2004 Ligonier Conference: An Everlasting Love: The Love of God
Focus Keywords: Love of God, John MacArthur, Intra-Trinitarian Love, Unconditional Love, Sovereign Grace, Eternal Love, God’s Attributes, Glorifying God
This comprehensive summary and rewrite draws on John MacArthur’s message, “An Everlasting Love: The Love of God,” which delves into the often-misunderstood complexity of divine love. The message argues that while the simple idea that “God is love” is universally affirmed, the reality of His love is far more profound, complex, and sometimes disturbing to contemplate, as it is governed by His sovereign determination and ultimate glory.
The goal is to break down God’s love into three critical, interconnected categories to grasp its height, depth, breadth, and length.
I. Intra-Trinitarian Love: The Starting Point
Before the creation of any creature, God was already perfect love, and this love existed perfectly and mutually among the members of the Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit). This Intra-Trinitarian Love is the necessary starting point for understanding all other expressions of God’s love.
Perfect Obedience and Magnanimity
The love within the Godhead is demonstrated through perfect obedience and consummate generosity, holding nothing back.
- Love Expressed in Obedience: Jesus stated, “The world may know that I love the Father,” and He showed that love through perfect and sacrificial obedience.
- Consummate Generosity: The Father’s love for the Son is revealed through magnanimity: all the Father’s knowledge, power, secrets, privileges, and honor are given to the Son, holding nothing back. Conversely, the Son’s reciprocal love celebrates the expression of the Father’s perfect love.
- The Bride as a Love Gift: The Father’s love for the Son is primary, and God’s love for sinners is secondary. Salvation is planned so that the Father seeks a redeemed humanity—an elect bride—as a love gift for the Son. The Son, in perfect obedience, willingly pays the immense price of redemption and receives the wrath of God for that bride.
II. God’s Love for Humanity (Unconditional and Indiscriminate)
It is true that God does love men and women and the world. There is an unconditional, unlimited, and indiscriminate kind of love extended to all people, which flows from God’s very nature.
This general love for humanity is demonstrated in four key ways:
1. Common Grace
Common grace is manifest in an earthly, physical, and temporal fashion. God causes the sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. This is an expression of God’s love for all humanity, even His enemies. The mere fact that the unregenerate are allowed to live, breathe, enjoy food, music, and career success, despite their continuous sin, is a physical, temporal expression of God’s love and patience.
2. Compassion
God’s love for mankind is revealed in His universal pity and grief over lost souls. God finds “no pleasure in the death of the wicked”. Examples include God weeping through the eyes of Jeremiah over human pride, expressing compassion on Nineveh despite Jonah’s hatred of the Gentiles, and Jesus weeping over Jerusalem and the tomb of Lazarus. Jesus wept not because Lazarus died, but because He was absorbing the horrible consequence of sin (death) for all humanity.
3. Warning
God’s love is revealed in His incessant warnings throughout Scripture. This warning is a manifestation of God’s patience and forbearance, which should lead the sinner to repentance. God is the “Savior of all men” in a physical and temporal sense because He withholds from the sinner what the sinner deserves, when they deserve it, thus giving them time to repent.
4. The Gospel Offer
God’s unconditional love is revealed in the extensive and incessant offer of the gospel to everyone. The path to salvation has been made known to all, and every sinner who believes in Jesus will be pardoned and saved. Jesus made Himself available as the “Savior of the world,” the official physician for humanity. However, sinners are condemned because of their refusal to come to Christ and their unwillingness to accept life.
III. God’s Love for His Own (Covenant and Sovereign Love)
While God genuinely loves the world (unconditional love), His covenant love for believers is distinct and more profound. This saving love is eternal, perfect, complete, and uninfluenced by anything but sovereign determination.
Limits in Degree, Not Extent
God’s love for humanity has no limit in extent (it reaches all men), but it has a limit in degree. He loves and saves all in a physical sense, but He “especially loves and saves believers”.
Unwavering Loyalty (John 13)
Jesus demonstrated this higher degree of love by loving His disciples “to the end”—meaning “to the max”—even in their darkest, ugliest moments of indifference, self-centered ambition, disloyalty, and cowardice.
- Protecting His Own: Jesus actively protected His disciples from arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane, knowing that captivity would have been “more than their faith could handle”. He enforced His promise, declaring that He would lose “not one” whom the Father had given Him.
- Eternal Assurance: This love is eternal. Jesus promises to prepare rooms in His Father’s house, and “there are no empty rooms in heaven”. He keeps the people to whom the rooms have been promised.
The Illustration of Covenant Love (Ezekiel 16)
Ezekiel 16 provides the most graphic illustration of this unbreakable, covenant love. Israel, likened to a “throwaway baby” despised at birth and cast out into a field, was saved by God’s choice and love. God saw them “squirming in their blood,” commanded them to live, and then entered into a covenant (espousal) with them, adorning them with unparalleled beauty and glory.
Despite this perfect love and provision, Israel played the harlot through idolatry, corruption, and child sacrifice. Nevertheless, God declares, “Nevertheless, I will remember my covenant with you” and establish an everlasting covenant. God humiliates His people by forgiving them, leading them to remember their abominations and be ashamed.