God’s Love in Christ: From time to time it becomes evident that understanding the gospel and resting in Christ are not always the same thing. Certain truths appear plain enough in Scripture, yet in experience they can still feel higher than our thoughts can reach. Often this shows itself in the way we think about the love of God toward us in Christ Jesus. While we readily confess that His love rests entirely upon Christ and not upon ourselves, there can still linger a sense that it must somehow be conditional. Not because the gospel is unclear, but because something in us continues to approach God in an old and familiar way. And that thought tends to surface most clearly when our own weakness and ungodliness become painfully evident.
Most believers recognize something of this tension, and it often becomes most noticeable when our attention turns inward. When things seem steady, we rarely question the matter. When our prayers feel warm, our reading of Scripture feels clear, and the outward course of life moves along without much disturbance, it is easy to assume that everything stands as it should. But when sin wrecks our daily routine and exposes us for what we are, everything can feel very different. On the one hand, we gladly confess that Christ alone is our righteousness and that everything rests upon Him. Yet when our weakness becomes evident, our thoughts easily drift back to ourselves. When we see our weakness, our sin, or our inconsistency, it becomes easy to wonder whether the love of God toward us might somehow be affected by what we are.
There is a statement in the words of our Lord that almost makes us stop and read it again whenever we come across it. The words appear simple enough, yet the thought they contain rises far above what we are prepared to receive. In John 17:23, our Lord prays to the Father concerning His people and says, “…that the world may know that thou hast sent me, and hast loved them, as thou hast loved me.” As one brother just said to me, that statement is almost too wonderful to take in. Christ does not merely say that God loves His people, but that He loves them as He loves His Son. Whatever that love is, its measure is found entirely in Christ, and not in anything that could ever be found in us.
The mind naturally recoils at such a thought. We know too much about ourselves to easily believe it, and yet it stands plainly in the words of Christ. And if that is so, then the love of God toward His people cannot depend on anything found in them. It does not rise with their faithfulness or fall with their weakness. Our weakness may trouble us and our sin may expose us, yet the love of the Father rests where it has always rested, in the Son in whom He delights. Its measure is Christ, and Christ does not change.
Much of what I find myself writing about returns again and again to this same theme: that the love of God toward His people is found only in Christ Jesus. In many ways that has become my chief consolation, that the love by which we are received is not something that comes from us, nor something that finds its foundation in us, but something that rests entirely in Christ, who is love, and in whom His people are loved. Ephesians 1:4. And yet, while these truths delight my soul in a way that is almost difficult to describe, how often do I find myself pausing to ask whether such things can really be true. II Samuel 9:8.
For the believer, in one sense his entire life is wrapped up in this hope, and yet at the same time we know there is nothing in us that could ever sustain it. If we look within, there is only death. Whatever hope we have must come from what God has declared in Christ. In the end we can only go by what the Scriptures say. The words of Christ stand, whether our thoughts are able to take them in or not. And so we are left to look where the Scriptures direct us – to Christ and to the love of God that is in Him. Isaiah 45:22.
As I was writing this early this morning, I set the post aside to read my Bible before work and opened directly to this passage of Scripture: “They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wits’ end. Then they cry unto the LORD in their trouble, and he bringeth them out of their distresses.” Psalm 107:27-28. As soon as I read it, I thought, that is exactly where the contemplation of this love leaves us. The love of God in Christ Jesus rises so far above what we know of ourselves that the mind staggers beneath it, brought to the end of its own understanding. And there, at our wits’ end, we do the only thing left to do – we cry unto the Lord. And perhaps that is not a bad place to find ourselves. Jonah 2:7. “From the end of the earth will I cry unto thee, when my heart is overwhelmed, lead me to the rock that is higher than I.” Psalm 61:2.
In the end, we cannot force ourselves to believe such things. Faith itself is the gift of God. When what we see in ourselves seems to contradict what the Scriptures declare, we are left with only one refuge: we cast ourselves upon Christ. There we rest, not because we have resolved every doubt in our minds, but because God has spoken concerning His Son. I John 5:9-10. MPJ