The Love of God Distorted

A question that we often fail to ask is this; what is my perception on the Love of God, and next, what is the perception of this Love of God with those I meet daily? According to D.A. Carson, the love of God is more difficult than we might think, thus the title of the book I’m currently rereading (had it in an electronic format, but recently purchased the book, why I did that could be a subject all of its own) “The Difficult Doctrine of The Love of God”.

In the first chapter titled “on Distorting the Love of God”, he states that “when informed Christians talk about the love of God, they mean something very different from what is meant in the surrounding culture. Worse, neither side may perceive that that is the case.” He says that when you tell people that God loves them, that they probably wouldn’t be surprised, “of course God loves me; he’s like that, isn’t he? Besides, why shouldn’t he love me? I’m kind of cute, or at least as nice as the next person. I’m okay, you’re okay, and God loves you and me.”

Not only is the Love of God distorted in our secular society, but it is often also distorted when it comes preached to us from the pulpits of Evangelical America, and Carson notes this as he points to a work by Marsha Witten, “All Is Forgiven: The Secular Message in American Protestantism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). Carson quotes from that work, which is primarily focused on sermons about the prodigal son in Luke 15 and says, ‘Nevertheless her book abounds in lengthy quotations from these sermons, and they are immensely troubling. There is a powerful tendency “to present God through characterizations of his inner states, with an emphasis on his emotions, which closely resemble those of human beings.…God is more likely to ‘feel’ than to ‘act,’ to ‘think’ than to ‘say.’ ”  Or again:
…the sermons dramatize feelings of anxiety for listeners over many other (this-worldly) aspects of their removal from God, whether they are discussing in the vocabulary of sin or in other formulations
…Many of the sermons depict a God whose behavior is regular, patterned, and predictable; he is portrayed in terms of the consistency of his behavior, of the conformity of his actions to the single rule of “love.

We in ourselves might say that God loves people, but God said “8Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. 1 John 4:8 (ESV) In this first chapter “On Distorting the Love of God” Carson gives his readers 5 ways that “the Bible Speaks of the Love of God.”
- The peculiar love of the Father for the Son, and of the Son for the Father. John 3:35; John 5:20; John 14:31
- God’s providential love over all that he has made.
- God’s salvific stance toward his fallen world. John 3:16; 1 John 2:2; John 15:19
- God’s particular, effective, selecting love toward his elect. Deut. 7:7–8; cf. 4:37
- Finally, God’s love is sometimes said to be directed toward his own people in a provisional or conditional way—conditioned, that is, on obedience. John 15:9; John 15:10

The one thing that I appreciated most, and which I have dwelled upon for quite some time is when Carson said “we need all of what Scripture says on this subject, or the doctrinal and pastoral ramifications will prove disastrous.” And, “We must not view these ways of talking about the love of God as independent, compartmentalized, loves of God.” Often we are tempted to take one aspect of the Love of God and build our whole doctrine upon it, but to truly understand the Love of God, we must look for it in all of Scripture, and then incorporate what we have found to build upon the relationship we desire with Him, and with those that come into our lives. Carson sums up this first chapter with, “Christian faithfulness entails our responsibility to grow in our grasp of what it means to confess that God is love,” which means that it will also grow in our own actions so as to imitate what we can as His servants in this world that lacks His true love. God’s true love in part rests in what we read in John 3:16 16“For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. John 3:16 (ESV)