Growing up, movies like The Burning Hell made me think God was more wrath than love, and then, detoxing from that, I spent another thirty-five years believing love and wrath were both attributes of God. In viewing John’s plain statement that “God is love,” I stood with good-hearted teachers that said things like “certainly love is a very important attribute of God”[1] but were uncomfortable saying plainly that the essence of God is “holy love.”
It has only been recently through teachers like N.T. Wright and Fleming Rutledge that I’ve come to understand that God’s wrath, properly understood, is not another one of his attributes alongside love but “an aspect of his love”:
- It’s because God loves people with “a steady, unquenchable passion” that he hated the Holocaust, Sandy Hook, 911, and all mass killings.
- It’s because of his love that he hates racism, sex trafficking, and all forms of abuse.
- It’s because his love that he hates all heinous crimes against children.
- Indeed, it’s because of his love that God sets himself against all that hurts or is hostile to his purposes.
- Wright reminds us that “if God is not wrathful against these things, he is not loving… And it is his love, determining to deal with that nasty, insidious, vicious, soul-destroying evil, that causes him to send his only, special son.”[2]
Remember my friend’s note from last week that critiqued some contemporary American reformed thinking for its reluctance to give wholehearted affirmation to the primacy of God as loving? Again, he said that this was because many have adopted a formulation of predestination or election that logically compels them to say that God does not love every person.
Now, I’m certainly among those who view predestination and election, pastorally applied, as important and treasured doctrines in scripture. The reformed tradition brings a richness to the grace behind phrases like “we love him because he first loved us.” (1 John 4:10,19) Nevertheless, I do believe, as the children’s song says, that “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world,” and that Jesus really does love ALL children as in every person, not just all peoples. The song represents God’s take on diversity, his welcoming heart, and is consistent with his holy love beautifully expressed in the following:
“Turn to me and be saved, all the ends of the earth! For I am God, and there is no other.”
Isaiah 45:22, ESV
In a passage like this, God’s love for the world could not be more clear. Still, when it comes to God’s heart and plans, we’re only given a glimpse—there’s so much mystery. And, when Jesus told his disciples, “You did not choose me, but I chose you…” (John 15:16a), he shared the Father’s secret grace and plans with them as a loving friend:
“No longer do I call you servants, as a servant does not know what his master is doing; but I have called you friends, for all that I have heard from my Father, I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you…”
John 15:15-16a, ESV
This passage clearly shows us that the doctrine of election—God’s choosing—is a life-giving, relational, family truth. It was never meant to be the missing piece to some intellectually-challenging comic puzzle that we coldly affix other doctrines to like reprobation, God’s wrath, hell, or some version of double predestination.[3] In the end, this produces a very ugly and distorted picture of God that many are the proud keepers of.
A detached, heady approach to God’s choosing misunderstands and maligns what many have called “the doctrines of Grace.” All teachings in Scripture—especially those shrouded in mystery or associated with difficult questions—should be held and informed by God’s love expressed in Jesus Christ (e.g. John 3:16).
Martin Luther had to learn this. He was tormented by doctrines related to God’s sovereignty. Then one of his teachers reminded him that we must “view predestination through the wounds of Christ.”[4] What his mentor meant was that the doctrine of predestination should always be connected to the cross and seen as an expression of the triune God’s love:
- the Father sets his intimate, special love on “the elect” and plans for their redemption (Eph. 1:4-5).
- the Son dies for “those the father gave him” (John 17:9), and…
- the Spirit enlivens and awakens these individuals at the right time (Acts 1614; Eph. 2:1).
In scripture, predestination is a positive, loving theme (Rom. 8:28-29; Eph. 1:4-5) and, again, should be applied pastorally like the passages in 1 John we’ll look at next week as a conclusion to this series.
[1] https://www.patheos.com/blogs/randyalcorn/2018/03/love-is-not-god/
[2] N.T. Wright, Lent for Everyone: Mark, Year B (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2012), 85.
[3] Double predestination—the teaching that God predestines some to heaven and passes over some or predestines them to hell—is a doctrine that is more important to some logicians and systematic theologians than it is to me. It’s the result of wrestling with passages like Prov. 16:4, and Romans 9—especially verses 13,18, and 22-23. Although I’m with those who teach unconditional election (9:16), I remain agnostic about many of the questions Romans 9 raises. Trusting his loving heart (1 Tim. 2:4), I bow in worship, as Paul does in 11:33-36. Truly, God’s ways are unsearchable and inscrutable.
[4] From historian Mark Noll at the 2017 EPC GA. He was speaking about Luther in light of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation.