Love is a divine attribute that we find taught throughout the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. Like the other divine attributes, God’s love is infinite, eternal, and unchangeable. Love is one of the divine communicable attributes that God shares with His image bearers in a manner appropriate to creatures. God’s saving love for the elect is unmerited and immutable. Theologians have made distinctions between the teaching of Scripture regarding common grace and the saving operations of the love of God such that God does not show His love to all people in the same way. By His common grace, God has a general love for the whole world that finds expression in His good will for creation, and by His special grace believers are the eternal objects of God’s redeeming love. Jesus is the ultimate revelation of God’s love to the undeserving. Through their union with Christ, believers are called to love each other with the same love with which God has loved them. In the hereafter, believers will live in unbroken fellowship with God and with one another in the eternal bond of His love. We should take care to remember that God’s love is a holy love and that it coincides with divine truth.
The love of God is an essential attribute of God that He reveals in Scripture. Scripture frequently associates God’s love with His goodness. The love of God is taught in both the Old and New Testaments. While God’s love is taught throughout the Old Testament (Deut. 4:37; 7:8, 13; 10:15; 23:5; 2 Chron. 2:11; Isa. 43:4; 48:14; 63:9; Jer. 31:3; Hos. 11:1, 4; 14:4; Zeph. 3:17; Mal. 1:2), we see it even more clearly in the New Testament on account of the fulfillment of God’s promises in Christ. As Herman Bavinck explained, “The love of God stands out much more vividly in the New Testament, now that God has given himself in the Son of his love.”1
Scripture makes a distinction between God’s love for Himself and His subsequent love for His creation. God does not need anything in creation to have objects of His love since He subsists in three distinct persons who are objects of the others’ love. The Father, Son, and Spirit eternally live in a perfectly loving relation with one another, as the one, true, and living God (John 3:35; 5:20; 10:17; 14:31; 15:9; 17:24–26). According to His good pleasure, the triune God chose also to direct His love to His creation.
God has a general love for the world whereby He acts in common goodness toward His creation. It manifests itself in acts of common grace and benevolence. This aspect of God’s love must be distinguished from God’s love as seen in the redemption of the elect. God shows a special, saving love only for the elect by offering up His Son for their sin (John 10:15; Rom. 5:6–11; 9:13).
The Bible teaches that God’s saving love toward the elect is unmerited by them. God does not set His saving love on anyone because of something that person has done or will do. Rather, Scripture teaches that God freely chooses to show love and mercy to those whom He graciously chose in Christ (Rom. 9). Since all have sinned and justly deserve the wrath and curse of God, His eternal love for the elect is unmerited—being rooted in the mere good pleasure of God and not in the elect themselves. Scripture also teaches that no one can separate a believer from the love of God. Accordingly, Scripture teaches that God’s saving love is immutable.
Reformed theologians have often made a distinction between the love of benevolence, the love of beneficence, and the love of complacency when speaking of the difference between God’s love for the elect and God’s love for the rest of creation.
Over the past two hundred years, many people have made the error of not seeing that God’s love is characterized by all His other attributes. For example, God has a holy love, a wise love, a righteous love, a powerful love, an infinite love, eternal love, and so on. The most common version of this faulty notion of the biblical doctrine of the love of God is a “functional universalism.” If God loves everyone without distinction—accepting sinners in their natural condition—the inevitable conclusion must be that all men are, by nature, in a right relationship with God. In this proposal, God forfeits His holy and righteous justice. The inevitable result is the separation of love from the other attributes of God. Scripture teaches that God’s love is a holy love that coincides, at all times, with His truthfulness.
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Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 2, God and Creation (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2004), 215. ↩
God not only loves but is himself love (1 John 4:8), and his love is the foundation, source, and model of our love (1 John 4:10–11). Now it is indeed possible to speak of God’s love to creatures or people in general (the love of benevolence), but for this the Scripture mostly uses the word “goodness,” and as a rule speaks of God’s love, like his grace, only in relation to his chosen people or church (the love of friendship). Granted, this love is not the essence of God in the sense that it is the center and core of God’s being and the other attributes are its modes, for all the attributes are equally God’s being. In him there is no higher and lower, no greater and smaller. Still, love is most certainly identical with God’s being.
Herman Bavinck
Reformed Dogmatics, vol. 2, God and Creation
Whereas some believe that God loves everyone unconditionally, the Word of God teaches that God’s love has been poured out in the hearts of His people for whom Christ died, demonstrating His love. It is not that God’s love is limited. Indeed, His general love of benevolence is shown to all creation. His special love, however, is demonstrated to those He saves. His saving love is directly applied to His children, the sons and daughters of His kingdom.
Burk Parsons
Tabletalk magazine
