects of God's love and a biblical understanding of His sovereignty, then the result will be Arminianism – a man-centred approach to the gospel that robs God of His glory and exalts man and his choices.

Alternatively, if we overemphasize God's love for His elect saints (i.e., particular love) and strip God of His love for the world (i.e., passionate love), the result will be hyper-Calvinism – the view that says that God has no compassion for the lost and does not care for them in any way. This error can lead Christians to give up their evangelistic activities because they do not see their efforts as necessary.

In addition, if we overly stress God's love for only those who obey Him (i.e., provisional love) then we might be led to a works-based system of salvation and/or sanctification wherein we are constantly burdened by legalistic attempts to maintain our own salvation in our own strength.

This is just a sampling of errors which can creep in if we allow ourselves to set the various objects of God's love against each other in an exclusive manner. There are eternal consequences when we "absolutize" any one of these categories.

So, how do we know if we have all of these aspects of God's love in balance? Tomorrow, I'll provide some test questions for you to see how you're doing.