God’s Holy Love: Finding Assurance in Both His Justice and Compassion

The biblical affirmation “God is love” (1 John 4:8) was called by John Stott “the most comprehensive and sublime of all biblical affirmations about God’s being.”¹ The Apostle John does not say that “God is loving.” It is not God’s behavior, but His essential nature which is in view. God “is love in His inmost being.”² All love is “from God” (1 John 4:7). He is the origin and source of love. God is the “fountain of love,” says John Calvin.³ His nature, His being, His character—God’s essence is love.

Yet when we have affirmed that “God is love,” we must ask, Is there still more to be said? In particular, how do we harmonize His love and His justice?

More Than Love

First, God is love, yet He is more than love. When the Bible says that “God is love,” it doesn’t mean that God is love to the exclusion of His other attributes. The Apostle does not write that “love is God.” The equation cannot be reversed. The Bible also says that God is “light” (1 John 1:5) and that God is a “consuming fire” (Heb. 12:29). The same grammatical construction is used in all three cases. The God who is love is also truth and holiness and justice. “Though God is infinitely benevolent,” says Princeton’s J.W. Alexander, “infinite benevolence is not all of God.”⁴ God’s love is a just love, and His justice is a loving justice. We must not allow one attribute to overwhelm and nullify the rest. Justice is exercised lovingly, and love never compromises His justice.⁵ C.H. Spurgeon puts it this way: “God is love, but God is also just—as severely just as if He had no love, and yet as intensely loving as if He had no justice.”⁶

Defining Love

Second, the Bible must be allowed to define love. Not infrequently the love of God has been understood in such a way as to deny God’s moral qualities. Some say, “I believe in a God of love,” as they go on to abolish judgment day and quench the fires of hell. They claim that divine love means the divine acceptance of any and every lifestyle and identity choice. “It is assumed,” says J.I. Packer of modern people, “that God’s love, if real, would itself take the form of unprincipled indulgence of our whims.”⁷ “A loving God would never,” they claim, and then articulate a list of moral distinctions or moral demands that God, it is alleged, would never make. He would never want us to be unhappy, disapprove of our conduct, or condemn our chosen sexual identity.

At the heart of today’s confusion is an ambiguous use of the word love. The Bible does not mean by love what Hollywood or pop culture means. God is love, agapē, not erōs, caritas, not amor. God’s love is self-giving and sacrificial love, not romantic or erotic love. There are five Greek words for love, whereas the English language has but one, adding to the confusion.⁸ “All associations or implications that suggest human finitude and fallenness must be eliminated,” as Packer points out, when we apply terms to God. The meaning of love must then “be set in the frame of God’s perfection and purity.”⁹

Delight in Love

Third, God reveals His love more readily than His wrath. While we should not allow love to overshadow all of God’s other attributes, yet we can say that God shows His love to us, in a sense, as more “natural” to Him than His wrath. We are stretching language at this point because God’s attributes, as the classical theologians have explained, are a harmonious unity. Love and justice are not warring against each other in God’s nature or consciousness. Nevertheless, the Bible teaches us that God “delights in unchanging love” (NASB) or “steadfast love,” while it never teaches that He “delights to show wrath” (Mic. 7:18). “God is more inclinable to mercy than wrath,” says the Puritan Thomas Watson. “Acts of severity are rather forced from Him.”¹⁰ The Bible teaches that “he does not afflict willingly,” yet He does willingly and eagerly love (Lam. 3:33; Deut. 7:6–8). He is “slow to anger” while He “abounds in loving kindness” (Ps. 103:8; see Ex. 34:6). Isaiah calls God’s judgment His “strange work” (Isa. 28:21, KJV), or what the theologians called His opera aliena, His “alien task.” Indeed, God’s love, says William Gurnall, “sets all his other attributes on work.”¹¹

The attributes of God beautifully harmonize. Indeed, the classical theologians insist that even to speak of different attributes in God is a concession to human weakness. They speak of simplicity as the natural corollary of the spirituality and unity of God. God is Spirit (John 4:24). He is invisible (Heb. 11:3; Rom. 1:23; Col. 1:15; John 1:18; 1 Tim. 1:17; 6:16). He cannot be divided into parts. He is “free from all composition and division,” says the Swiss Reformed theologian Francis Turretin.¹² When we study His attributes, we are not examining parts of God. “God is a most pure, simple, unmixed essence,” explains the Puritan George Swinnock, “he is incapable of the least composition, and therefore of the least division. He is one most pure, one without all parts, members, accounts, and qualities.”¹³ We comprehend the attributes differently, but they are all one in Him. “To speak properly,” says Lewis Bayly, “there are not in God many attributes, but one only, which is nothing else but the Divine Essence itself, by what attribute soever you call it.”¹⁴

In God, “righteousness and peace kiss” (Ps. 85:10). So also do justice and love. They are mutually clarifying in meaning, reinforcing in application. Indeed God’s justice is the guarantee that those upon whom God has set His love will be delivered from evil, will see the righteous vindicated and rewarded, and the wicked condemned and neutralized forever.