What You Should Know About God's Grace and Love

1. God’s love is beyond comprehension

God is beyond human comprehension. We are unable to define God. We can't give you a complete picture of who he is. He "resides in inaccessible light" (1 Tim. 6:16). If God's love is incomprehensible, so is God's love. While we can and must speak honestly about his love, we will never be able to comprehend it because it is divine love, which is as different from our love as his being is from ours.

2.God's love is observable.

We can't define God in the sense of exhaustively defining who he is, but we can accurately describe him. We can do so because he has revealed himself to us through his Word, which he opens to us through his Spirit. Given the divine difference, how is that possible? It's possible because God manifests himself in the world of creatures. He picks up his creations and uses them to describe himself to us. As a result, he's a lion, a rock, a fire, and even a moth and dry rot (google it!).

3. God is understood through analogy.

In the Bible, when God uses created things like lions to speak about himself, he is speaking metaphorically. This implies that the words he uses to describe himself are neither identical nor diametrically opposed to him. For example, he is a rock because he is made of stone, not because he is made of stone. We are not to map all of a rock's rockiness onto him point-for-point when he says "rock" of himself. But we shouldn't assume he's completely discontinuous with rocks in every way. He means some of what we mean when we say a rock is a rock when he says he is a rock: he is not made of stone, but he is solid and dependable. How is it possible for created things to represent God in this way for us? It's possible because he's the one who created them. It's as if his fingerprints are imprinted on the things he's created, and each one reflects a sliver of his divine attributes. We can't piece together a picture of God from what he's made—indeed, we suppress his natural revelation—but he can use those things to describe himself in his inspired Word, and then he can illuminate our minds to understand and believe those descriptions. All of this applies to God's love: when we read "God is love," we get a sense of what love is from what he has created, but his love cannot be compared to any other created love we are familiar with.

4. The Bible's depictions of God, including depictions of his love, self-regulate.

The question then becomes, how do we know which aspects of each picture of God we should apply to him and which we should not? How do we know we're not supposed to infer that his love might ebb and flow like human love, or even fail? This may appear obvious to us, but that is only because we have already learned how to read the Bible correctly to some extent. What is the reason, when we think about it, that we don't infer this? The reason for this is that other ways in which God describes himself, such as his repeated self-description as a covenant-keeping God who makes solemn oaths to his people, prevent us from doing so. The Bible is a book that interprets itself: What it says in one section reveals how we should read another. Its numerous depictions of God create a self-interpreting tangle of images. That includes the photographs of his love.

5. We have a tendency to jump to the wrong conclusions when it comes to God's love.

We are frequently less aware of how the love language should be interpreted in light of God's other self-descriptions. When someone says something like, "If I were a God of love, then...", this is very clear. The reasoning that follows is frequently divorced from God's larger portrayal of himself in the Bible. When we do this, God becomes a giant projection of ourselves, a shadow cast onto a screen behind us with all of our own features magnified and exaggerated. While it may be obvious that God will never stop loving us, it is less obvious that his love differs from ours in other ways, Being self-sufficient, sovereign, unchanging, all-knowing, just, and passionless are examples (yes, rightly understood).

6. God's love, when truly understood, always elicits a love response from us.

Divine love, in all of its biblical fullness, is never a self-contained experience. Our rest in God is never found in ourselves, but always leads us out of ourselves and toward him and others. God's love is something that must be experienced as well as learned. God's love for us produces love in us for him and others. The true Word of love that we have in the Bible, if we truly have it, will abide in us and will not return empty as we make glancing reflections of God's immeasurable love visible to others in our own lives through miracles of grace.

7. Understanding the various manifestations of God's love allows us to appreciate its immeasurable magnitude.

The study of God's love in its biblical contexts is not an exercise in abstraction that only obscurantist systematic theologians are interested in. It may be simpler to simply think "God is love" and fill in the blanks with whatever our minds suggest. Allowing our own minds to generate our theology requires far less mental effort than subjecting them to the disciplined study of God's self-revelation in Scripture. But, in the end, a god who is nothing more than a projection of my own mind will never be enough to satisfy me. Worshiping such a god would be akin to being locked in a room with only myself for company, a form of theological solitary confinement, a terrible form of narcissistic solipsism, and ultimately a form of self-worshipping idolatry akin to hell itself in some ways. On this path, there is no satisfaction, only bitter disappointment. Our souls will find rest in meditation on God's authoritative self-revelation in all of its fullness, the rest of discovering in him one who infinitely exceeds our own finite finitude, one whose delights can never be exhausted.

8. We avoid errors by reading God's love in its larger context.

Love is perhaps the most obvious attribute to consider from a Trinitarian perspective, but we are more likely to notice it than comprehend its theological implications. What a difference it makes if we remember, for example, that God's love is rooted in the Father's love for his Son and the resultant desire to see the Son honored (John 5:22–23). Then we won't assume that because "God is love," he easily overlooks sin, because we'll understand that sin that disobeys Christ is an offense against the very heart of God's love. God's wrath against sinners will flow from his love for his Son. Only by reading about God's love in this way we can draw conclusions from it by placing it in the context of our own natural minds.

9.God's love must be "read," particularly in light of what the Bible says about his triune life.

Furthermore, John's writings will repeatedly link God's love to his triune life in the larger context. The Father's love for the Son and the Son's love for the Father are two of John's favorite topics to write about. He even records the Lord Jesus saying that the Father loves him because he gives his life for others (John 10:17). Love is not unique in being a Trinitarian attribute: all of God's attributes are attributes of the one God who is three persons, but we must never overlook God's love's Trinitarian nature.