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CPC Sunday School | Attributes of God 4 (10-15-2023)
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The transcription discusses the topic of God's love and addresses common misconceptions about it. It highlights how the culture defines God's love based on their own terms, leading to misunderstandings and false ideas. The transcription also mentions the human terms used to describe God's love, such as reckless, wild, and irresponsible, and explains their origins and flaws. It emphasizes the importance of seeking and understanding God's love through scripture, rather than relying on personal feelings and circumstances. Ultimately, it argues that true love comes from God and cannot be separated from Him. All right, let me start with a word of prayer, and we'll get started with our lesson today. Lord, we're so thankful that you have brought us here today, recognizing that this day is set apart for us to come before you and to worship. Lord, we are reminded of your covenant to love and how you covenant with your people. Pray, Lord, this day that you would help us to see your deep love, Lord, that it would penetrate our hearts, that we would understand your love to the fullest, and Lord, we just pray that you would open our hearts and minds, that we would be attentive to hear, and that we would be guided by your Holy Spirit through the scriptures, praise in Jesus' name, amen. So we've been going through a series of God's attributes, and today we're going to cover the attribute of God's love. So within God's love, we're going to talk about a couple different things. This is kind of our overview today. So we're going to firstly talk about the common misconceptions that is described in God's love. We're going to compare that and try to look at the biblical definition of what God's love looks like. We're going to see that in our first example of the Trinitarian love. We're going to look at a deeper view of God's love strictly from scriptures, and then we're also going to look at, does God love everyone the same? So firstly, we're going to look at the definition of God's love, but more in the view of how does the culture define it? So this idea that God is love comes from John 4, verses 8, which John points out there that God is love. But this idea of God is love that commonly gets pulled from John is widely misunderstood because they're describing something of God's nature without understanding truly what the love of God is about. So that's why you get the idea that they would say, well, a loving God would never do this. A loving God would understand my circumstances in this. And so everything kind of comes after their own definition of how they would describe God's love. And so when we think about that idea, we have to look at where that idea is coming from in regards to the scriptures, in regards to why it is that they believe that they can define God's love in their own terms. And if you look at that connotation of a loving God would never, you're putting your own idea on what God's love is defined by. So when you think about this, you'll see here it's not only your own idea, but they only accept God if he loves on their terms. And so the error of assuming that is in basically that that's all that we desire to know about God. When we place him into this box and this idea of saying, well, God would only love me or God would never do this to me, we're making an assumption about him that that's all that God is about. So this leads to then a confusion ultimately of, again, not knowing who God is and not knowing what God's love truly is. These are the misconceptions that the world and the culture would try to press upon everyone in regards to this love of God. So these misconceptions lead to a God that ultimately loves you, and this is their terms, God ultimately loves you unconditionally. But there's no need with an unconditional love, there's no need for change, there's no need for repentance, there's no need for a Savior in Jesus Christ, and ultimately there's no need for an atonement if God loves you truly, unconditionally. And so we don't see that we are, in a sense, alienated from God, that we are ultimately separated from God, and there's this connotation when they come and speak to you and say, well, God loves you, there's this connotation that He loves you regardless of who you are. If they don't know you, they can say God loves you. But if we don't have a true understanding of repentance, if we don't have a true understanding of who we are in our human depravity, then it can't be unconditional. So there are three ways that I wanted to talk about the human terms and how God's love is described. So God's love in human terms, in the culture, a lot of times is described as reckless, is described as wild, and irresponsible. So you might ask, well, I've never heard this talked about. So where this comes from is, I'll talk about the reckless one in my next slide, but wild and irresponsible. So irresponsible comes from this idea that the argument is that in the book of Hosea, God's love was irresponsible, because He commanded Hosea to marry this harlot woman, and that He would demonstrate through this harlot woman the wickedness that was going on in Hosea, and God was going to use the children and use this relationship with Gomer to demonstrate His love. But they would say that that's an irresponsible love, because God used a difficult situation and pushed it upon Hosea, and it was irresponsible in God's character, but it was still love. Same thing with wild. So the wild idea comes from this idea that they would say that God's love is wild towards us in terms of how He pursues after us, and this idea that He basically has this everlasting love, but in terms of it can't be controlled, it's wild. So then the last one is reckless, His love is reckless, and this is something that's being pushed specifically by the culture from a song that comes from Bethel. So there's a singer called Corey Asbury, and the name of his song is Reckless. And so looking into what he means by reckless, if we look at this term, it stems from this theology that sees God as not knowing the future, so that's why they would describe it as it's reckless. It takes His love, they would say, in His recklessness, it takes risks. And not only does it take risks, but He doesn't understand or He doesn't know what the outcome is going to be in the short term. So because of that, they would argue that His love is reckless. So they would also say that in that reckless love, they would say that it is ultimately not a good bargain for Him because He deserves our love but knows that we can't love Him back in the same way. Well there is some truth to it's not a good bargain for Him because we're sinners, right? But at the same time, they're basically putting us in this measure with God as if we are able to understand God's love in our own humanistic view. And the problem with the idea of putting God's love in the term of reckless is that if we were just to look at the word reckless for a second, we would see all the other words that are synonyms of reckless, which is audacious, brash, carefree, careless, daring, foolhardy, hasty, and it could go on and on. But all of those words do not describe the character of God. So we have to be careful these terms and ideology that is being pushed upon us from the culture where it now becomes something that we're not thinking about what it is that we're singing. We're not thinking about the theology and the agenda that the world is trying to place on the character of God. And so that's why these words like reckless or characterizations of God that are not biblical can lead us to our own understanding of God that is incorrect. So ultimately what the culture wants to do in summary, society wants to tie God's love to the individual. And by doing that, what they're doing is they're associating our experience of God's love with our own feelings. So it's driven off of our human emotions or our performances or our circumstances or our personal well-being. And so because everything is dictated upon our life, then we draw God's love based upon those circumstances. And so the idea that what we're fighting today ultimately is that we're fighting this idea that they want to define God's love in a justification of sin, saying that, well, yes, I do this, but God loves me. And so the error in that is ultimately in trying to get people to accept their sin and get them to know that God loves them regardless of what they do. The second thing is that they also describe God's love as something that they must feel. So again, it's a human emotion, but it's something that they would describe even as it fills my heart with love to be truly happy. But in that statement, you can recognize that it's all about them. They want to be happy. They want to reach the performance. They want to feel the circumstances change. So instead of this idea that God's love is changing you and perfecting you, instead it's about your performance and what you receive. And so then that leads to ultimately this idea that they would say that, well, because of this, there's no shortage of God's love in the entire universe. Because if I can feel it, everybody can feel it. And so it ultimately leads the individual down a road that's unbiblical and is not what God's love is about. So in this misunderstanding of God's love, what we see is that when you define it in these terms that everyone believes in love, everyone has this idea that they want to love. But when we do that, we're not actively seeking God through those circumstances. We're not actively seeking God in that love. So all of them are looking for love, but far of them find that love in God. So if God is love, what is love without God? So we can't have this idea ultimately of love because the idea of love comes from God. But if you're trying to separate love and God, then what are you really finding? You're not finding true love. Okay, so we look at scriptures here where it says, you can't assume to know God's love if we have a heart that doesn't seek him, because ultimately we have to seek him to know God's love. So in Proverbs 8, 17, it says, those who love me, those who diligently seek me will find me. And Psalm 34, 8 says, oh, taste and see that the Lord is good. So that's where we must look to for love. So there's this deception within the culture, because there's two ideas. We've talked about the culture and its definition of love. And there's another aspect that we want to consider as well. And that starts and stems from the Garden of Eden. So in the Garden of Eden, God, when he was presenting human nature in Adam and Eve, if you remember in the Garden, Satan's temptation was to question God, to question God's character. And ultimately what he's trying to do is he's trying to lessen our opinion of God's goodness and of God's love in those questions. And ultimately when he does that, he's trying to seek to hide God's goodness and to present a God that doesn't delight in our destruction, doesn't delight in our salvation, but ultimately he doesn't care for our well-being. And so Satan presents this idea, as he presents it in the Garden, that ultimately God doesn't delight in us. He wants to cause us to question that. And that's what he did with Adam and Eve, is he questioned it by saying, but does God really, did God really say? Because he wants you to question God's character. So you have this idea that the culture is trying to define God's love on the one side, and then you also have Satan's ploy to continuing to question God's love as well, but from a different perspective. You have the world and the culture that says God loves you, no matter who you are, but then you have Satan that says, I want you to question who God is. So God doesn't love you in that way. If God loved you, he would do this. So you're kind of trying to balance these different ideologies and these different temptations. And that's what I want you to see here, is that we have to have our love defined and centered on the Word of God. Because we're going to continue to be tempted by Satan's lies, and we're going to continue to be pressured by the culture and how they want to define love. So let's take this idea that if God is only love, what does it look like? If God is only love, then he would never send sinners to hell. He would never have a need for justice, and he would never have a hatred of sin. Because if he is defined by only love, then there would never be a need for someone to go to hell. Right? So we know that can't be true. All right, so let's look at the definition of love. So when we look at the idea of love, we have one word that describes love. But in the Greek, there are actually three words to define love. So I think we have to look at those to have a better understanding of how God's love is separate from the love that we commonly describe. So eros is the Greek definition for a physical attraction to someone else, but it's also a way of loving. You have phileo, which is the friendship kind of love. And then you have agape, which is the fatherly love of God. So in agape, you have the highest form of love that exists. It's not based on a whim or a feeling or an emotion, but it's sacrificial to seek the highest good in the one that is loved. And agape is how God loves his people. So we cannot throw this idea of cultural love into the same theme as agape, because agape is this highest form of love, which we don't even have a way of describing in the human language. So I want to look at two opposite spectrums, because commonly in the world, we confuse lust and love, but they're very different. So lust is to take from someone else what is not lawfully yours. But love is totally the opposite. Rather than take, love gives at great cost and sacrificially. Lust, on the other hand, impulses, is an impulse, not of necessity. It's not because you need it, but it's an impulse of desire. But the greatest love would be to love someone who is unlovely, right? And that's what God does with us in his agape. He loves us, even though we are unlovely, he chooses us when we are the most unlovely, when we are wicked and sinners. And God chooses to love us agape, not based upon this lust, but because of when we are the most unlovely, he chooses to love us and to redeem us. And then the last thing on the left side is that there's this idea that's pursued of possession and greed, but God's love is sacrificial. There's no greed or possession associated with God's love other than, yes, he's covenantal, yes, he desires his people, but it's not the same as lust. Okay, so let's look at three ways that we can also understand God's love in layers, okay? Because what commonly happens is, is in the world, yes, we have this text that says God is love, okay, but they want to say that God loves everyone unconditionally, okay? So how can we look at a better way to understand the love of God as it pertains to the unelect and as it pertains to the elect? Is it different? So in God's benevolence, God has a love through his benevolence, which is his disposition, okay? So you could think of it as his character. So God's character would be that he has a goodwill towards all humanity. So his love is characterized by a goodwill towards all humanity, but in that he has no pleasure in the death of the wicked, which Ezekiel 33 11 says, okay? So if we understand that God's character is a goodwill towards all humanity, then in that we have an action which takes place based upon this benevolent love, and his action is his beneficent, okay? His beneficent is how he demonstrates that good character towards all men, and that's through his common grace. So the wicked receives a home. They receive rain on their crops. As we see throughout scripture that even God shows a certain type of benevolence or a certain types of love towards his human nature because of the common grace that he shows. And in Psalm 145 9, it says, the Lord is good to all, and his mercy is over all that he has made. So scripture is just showing us that he has a goodness to all humankind. But then the final layer is what he demonstrates through his election and through his redemption. And that's where there's a separation between the world and his benevolent love, his disposition, and his beneficence, which is his common grace. And then you have his love towards his people, okay? So his love towards his people includes his electing them and his redeeming them. And that's different from his love of benevolence and his love of beneficence, okay? So the first example that we have to look at for love is his love within the Trinity. So we see all throughout scripture that the love of the Trinity demonstrates to us the true love of God before even the world was created. We see the Father's love for the Son, which we see in John 335, that he's given the Son all things into his hands. We see the Son's love for the Father in John 14, love for the Father and fulfilling and doing what the Father commands. And then we see the Holy Spirit's love for the Father and the Son and the Trinity working together in unison with one another, anointing Christ to do the will of the Father. He acts as the divine agent of the Father. So we see this unison working together in this Trinitarian love, and this is done before the world is even created. He represents and showcases and gives us this example of this love united together as one. So firstly, we have to look at how God's love is faithful and affectionate. So you have this word, kesed. This word kesed, it basically is a term that communicates faithfulness, as in God's keeping of his covenant of grace. So in Psalm 136, it describes his steadfast love endures forever. So his kesed, it lasts forever through his covenantal love. Not just merely is God's love reliable, it is also a kind affection. He delighted in mercy, is what Micah 7.18 says. So we see here that God is not just merely a God that is unreliable, but it says that God is reliable in his kind affection. His kind affection is consistent. His love towards us is always faithful. His everlasting love is to those who fear him, is what Psalm 103 says. He has an everlasting love to those who fear him. God's covenantal loyalty and his steadfast love, in this Psalm 5.7, David is talking about the covenantal love that the Lord has for us and the faithfulness in his covenant. So when we think about God making a covenant with us, God is always faithful in that covenant. He never wavers in that covenant, regardless of whether we're wavering. The Lord is still faithful to us in that love. And then the Hebrew denotes a kindness that is eminent, that is rare, and is done gratuitously without respect to any compensation. So his affection towards us in that love is so powerful and strong that it is characterized as a rarity, something that we could not associate to or understand. Nextly, God's love is infinite. His love has no limit. His love cannot be defined by any length or depth, is what Ephesians 2.4 says. And then in John 17, he says that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me. So the son is talking about, the father is talking to the son here and saying that he was sent by the father and he says he loved them, which is his elect, he loved his elect even before he loved his son. So it's showing that the infinite love of God was planned before time, before the world was created. God had this infinite love for his elect. So God's love then is eternal. His love within the Trinity demonstrates that he has an eternal love. We talked about how it was before the world was even created. God had this love for his people. God has no beginning and thus his love has no beginning. Jeremiah 31.3 talks about, I have loved you with an everlasting love. So he ultimately has pursued after us in this eternal love and he is sovereignly guaranteed that we would be with him forever through this sovereign eternal love. He sets his heart upon us, is what Ephesians 1 says, he sets his heart upon us from all eternity, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world is what Ephesians says. So you can see this building upon his eternal love. You can see how he has predestined before time that he would love us eternally. Charles Spurgeon says, you can trace the beginning of human affection. You can easily find the beginning of our love to Christ, but his love to us is a stream whose source is hidden in eternity. God's love is immutable. His love never changes. He doesn't know change. He doesn't know reduction in size. James 1 talks about with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change. So we're seeing here that the love of God not only is infinite, not only is eternal, but is unchangeable, that the Lord's love, once he sets his love upon us, as we talked about before the foundation of the world, there is no change. Even if our circumstances change, the Lord doesn't change. So he doesn't change based upon our actions. So when we think about like our day-to-day life, the common temptation is that, oh, does God still love me because I've done this? God's love is not changing. He doesn't lose his grasp or his hold on his people. We can rest in the fact that because he doesn't change, that he continues to love us, even based upon our imperfections. So his love for his elect from all eternity, we talked about he does not call back his love. In John 13, it says he loved them to the end. So we can do nothing to compel and nothing to repel. So we can't get God to love us, and we can't even get God to not love us. He chooses who he will love. And through Romans 9, 19 says, for who can resist his will? No one can resist the love of God. So God's eternal promise through his covenant is that God's love is unwavering through his covenant of promises. So we see that as representative throughout the entire Old Testament, this continual theme that plays through the book of Judges and the people turn away from the Lord. Every man does what is right in his own eyes, but the Lord is still covenantal to his people. He does not forget about his people, even though they have turned away from the Lord and not followed after him, not kept his covenant, yet the Lord is still true to his promise. He is unwavering because of his covenantal love. So, nextly, God's love is holy and just. His love never conflicts with his holiness. We know that God is holy, but even the love of God has to reprove through his love. So when we think about Hebrews 12, 6, it talks about how the Lord reproves those who he loves, right? Because of his holiness, they cannot contradict with one another, but because God is holy and loving, that he has to reprove and he has to hate sin. So God is love and God is light. There's a perfect balance of holiness and joy that we see God being love and God being light. His love is pure, so it's not mixed with any weakness or overindulgence of emotions, but rather love permeates his attributes and harmonizes them. His holiness is a loving holiness and his love is a holy love. So we're not seeing that he can only have love, but yet all of his attributes work seamlessly together, and so we are able to see that he is able to perfectly demonstrate to us his love through holiness. So he also has, as we see, through his holiness, we see that he has to have a justice and a hatred over sin. He loved his elect to send his son, and if not for Christ, we are destined for wrath, as it says in 1 Thessalonians 5.9. So you can see here that although God is love, God also must be holy. He must be just, and his justice and his righteousness will not allow for sinfulness to creep in just because of his love. So you see that the attributes are all working together in unison. So J.I. Packer had this to say, God's love is stern, for it expresses holiness in the lover and seeks holiness for the beloved. Scripture does not allow us to suppose that because God is love, it must look to him to confer happiness on people who will not seek holiness, or to shield his loved ones from trouble when he knows that they need trouble to further their sanctification. So through this quote, J.I. Packard is pointing out that the Lord uses reproof, the Lord uses discipline for his elect to sanctify them, and that in itself is loving. So God's love next is long-suffering. So throughout Scripture, we see that the Lord continually withholds judgment for those that deserve judgment, that deserve God's wrath and curse immediately. But God's love is long-suffering in that he withholds that judgment, and Exodus 24.6 says that he is slow to anger. He grieves over Jerusalem, as we see in the Old Testament, because his love hates this pursuit over sin. And so because he hates this pursuit over sin, he is patient in his love, he is long-suffering in his love, and it's meant to lead us ultimately to repentance. So we see in Romans 2.4 it says, Or do you presume on the riches of his kindness and forbearance and patience, not knowing that God's kindness is meant to lead you to repentance? So he has patience even for the wicked, as Romans 9 says, he has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction. So even though he has a righteous anger, there is still a patience and a long-suffering in God's love, and that he does not act with immediate judgment, but that he uses, for his elect, he uses circumstances to ultimately lead us to repentance. Next, God's love is sacrificial. So the greatness that we could ever have from a sacrificial love would be in his Son being sent to take our place on the cross. His Son being sent not only to take our place, but he was the only Redeemer, the only perfect person that could have taken our place. And so as you can probably imagine, for any of you that have kids, if you were to give up one of your children to be a sacrificial lamb, it would be very difficult, right? But at the same time, you have to think about it in the sense of not only is he sending his Son, but it's his only Son. And not only is it his only Son, but it's his perfect Son. And the Scriptures talk about no man hath a greater love than to lay his life down for his brother, right? But at the same time, we see that Christ was laid down for us in perfection. There was nothing wrong in him, and he's laying his life down for those that are unworthy. So his love is sacrificial. It says in Ephesians 5.25, Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her. So it was the most difficult and cruel death to die on the cross for us as undeserving rebels, deserving of wrath, yet he sacrificed through his love. So Charles Spurgeon had this to say, the Father gave his other self one with himself. When the great God gave his Son, he gave God himself. For Jesus is not in his eternal nature less than God. When God gave God for us, he gave himself. What more can he give? God gave his all. He gave himself. Who can measure this love? So next, God's love is uninfluenced. So we have to recognize that regardless of what things that we do in our life, nothing could influence the love of God. And we hit on that a little bit when we were talking about how the love of God, we cannot repel it. So it's uninfluenced by us. Nothing in nature, nothing within us can attract or prompt the love of God. His love only originated in God and God alone, which we saw in his Trinitarian love, which is at the beginning of time. And God's love is free and spontaneous. He has a love for his people in Deuteronomy 7, 7-8, where he talks about that he is the one that chooses to love us. That it is not by him being compelled. His love for his people, he loved his people before a spectacle of love for him was even present. So we see that there is nothing in us at all, according to 1 John 4, nothing in us that would have caused God to love us. So it was not influenced by anything in us. So we see that nothing in us is able to attract the love of God, rather the opposite, everything to repel him and everything sinful to make him detest us. So if we were really to describe and try to understand how God's love is influenced, we could describe it by we're so undeserving of it. Because if we were to look at ourselves, there's nothing in ourself that would be worthy to look upon that would attract us to his love, because we have nothing good. Martin Luther said, God doesn't love us because of our worth, we are of worth because God loves us. So I think we have to understand and have a correct understanding of our view of God's love. We looked at all of these things that describe God's love from a scriptural standpoint, and at the beginning we looked at from a view that would be culturalistic, or a view that would be a temptation by Satan. I think it's important that we recognize that our view of God has to come from God's word alone. It cannot come from a view of man, it cannot come from our emotions, it cannot come from circumstances or our own personal opinion, or what society views as love. We looked at that a little bit in the beginning, that so easily we want to associate God's love with our own personal emotions, our own circumstances, and try to fit God into those circumstances and try to define and measure God's love based upon that, but that's not a biblical type of love. So I have this in consideration when we think about the Lord's love, we have to recognize as we talked about, the Lord's love is just, the Lord's love is righteous, and because of that we have to call out this idea that he has a hate for the wicked. So it wouldn't be right for us to say, take John, where he describes God as love, it wouldn't be right for us to take that verse and immediately know about the love of God without talking about his justice, without talking about how he has a hate for the wicked every single day as Scripture describes. So in the top one we see, the wicked consider the things of the Spirit as foolishness, but the Lord, on the right, the Lord is righteous and he loves righteous deeds, and the only way we're able to be righteous is through the perfect love of his sacrificial Son in Jesus Christ. So it says in Psalm 115 that the Lord hates the wicked, and ultimately, in 2 Corinthians, as they compare 2 Corinthians 2.14, we must be transformed by God, is what Scripture says. God hates the wicked ways, he hates the wicked's thoughts, their worship, and their actions. And ultimately, God loves justice, will not leave his people, but will transform them forever. It says God is angry with the wicked every day in Psalm 7, and it says in Romans 1 that the righteous shall live by faith. And lastly, it says in Romans 1.18, it says the unrighteous suppress the truth. So in wickedness, if we are separated from God, if we try to define God as love, and that's all God is, then ultimately we are suppressing everything else, every other characteristic of God. And so by doing that, we suppress the truth. Because if we want to recognize what truth is, then we have to characterize God in all the things that we talked about God in, his justice, his goodness, his sacrificialness. And so when we think about this idea of culture pushing on this idea of God is love, we also have to recognize the other side of things, that we have to call out that there's also a hatred over sin, there's a hatred over wickedness. So lastly, in God is love, we see that the understanding of the verse, God is love, is the complete truth about God so far as the Christian is concerned. Because God is love to his own, the ones that he has sacrificed his son for, the ones that look to Jesus Christ for love. And ultimately, this idea that God is love means that his love finds expression in everything that he says and does. So he's defined by all of these things based upon the characteristics of his justice, his truth, his righteousness, and it can't be defined just by love. The cross of Christ gives us assurance that we are beloved of God, as Colossians 2 says, and in every circumstance, God is working out of love for our good. So we talked about how there is also discipline that the Lord does, his reproving of us, and that is helping us to see the Lord's love in us because of its sacrificialness. So in J.I. Packer says, every single thing that happens to us expresses God's love to us and comes to us for the furthering of God's purpose for us. Even when we cannot see the why and the wherefore of God's dealings, we know that there is love in and behind them, and so we can rejoice always, even when, humanly speaking, things are going wrong. Any questions? Any questions? Great. I'm not sure where it is. Did you have a question in regards to that? Yeah, I'm not sure where that would have been, but hopefully I didn't misspeak. But I think, ultimately, what I'm trying to demonstrate is that he had predestined us, before time, that he would send his Son to take our place, that he would love us through that sacrificialness. And so it was in that that his love was eternal and infinite, probably is what it was based upon, and it was showcasing how that he had predetermined it, that he would love us even before we were even created. Probably more of a comment. I really appreciate how you make this, not juxtaposition, but a compliment of both the purity and the rarity of Christ, that he had to be the perfect man, but that he is the only perfect man. I think that's worth digging into, and so do you have any more to bring out on that or to talk about that? I just love that slide. Yeah, yeah. Let me see if I can find that slide. Can you talk about it a little bit more? Yeah, this is it. Yeah, so I think what I would comment on that is that sometimes we want to put ourself in place of God, and this is not the case where we could ever take the place of God. Not only was it determined before time, but we have a couple different layers that we could look at in the sense that it was not only God's only son that he loved from all eternity, but then you add another layer on top of that saying that he was the perfect person, the only person that could have taken our place, because he was the perfect son who not only came in incarnate and came to the world to take our place, but then he's also ridiculed and criticized and endures the worst of punishments, and not just dying for his people, but dying on the cross and being mocked. And so for us to even try to put ourselves in that situation and say, I could have done that, there's no way. There's no way we could have done that. Not even would a mere person die for another person that's not perfect, but yet he's dying for people that are unworthy. So I think it characterizes a greater love, an agape love is how we describe it, that is definitely covenantal, and his love extends so great, so deep, that he would go to that length to die. Yes? Do you think the root cause of this kind of heretical view that God loves unconditionally is a lack of understanding of God's law? Yeah, I do think it is a lack of understanding, but I think it's also, it goes hand in hand with suppressing the truth. I think there are certain things about God's love that they don't care to know, or they don't want to know, because they still want to have this acceptance of sin and feel like they're loved, even with who they are. And that's the thing. Scripturally, the love of God talks about how it's not just love, but that it's also just. And if it's just, then it can't have this idea that we're going to continue to live the way that we currently live, but that we have to be transformed, as Scripture says. And without that transformation, and that's the missing piece, is the idea that I don't have to change. I can be who I am, but yet God still loves me. So I think that's the problem that's misunderstanding, and I think it goes hand in hand with Romans 1, where it's not just a suppression of the truth, but it's continuing to want to live in sin, and I love my sin more than I love God. Yeah. I mean, also, you would say, too, that we just don't esteem God's law, even as Christians a lot of times. We don't read it properly. Yeah, that's right. We don't have a proper understanding of it. Yeah, I agree. Paul, you had a question? We got time, Nate? Yeah. On our culture, I'd be interested in your thoughts. We often struggle within our culture, you see it around us, when we hear about love, we think about an Eros love, and this seeps in, obviously, to our church. In 1 Samuel, we hear about Jonathan's love of David, and that there is friendship and love. I stepped out, so maybe you cover this, but just interested in your thoughts on where that erosion may come from, as you've been thinking about this. Yeah, so I think your question is, how can we separate this Eros and Phileo from Agape? Is that kind of your question? Yeah, just your thoughts on, just your reflection on it. It's around us, and I think when people think about love, that can be one of the first thoughts that floats to the surface, and just a recovery of love in a way that is really biblical, and it's healthy as we build friendships, and as we just think about our church and our culture around us. Yeah, I mean, I think that if we're looking at Scripture in regards to that, we could easily say that God teaches and Christ teaches even that we're supposed to love our enemies. So I think that there's an aspect of God's love, so when we look at Eros and we look at Phileo and separate out Agape, there's a love that is a right love, like to love your brothers, or even as Christ gave as an example, to love our enemies. There is a love there that is scriptural in the sense of like, you are supposed to have characteristics of love, but that love only comes through the love of Christ, because it would be impossible for you to love your enemies if it weren't for Christ's transformation and His love within you. And so I think that's what's missed, is that we think that we can have this love outside of God, but Agape, this highest form of love that exists that we don't even know how to define, right, is this love that we can't even understand. And so if we think we can associate Eros and Phileo with that, we've missed the idea of the Gospel, because God's love for us is so great through His Agape that then we are transformed and then we are able to have Eros and Phileo. Then we are able to love our enemies, then we are able to love the Church and to love the brethren, because in our human nature, all that's within us is hate. And that love that we think we have is not a true love, because we know that only comes from His Agape. Okay, I think that's all we have time for. If you guys have questions afterwards, feel free. I'd love to talk more about it. Let's pray. Lord, we thank You so much that You have given us a sacrificial love, a love that has no end, that is so widely misunderstood, Lord, that we just pray and just thank You for the love that You have given us, the true love, through Your Son, Jesus Christ, that You gave up Your only Son, Your only perfect Son, to be able to take our place, even when we were unlovely, that You still loved us, that You pursued after us, and that You have loved us so tenderly, Lord, and so gentle and so faithfully. We just thank You, Lord, for Your covenant of love, which the deepness we cannot know. And Lord, we just thank You for this study and pray that You would cause us to reflect upon it, to meditate upon it, so we might continue to learn more about Your love. We pray this in Jesus' name. Amen.
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