The Love of God | Clip 1
To truly grasp the profound and life-altering nature of the love of God, intellectual reasoning and traditional study methods are insufficient; the truth must be received through supernatural revelation by the Holy Spirit. The philosophical mind, while skilled in human reasoning, cannot begin to comprehend the unsearchable love of God.
This summary explores the necessity of divine revelation, the unconditional nature of God’s love, and the incredible, almost unbelievable truths concerning the believer’s condition before and after being embraced by this infinite agape.
1. The Necessity of Revelation: Beyond Philosophy
The source highlights the inadequacy of purely philosophical or academic approaches to understanding God’s foundational truths.
The Philosopher’s Dilemma
The speaker, a former professional philosopher at Cambridge University, centered his life around reading and studying books. Before being called into the British Army in World War II, he determined it was his “philosophic duty” to read the Bible—the most widely read and influential book in human history—because he knew very little about it.
He treated the Bible like any other book, starting at Genesis 1:1 and reading through in order. After about nine months, having reached the book of Job, he found it a “remote wearisome baffling book” and only continued reading because he resolved that “No book is going to defeat me”.
The Supernatural Turning Point
In July 1941, in an army barrack, the speaker received a supernatural revelation of Jesus Christ that radically and permanently changed his life. The very next day, the Bible was dramatically different; it was as if God were speaking personally to him.
This experience confirmed that as long as he tried to understand the Bible with “philosophic reasoning,” he could make “no sense of it”. Real biblical truth requires the Holy Spirit to reveal the necessary knowledge. Without the “spirit of wisdom and revelation,” all preaching is “more or less vain”.
2. Defining God’s Love: Basic and Unconditional
The Apostle John, focusing on fundamental concepts often expressed in single-syllable words in English, simplifies the core reality: “God is love and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him”.
A. The Sovereign and Unconditional Nature
God’s love is defined by two crucial characteristics:
- Unconditional: God does not impose conditions upon which He loves us. It cannot be earned, is not deserved, and God does not wait for us to do something to merit it.
- Sovereign: God’s love is sovereign; He loves because He loves, and there is “no other reason”. You will never find a reason in the Bible why God loves us. If one seeks for something within themselves to make them worthy, they will look in vain. This unconditionality contrasts sharply with religious people who think they must “do something to earn God’s love”.
B. Knowing vs. Believing
The statement “We have known and believed the love that God has for us” establishes two necessary steps.
- Knowing: Billions of people globally have never even heard about the love of God.
- Believing: For contemporary Christians, the truth is that many have “very little real faith in God’s love”. This lack of belief results in nervousness, fear, striving, and pressure.
3. The Unbelievable Measure of God’s Love (Romans 5 & Ephesians 2)
The depth of God’s love is revealed by examining the terrible condition of humanity when Christ died for us. The truths found in Romans 5 and Ephesians 2 are described as “incredible” and “unbelievable” without the help of the Holy Spirit.
Our Condition When God Demonstrated His Love (Romans 5)
God demonstrates His own love toward us in that while we were in the following conditions, Christ died for us:
- Without Strength: We had “no power to do anything about it”.
- Ungodly: We were ungodly, and Christ died specifically for the ungodly.
- Sinners/Failures: Sin means “to fail to achieve a mark.” Christ died for us while we were “still sinners”—total failures.
- Enemies: We were at “enmity with God because of our sin”.
Christ died in faith, believing that through His death, we could become what we should be, even though there was no evidence of this potential when He died.
Our Condition When God Made Us Alive (Ephesians 2)
God, who is rich in mercy, demonstrated His great love even when we were dead in trespasses. It is unimaginable to love a corpse that one has never known, yet this is how we were in God’s sight.
Because of His great love, God performed three incredible acts by grace:
- Made us Alive together with Christ.
- Raised us Up together (resurrected us).
- Made us Sit Together in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, meaning He enthroned us with Christ.
This present reality—being enthroned with Christ—is too vast to be apprehended without God breathing faith into the believer.