Doubting God's Love

Doubting God’s Love

I want to begin by reassuring you that it’s OK that you have doubts from time to time. We all have doubts, but God is bigger than your doubts.

An atheist friend of mine expressed his doubt in a post on Facebook recently. I want to share it with you because it’s one that I have had to resolve myself.

Atheist Friend’s Post:

There was a picture of God overlooking the earth and saying, “I better send myself down there so they can murder me. That way, I won’t have to send everyone to the hell I created.”

My friend wrote, “The basic logic behind the Bible's New Testament... create a test you know everyone will fail, and then a fix for it to make everyone feel guilty about failing.”

I’m not going to delve into the question of whether or not God created hell—the answer is, “He didn’t need to” because hell is the absence of something.

The answer to this seemingly logical proposition is found in the unfathomable love of God.

There is a contemporary Christian song written by Stuart Townend that says, “How deep the Father’s love for us, how vast beyond all measure, that He should give His Only Son, to make a wretch His treasure.”

Let’s delve into this.  Just how deep is the Father’s love for us?

1 John 3:1a (NASB)

1  See how great a love the Father has bestowed on us, that we would be called children of God;…

1 John 3:16a (NASB)

16  We know love by this, that He laid down His life for us;…

1 John 4:7-12 (NASB)

7  Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God.

8  The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love.

9  By this the love of God was manifested in us, that God has sent His only begotten Son into the world so that we might live through Him.

10  In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins.

11  Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.

12  No one has seen God at any time; if we love one another, God abides in us, and His love is perfected in us.

Scripture tells us not merely that God loves, but that He is love. 

Let’s think through what that statement means.

Anselm of Canterbury (1033—1109), a Benedictine monk, theologian, and philosopher wrote that “God is that than which there can be nothing greater.”

We might define perfection as that state than which there can be nothing greater or better. 

Perfection

1:  the quality or state of being perfect: as

a :  freedom from fault or defect :  flawlessness

b :  maturity

c :  the quality or state of being saintly

2

a :  an exemplification of supreme excellence

b :  an unsurpassable degree of accuracy or excellence

Merriam-Webster.com. Merriam-Webster, n.d. Web. 16 July 2016.

If God loves, and in fact is love, He necessarily loves purely, perfectly, infinitely. 

So then, what does perfect love look like? 

First, perfect love requires an object.  To be said to have love, one must love someone or something.  How could it be possible to love nothing?

This concept can be illustrated by the love of a child for a Teddy Bear. This isn’t perfect love, however, because clearly we can imagine something better.

Can you imagine a greater love than love for a Teddy Bear--a love that is not returned? Certainly; you can imagine loving someone who loves you in return!  This is obviously better.

For God to be perfectly or infinitely loving, He would need to express that love, but not in the way that a child might love a Teddy Bear—with love that is not returned. 

Someone might argue that God could then simply have created beings who love Him by their nature; beings who love Him because they are created for that purpose; who must love Him.  This line of thought would be flawed however, because again we can imagine something better than loving someone who is forced to love us in return. Such love would be a sham.

Loving someone who loves us in return because they choose to love us of their own free will would be immeasurably better. 

I John 4:12 points us in this direction, “No one has seen God at any time; if we love one another, God abides in us, and His love is perfected in us.”

For this reason, God created us with freedom of will.  Within our temporal existence, we are free to love God, or not.  That’s incredible; and it is very good news.

1 John 4:19 (NASB)

19  We love, because He first loved us.

God’s love is perfected in us when we love Him in return, and when we love our neighbor with that perfect love He gave us!

In the perfection of God’s love there is no error; no mistake; no neurotic need fulfillment.  That is perhaps a strange idea to suggest in talking about God—and it should be.  I add it here to make the point that God has not acted in love toward us out of some codependency or because of some emotional need on His part.  God acted toward us as He did because He truly and perfectly loves us.

In Genesis 1:27 we read, “God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.”

This is a supreme act of love.  We can read the remainder of the creation account and nowhere else do we see that He loved anything else in creation enough to create it in His image.  He said that each thing was good, yet only we are created in the very image of God Himself.

Ephesians 1:4-5 (NASB)

… He chose us in Him before the foundation of the world, that we would be holy and blameless before Him. In love He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will,

He created us to love us, and in the hope that we would love Him in return.  He did this even though He knew that we would turn away from Him.

Here is where God gave us that choice. To love Him back, or to try to live on our own.

Genesis 2:16-17 (NASB)

16  The LORD God commanded the man, saying, "From any tree of the garden you may eat freely;

17  but from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat from it you will surely die."

In Hebrew, “you will surely die” is literally “dying you shall die”.

Remember earlier I mentioned that it was not necessary for God to create hell? I said it was unnecessary because hell is the absence of something. It’s the absence of God, of love, of life. We are incapable of having life in and of ourselves. If we choose to try, then we die and that’s it.

Because God knew that we would turn away from Him and try to live on our own. He also knew that once we went down that road it would be impossible for us to turn back by ourselves. We would be in bondage to sin. Therefore, in love He made a plan of redemption and reconciliation for us before the foundation of the world!

John 3:14-18 (NASB)

14  "As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up;

15  so that whoever believes will in Him have eternal life.

16  "For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life.

17  "For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world might be saved through Him.

18  "He who believes in Him is not judged; he who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.

There is so much great news in these three verses.

Numbers 21:7-9 (NASB)

7  So the people came to Moses and said, "We have sinned, because we have spoken against the LORD and you; intercede with the LORD, that He may remove the serpents from us." And Moses interceded for the people.

8  Then the LORD said to Moses, "Make a fiery serpent, and set it on a standard; and it shall come about, that everyone who is bitten, when he looks at it, he will live."

9  And Moses made a bronze serpent and set it on the standard; and it came about, that if a serpent bit any man, when he looked to the bronze serpent, he lived.

They sinned by speaking against the Lord. This reminds us of the Genesis account of the serpent and the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Adam and Eve spoke against Him in that they chose to believe the deceiver rather than God. Now in John 3 we learn that both accounts were pictures of God’s redemptive plan.

Looking at the serpent required faith in God’s Word. Believing in what Jesus did on the cross is exactly the same. Believe and have life. Go your own way and find only death.

More good news: God did not send His Son into the world to judge the world. I think most people who are turned off to the Church would find this amazing. Not only did Jesus not come to condemn, but in fact, God was reconciling the world to Himself—not counting our sins against us.

Consequently, those who believe in Jesus (who He is, what He has done for them) are not judged! This might be surprising to you if you grew up in the Church and were taught that everyone will be judged, but it’s hard to argue with this point. Believers are not going to be judged. Perhaps one day we can study that idea more.

So God did not create a test He knew everyone would fail, and then create a fix for it to make everyone feel guilty about failing.

He created the only system that could possibly provide for true love. He created a system in which He loves you and me, yet we can truly and freely choose whether or not to love Him back, and if we truly do, that love is perfected by overflowing to those around us.

Since He gave us that choice, death was a very real possibility. Why?

God is perfect, and implicit in that concept is the fact that God cannot, by His very nature, unite Himself with anything that’s imperfect. If He did, He would become less than perfect, and that wouldn’t be God at all.

Since death was the consequence of us (in Adam, our federal head) making poor choices, we would be unable to correct the situation and be united with Him in love. Consequently, He also created a plan of redemption.

Colossians 2:13-14 (NASB)

13  When you were dead in your transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, He made you alive together with Him, having forgiven us all our transgressions,

14  having canceled out the certificate of debt consisting of decrees against us, which was hostile to us; and He has taken it out of the way, having nailed it to the cross.

No wonder Paul finds it so important to pray that we would know the incredible love of God.

Ephesians 3:14-19 (NASB)

14  For this reason I bow my knees before the Father,

15  from whom every family in heaven and on earth derives its name,

16  that He would grant you, according to the riches of His glory, to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man,

17  so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; and that you, being rooted and grounded in love,

18  may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth,

19  and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God.

Knowing and believing God’s incredible love, expressed to us in Jesus Christ, is the only way we can be filled up to all the fullness of God.

And it’s all that’s required!

How beautiful is that?