Part II Doctrine
VI. THE GOD OF LOVE
Exodus 34:1—7; Jeremiah 31:1—9 Psalm 103 Luke 15:11—32;
1 John 4:7—12
God’s righteousness and His love are not incompatible qualities.
At different times men have tended to emphasize one of them to the exclusion of the other, but if we read the Bible carefully and
as a whole we can see that God is always perfect in both His righteousness and His love. He is righteous precisely because He is a God of love; it is because He cares so much about men that He is concerned for justice and right dealing among them.
In much of the Old Testament the emphasis seems to be more on God’s righteousness than upon His love, because this was the lesson the people of Israel needed most to learn. Throughout much of their history they were too sure of God’s love and were inclined to misinterpret it in two directions. On the one hand they were inclined to think that God loved them alone among all the nations of the earth, and, on the other, to think of Him as a kind of unmoral, indulgent father who was indifferent to their conduct so long as they continued to honor Him with sacrifices and
prayers. It was the special task of the prophets to disabuse them on both counts. The great prophets taught that God loved other nations just as He did Israel (e.g., Amos 9:7) and also, as we saw in our last set of readings, that one cannot please God by any expression of pretended religious feeling which is not
accompanied by righteousness of life.
All the time Israel and her great prophetic teachers knew that God, above all else, is a God of love. The most frequent
statement made about God in the Old Testament is the one we find embedded in the account of Yah.. weh’s revelation to Moses upon Mt. Sinai (Exod. 34:1—7). God is "merciful and gracious, long-suffering, and abundant in goodness and truth, keeping mercy for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin . . ." (vv. 6— 7). While we cannot be sure in what particular age this formula arose, it is significant that the historians of Israel felt it to be so important that they associated its proclamation with the fundamental revelation upon which the very existence of Israel as a nation depended. In later literature it is quoted again and again (e.g., Neh. 9:17; Ps. 86:15; Jonah 4:2). The full sense of it is brought Out even more clearly in the Revised Standard Version, in which the word translated above as "mercy" is
rendered more accurately as "steadfast love." The modern reader will perhaps be offended by the words which follow and which speak of God punishing the guilty for several generations. Since we have no space here to explain the full meaning of this
expression, the reader should either turn to a commentary for a fuller account or at least accept the assurance that it does not
contradict the first part of the formula. It is intended to prevent those who recited it from supposing that God’s love meant that He was indifferent to wrongdoing.
As we have previously seen, Hosea was the special prophet of God’s love in ancient Israel. While in some ways Hosea was even more severe in his pronouncements of judgment than other prophets of his time, he was the first to speak habitually of God as Israel’s Father and Husband, whose love had been violated by her unfaithfulness and who longed for her to return to Him in penitence. Once Hosea had introduced this kind of language, it became natural for others to use it, as we see in the passage, Jeremiah 31: 1—9, which promises the restoration of Israel after the Exile. Notice especially v. 3 (which has sometimes been called the motto of the whole Bible story), and the concluding words of v. 9.
The most extended and impressive account of God’s love in the Old Testament is that of the 103rd Psalm, a hymn composed in late times when men could look back upon the long history of the nation and see that, however hard the road may have been, it was God’s love which had guided them all the way. In v. 8 the
formula of Exodus 34:6f is quoted once again, but the author no longer feels the need to repeat the concluding words about the punishment of the guilty. He is content to say, "As a father pities his children, so the Lord pities those who fear him" (v. 13).
From these words we turn naturally to our Lord’s parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11—32), where the meaning of God’s Fatherhood is displayed more clearly than anywhere else in Scripture. The central figure of the story is, of course, not the prodigal, but the father who stands in the door of his home
waiting in love for his foolish and errant son to return. In a sense this parable summarizes in brief the entire drama of the Bible:
mankind is the prodigal son and God has always been waiting for the race to "come to itself" (v. 17) and find its way home.
Our final passage is the familiar one from I John (4:7—12)
which states simply that God is love. This means that if we could attribute only one quality to God, it would have to be this. But the author goes on to say that God can be truly known only by men in whom the same quality predominates. God cannot be
known by the mind alone; only those can know Him who in some profound respect are like Him. As God’s righteousness demands righteousness in men, so His love requires that men be loving also. "Everyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God." (v.7).