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CHAPTER SEVEN

WHEN GOD SAYS LOVE, HE MEANS It

In the very midst of the self-destructive nations of mankind, there is a saving power to redeem, deliver and bring peace as in Isaiah 9:1-7, If it is rejected by a nation, at the first, or at the last, there are results. This brings up the love of God ? How wide is it, how deep, how high, how applicable ? It is imperative to a good understanding to realise the answer to all this, so that the nations, among others, may know what they are doing, at what cost, with what result, and in the face of what opportunities. To say that this equally concerns individuals is merely to apply the principles which God assigns to His ways, to all the fields of their application.

Let us see concerning His grace, power and motivation, what His word to man is.

It is marvellous to read in Romans 4, that God is He who gives life from the dead and calls those things that do not exist as though they did (4:17).

That is the work of the Creator, whom it is logically impossible as we have often seen, to bypass without antilogy.

What then of His personal disposition do we find in His Handbook for Holiness and Script for Salvation, the Bible, as demonstrated so  often ?

It is that He SO loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son.

That is a huge price, none higher. Money can be replaced; only begotten Son cannot be.

He can only be raised.

In His wit and wisdom that is the option God exercised, since He is in Himself, He who gives life to the dead, including resurrection, as Christ repeatedly exemplified in His life on earth, and almost as if a trailer to a film, notoriously in the extreme case of long dead Lazarus, whom He called forth out of the tomb with such sensational impact that the high priestly officials decided to take action. Everyone will be believing in Him was the trouble noted (rather more fruitful than what followed His murder!), so He must die. The Lazarus thing was too much. This person had been dead for says, with an eminent expectation of the hideous smell of decay, if he were to come forth out of the tomb. Such was the case; and yet he DID come forth, alive when and as CALLED by Jesus the Christ.

It is the best thing for the people, it was concluded, that He die. Think of our survival prospects if Caesar hears of some king! So they wilted and jilted and survived in order to be divinely destroyed when Roman soldiers fulfilled what Christ had also predicted (Matthew 24ff.).

 What a thought! Kill what does good, and destroy what heals, remove what has the overcoming medicine for death, and prevent belief in Him, in the experiemental results, in actuality! What an eminene of wisdom was here, the wit of this world which destroys itself, as in so many episodes and attitudes since that time.

What tarnished untruth was voiced in the place of simple fact that here empirically was the divine exhibition before their very eyes; and yet vested interests, thoughts of survival took precedence over ACTUAL survival, associated with revival. SO came the deadly decision, one of many to come. Reject Him. Instead, let the untempered, untampered, revamped sins simply continue charging furiously along. But would there be a defiant battering of those whom He recovered, without cease, making the whole exercise pointless. Not so with Christ: GO and SIN NO MORE. The other option ? preserve the people from such recoveries, in things small or large, for the sake of a murderous, self-assured, self-interested, self-trusting survival. It would after all continue for a generation before 1900 odd years of non-survival as a nation in the domain of Israel. You cannot play with truth and expect lies to help you, however confused. If God says it, let it be so. It will be in the end anyway. The outcome of truth is not altered by evacuees, except for their own milieu.

Thus there was an enemy of sin, and He was murdered through sin in thought, imperious dismissal of fact, blindness to prophecy and dismal doldrums of heart by which man is tempted to trust in himself - in his own plans, thought, powers and accomplishments until he becomes a veritable peacock, without a pea of wisdom and with cocked gun ready to murder, as Islamic forces are currently doing in Iraq and Syria, with a passion for display of their presumption which has horrified the world, which commits in any case, horror enough.

The love of God, having provided the salvation by God, and this entirely by grace so that you do not have to earn it by horrendous acts, whether individually or nationally or religiously, Christ Himself having taken the judgment for the penitent and repentant believer in Him, how much can He forgive ? We know why it may justly be forgiven (I John 1:7), because in Him justice is paid off by mercy, and transformation of life is instituted by power coursing as available to the believer (Ephesians 1:19).

But how MUCH can be so covered ? Paul makes it clear just how much, seeing himself as the pardoned chief of sinners, one without ultimate excuse, though ignorance might be pled for one mitigation, for his multiplied whippings and imprisonments, inflicted on many. These had been his own testimony,  dragging people off like some secret police horror of human manipulation, endued merely with the authority of other sinners, blind and heart and beating their path through a jungle of other people, as though they were using an axe on undergrowth. He is set forth as a testimony, he declares, of divine mercy (I Timothy 1:12-17). Thus in Titus 2:11-14, we see Christ is sent to redeem us "from every lawless deed." People are saving "through the washing of regeneration and the renewing of the Holy Spirit," Titus 3:3-7, to eternal life. Sin is thus separated in its devouring liabilities and loveless follies as the East from the West (Psalm 103); for God delights in mercy (Micah 7:17ff.). If you COME to Him, He WILL NOT cast you out (John 6:37). That is the way of it.

But some protest thus:

"We know He delights in mercy to some, and that some will by a profound and inimitable grace, which is wholly exclusive of meritorious contribution by man, be saved as from the common destiny controlled by sin, by law-breaking and spiritual self-sufficiency or self-reliance (for you either trust yourself, your appointee or God). However, we do not find this is offered freely as if it could be effectual to all. It is a very special donation kept for some only. There is love and love, and the love which goes to the extreme of finding by divine selection, those whom He has chosen, is not for all. There is a difference.

Let us consider such an unbiblical distortion.

What an important difference, then, that must be, if it separates the destinies of heaven and hell, for the human recipients of one or the other. It is not as if to one He gives 10,000 and to another 100,000, which would be no small differentiation: rather to some He on this basis, gives eternal life in salubrious beauty of holiness, but to others hopeless loss following the inclinations of their preferentially otherwise disposed hearts. They did not come to Him when called (cf. John 15:22ff.), and bore the consequences of the selection of their own hearts. Had, said Christ, they NOT KNOWN, HEARD, SEEN His words and works, then they would have had no sin. Destiny would not then have been declared by their preference. But in that case, since they had certainly both seen and heard, and STILL DID NOT COME IN FAITH IN HIM AND TO HIM, therefore "they have no excuse for their sin."

Inexcusability ? this followed on rejection of His Gospel reality, based in Himself as sent. It occurs because they rejected the intervention. They were still unmoved in the face of the evidence, this to the satisfaction of God as being so, of Him who foreknowing all, and discerning all, SO loved THE WORLD that He even gave His only begotten Son to save it. Remove the only way to mercy and you remove the mercy. Then there is no excuse.

There is no excuse for man; but as for God, He has done to the uttermost, and ensures that the case in His sight is measured and sure, meaningful and fulfilled, real, with that reality of preference preserved from its own state to its fate.

As to the world, He did not, He indicates. even desire to condemn it, since saving it was His supervening motive.

When the Almighty has a supervening motive, there is nothing He lacks to implement it. However when the supervening motive has a basis still  left for exclusion, a limitation, since not all come, we ask this. What is that self-imposed limit which flies in the very face of His desire and most expensive action ins sending His only begotten Son to become a sacrifice for sin as so often and in so many ways foretold ? Indeed, these were not only foretold, but this in such detail of date, and place, and situation, all  described as if TV had been there aforetime, that it can make one feel as if there in advance as one reads of it in the prophecies.

It was the wisdom of God which had been there beforehand, and knew it, having placed elements as He saw fit, but not excluding the free operation of sin in those who preferred that status of sovereignty in their lives. Both were foreknown, since all was, on the part of Him who knows the end from the beginning, and operates with knowledge always, whether foreknowledge or any other. In Him are the "treasures of wisdom and knowledge," as in Colossians 2:3.

It is as in Romans 4, He who raises the dead and calls those things which do not exist as if they did. TO know what the Bible means, it is best to look at what it says, not to indulge rather in pouring in splashes of worldly wisdom or thought, as if making some sort of cocktail.

When, then, He declared that He sent the Son NOT to condemn but TO SAVE the world, did He mean that He did not send His Son to condemn ALL of the world, only most of it, and hide this consideration ? He who accuses God of hiding anything has hidden from himself the knowledge of God, who made time, and whose word makes what is to be, in accord with His will, whether to test or condemn, if necessary, whether to exalt or to dim. God SAYS that it was the world He wished to save (and not this present world only, but things on earth and in heaven, Colossians 1:19ff.), and this in the context of God and the world, God and mankind, God the Creator and man the sinner. To make it otherwise is simply a sort of Putin into Ukraine procedure, an invasion, this time of the text. It may be on alleged humanitarian grounds or philosophic, but it is an invasion nonetheless. The word of God states clearly as to God and man and sin and salvation as categories of the most uninhibited expression, that such is His desire toward the world.

Why then does He not implement it in saving all of its inhabitants ?

It is because He has made man in His own image, able to love and hate and choose and reject and slander and scoff and revere and worship, and for Him who made, to countermand the creation is mere equivocation, self-exhibition of unwisdom and unknowledgeable incompetence. He knows the end from the beginning, including revulsion leading to severance; and this does not remove the revulsion, since time is a mere repository, and God is eternal. Thus if man PREFERS NOT GOD (as in Deuteronomy 32:15ff., esp. v. 21), then not-God is his endorsement. Thus in John 3, it not merely declares the extreme character of God's love for the world, and the totally massive action taken in pursuit of this desire of the heart, but makes two further points.

Excluded from this coming and this purpose is an allied and opposite purpose: what is that ? It is that He does NOT desire to condemn the world, so that this is not some dichotomy of desire, some platitude of passions mixed, like some revolving whirl-pool. The affirmation and the negation given, however,  jointly remove any such concept as applicable, even for the most extraordinary contortions of twisted meaning.

Indeed, God in His word goes further. Naturally, there is desire to know, then, not only what is NOT his underlying motive in the sequence of love, and what IS that motive, all as stated unequivocally, but what is the GROUND of exclusion from such an embracive, whole-hearted, whole-world thrust, not made with engines but with man, God incarnate as man, His only begotten Son as in Isaiah 48:15ff., Psalm 40, Philippians 2.

How and in what is the exclusion zone to be erected, since it is assuredly not in the desire of the heart of God for those made in His image ? This is stated in the next verse, 3:19. "THIS," it declares, "is the condemnation." Now we are in the territory of logic which is demanding an answer for comprehensibility concerning a being of such POWER and of such LOVE, measured to such ULTIMACIES in both cases. This is provided in two steps. Light has come into the world (as in John 15, into the separate pocket of certain people, when Christ entered into it). It is then not as if there were some rule of ignorance which aborts some clumsy passion; the light has come. What then is the treatment of that light which leads to condemnation ? It is this.

MEN LOVED DARKNESS MORE THAN LIGHT. They COULD do so, in the ultimate, being made in God's divine image, and hence not mere robots. They in some cases DID. In those cases, where the light is to God's satisfaction reaching, has reached, or is seen to have reached, to His knowledge or foreknowledge, there is a result.

What is that result ? It is this. His creation is gifted to love or hate, scoff or serve, and it uses this to LOVE darkness as well as wife, friend or music; or to hate; and when it comes to God Himself, then this power to prefer is exercised negatively. They prefer what is not God, not the actual God, not the actual offer, not the actual gift, not the actual salvation. They prefer, as some with cigarettes, either to make their own or not to receive or make anything, self-serving to the point of the droll or the devilish.

What then of the mystery makers, who insist that this is NOT, despite what is written, the way it is. There is a profound mystery, they indicate, about this very point. Very mysteriously, God is simply not interested to the level of salvation, in some, they affirm. There is, if not a short-circuit of the love, then rather a degree of withholding (perhaps like a massive shareholder about to put his shares on the market, but withholding some of them, for SOME reason or other, unknown what that reason is.)

This is of course a flat contradiction of the words of the Bible, but this has no apparent impact. It is imagined to be so. The it is put into words. The flat contradiction proceeds, like a rock absorbing the sun that shines on it, without participation in the light, merely its surface exposed.

Alas. It is a confusion of the fact that God calls and saves whom He will, being subject to no one and to nothing in the process; and what is the nature, the revealed nature of that sovereign work and decision and apportionment by God for God, through God, in sending His Son, showing the salvation through the anguish of vicarious death, and sending His Spirit to apply it. Men cannot create this sovereign exercise of God, choosing to SO love and to do this to the WORLD, and that NOT to condemn it but in order that it might be saved; but they may confuse it with another fact.

The other fact is that the nature of THIS ETERNAL SOVEREIGN, over-ruled by none and by nothing, is that He SO loved the world and SO gave at that limitless level, so that this same world into which He was sent might NOT be condemned. The motivation, the application and the innovation are all clear. Presuming to characterise the sovereignty of God, as if this precluded truth and perspicuity in His specific statements, in a way contrary to that which He assigns to it (kings being sovereign may be this or that kind of sovereign as shown in this or that interpretation of their works, and with God, the interpretation is truth), they make mystery the mother of contradiction. A thing is no longer unknown when God has made it known.

That man in sin is not in or of himself able to revert to sinless is clear; that he has originated no message or pardon mode from himself is most clear, for what debtor instructs his creditor on pardoning the debt, or the methods. That the works of man are exclusive in this divine donation, is specifically affirmed. The whole thing, salvation itself, is of God and not of man. All this is so, and it is even operated by and applied by God, so that no one can come to God except at His grant (John 6:65).

WHAT is the nature of this sovereign gift, this gracious deposition, its sending and its receipt, however, is specified most clearly. Sovereignly, so that having foreknowledge of all (as in Romans 8:29ff), God effects His own wishes, and this indeed not according to any bargaining or barter (as in Galatians 1:6-9), and ensures no mistakes are made, having with foreknowledge predestinated it all to happen as is fitting in terms of that first cited foreknowledge. What however has that to do with the point at issue ? If it is sure, does that alter its quality ? If it is sovereign, does that determine what the sovereign is like, in what He delights, or the nature of His methods ? There appears a giant confusion which has for some phases in theology, lasted for several centuries, and before.

Sovereignty ensures the wishes are followed. WHAT those wishes are, and why, and what limits are set, this is for the Sovereign to declare, and no one else; and He HAS declared in the most emphatic manner, in the most logical exclusive fashion.

Is His sovereignty to be revoked because of some theological penchants, philosophical preferences ? Alas, whatever the motive, this for many has been the result. God, they may say, is good and what He declares is good. Good! But they do not include just WHAT HE does declare on the topic.

GOD STATES in the light of, in the face of, in the thrust of His incomparable love for this world, at the outset, and in terms of His thrust, what is HIS approach. He then states what is the approach of some among men, even TO THIS VERY LOVE and this very SENDING of salvation. This, He declares is the cut-off. It is not in the divine love, either in its intent or in its extent; it is in those who PREFER darkness to light. Does He not know who these are ? Of course he knows, in His foreknowledge. Does He not take steps to ensure not one of these so foreknown, is lost anyway, through some failure in history or geography or otherwise ? Yes He does. Whom He foreknow, these He predestines. It is all perfect in composition, understanding, attribution of grounds and application of results.

Why then, some might ask,  should men be missionaries, or women or even children in some way or another ? It is for the same reason that God became the cynosure of missionaries in sending His only begotten Son as a sacrifice. It is love. It is not particularised and unreal love for the world,  which really does not have time for the young ruler whom He loved (Mark 10:21), but whom He did not follow when he turned away, PREFERRING the darkness of gear to the light of God. He wanted to be having things and ruling, rather than the light of the One who made them all, and him with them. The call was close, he was eager, he was humble, but when the cost was clear in his own pe rsonal case, then he wilted, and jilted, with sorrow.

]It is a love which can weep for those fail to see and grasp their OPPORTUNITY (as in Luke 19:42ff.). Christ was borne down by their loss, wept for it, not because it does not matter in the last analysis, being bypassed by some mystery, but because it is in the realm of preference, and this being so, He has no supervening desire to crush reality for desire, or truth for result. What would that result be in any case, if He DID force the issue and MAKE the person, by transformation, activation or other means, love Him ? That would be fraud.

It is true that in being born again, there is a result of moving from the darkness of confusion or diffusion to the light of truth; but this transformation is IN TERMS of foreknowledge, which is in terms of the Sovereign who He is, and what He desires, and what are His preferences, and the nature of their kind. This merely amplifies the certainty that such image-bearing features will not be broached, despite the divine desire, for they would be superfluous. Breaching these would be a fulfilment not of love, but of its abuse, a reaching of what is not found, but simply replaced by a conformist object of the same name, denied the liberties of love. THAT is AS FAR AS love can go.

Moving further denies its very nature, so that the LOVE OF GOD is fully realised, and the abuse by God is fully excluded, and we follow what is written, not by biting it into bits, but by believing it, and leaving mysterious unknowns, to the realm where God has not spoken.

For completeness^*1, let is be added, that even this is no dint in the declaration of truth. EVEN THE DEEP THINGS OF GOD have been revealed, we read in I Corinthians 2, so that while there is very much to learn, it does not transform the truth into error, or the principles as things at which to take pot shots; but leaves all intact, for the word of the Lord endures forever.

NOTE

*1

Deuteronomy 32:21 has a hyphen between God and Not, so making the compound, not-God. This is the category in view. There are only variants in reality: God and not-God, creator-saviour and not-creator-saviour, Originator and originated. You can make up not-God into party dress and have a big to-do, but it is all not-god. You can have them in hunting or other scenes if you want to, since it is not-God and just a realm of imagination. As to the One who IS God, to take a trifling illustration, a great mathematician who makes a unique model, may have that model named after him. It is his, and has nothing to do, it may be, with any other imaginative thinker among mankind as such. There is on the one hand, his work, and what in this genre, is NOT-his-work. Someone else may misuse the name, but not provide the unique thing named. It is already there.

What is not God is what man invents, giving it an unearned name; what is God is what God discloses, showing it in named works and words. The two are so much more different from the mere diversity between people with 10 cents and those with 10,000 million. That is quantity; this is quality. That is amounts of some stuff; this is surmounting all stuff, and only source of it. That can be discounted; this is eternal. That cannot save in the grand, haunting sources of demise, for unsaved man; this is what saves. That is originated in man's ideas; this is what originated the power to think any idea at  all, in that creation known as man.

Similarly, it is quite evanescent and misled to make up any characteristic of God, from the realm of not-God, and to try to insert it,  like a needle into the arm of a medical patient. God is not available for insertion. He is what He is, and  would have all  to be  reconciled to Himself, through His own and uniquely displayed course, which moves from Himself and back to Himself (cf. Philippians 2), to do all His will (cf. Psalm 40). He says so (Colossians 1:19ff.).

*2

If you would like some parallel presentations, see " love"  in index, and in particular the following.

	In this domain of amplitude, including John 3:167ff., and resultants of crimping:  see for ready reference to title:
	Repent or Perish Ch. 1, *2, which being amplified recently, is here added as an Excursion, and to this add
	Outrageous Outages ... and the Courage of Christ Ch. 9 with
	The Celestial Harmony ... Ch. 2,whether correlative error in Calvin on Romans,  is seen, and for a jolt to too limited jubilation,
	The Christian Pilgrimage Ch. 3, including Appendix with The Glow Ch. 4 ...and  Great Execrations .. Ch.   7