The Love of God Is Massive
Assurance and Comfort for Discouraged People
I’ve heard it more times than I can count: “I struggle with assurance. I have a hard time believing that God really loves me.”
There are different reasons for this common confession. Sometimes people are locked in a visceral battle with sin, and they’re not experiencing much success in the fight. That requires real pastoral care and wisdom. But here’s another big reason why people struggle with assurance: they hear a lot about their Christian duties, and very little about the love of God.
Here is where we go to find the love of God in this cruel world: the cross of Jesus Christ. I’ve just written a book on this grand subject: The Warrior Savior: A Theology of the Work of Christ. Modeled after John Stott’s magisterial but accessible The Cross of Christ, a book that came out almost 40 years ago (InterVarsity, 1986), my book was just released by P&R. P&R represents the gold standard in sound doctrine, having established this reputation over nearly a century of faithful publishing.
The Warrior Savior is the culmination of nearly six years of planning, research, a PhD class on atonement, and lots of writing and editing. Like Stott’s classic work, mine is not a polemical book. It is a work of systematic theology via the method of biblical theology. It is currently being sold at a staggering discount; to get it for 40% off, go to the official page dedicated to The Warrior Savior and use the code "G3OWEN." (I’m very thankful to my friends at G3 for this partnership.)
Back to the biblical matter at hand. You don’t have to strain to connect the cross of Christ and the love of God. To understand God’s love shown in the cross, all you have to do is simply listen to God’s Word. As just one passage among many connecting these matters, here is 1 John 4:7–10.
[7] Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. [8] Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. [9] In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. [10] In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.
This is explosive material. It is material that cannot help but strengthen and assure Christians that God loves them. This isn’t buried in a field somewhere; this is the Word of God, and God intends that his people would learn these truths. God does not want us feeling unloved; God wants us to know that he “loved us” and sent his Son to die for us. Simply put, there is no greater fountain of love than this.
Strange But True: Many Christians Struggle to Be Loved by God
If this is biblically clear, then why do so many feel so little assurance? Why aren’t Christians more secure and hopeful and confident in God? Here again we could list a number of factors contributing to this sad situation. In the interest of time, I’ll focus on a couple that I commonly observe.
First, conservative evangelicals like myself have reacted strongly to theology that preaches all love and no holiness. We have rightly sought to correct this and preach both dimensions of God’s character and resulting action. But in our reaction, I sense that we may have over-corrected in some places. One example of this: we might emphasize—against unsound voices—that the practical burden of the Christian life centers in sorrow over sin and the performance of spiritual disciplines.
We must hate our sin as Christians. We should strive by the Spirit’s power, furthermore, to be holy, and we should definitely practice spiritual disciplines. But if we are not careful, a sin-driven approach to the Christian life can end up eclipsing God in functional terms.
In reality, there should be no tension between divine love and our holiness. Our battle against sin is super-charged by a massive vision of God’s love, after all. That was John’s point in the passage quoted above. John wanted his audience to walk in righteous communal love, and toward that end, he pointed them to definite divine love: the love of God displayed in the cross of Christ.
Yet I sense that this discussion could sound troubling to some evangelical ears. We have a tendency to distrust a theology of divine love. As I’ve said, this is partly because we’ve all heard divine love preached badly by professing Christians (a real problem). Here’s a second reason: we think about love from the ground up, reasoning from our partial and fractured expression of love to God’s capacity for love.
Strange But True: Legalism Unintentionally Creates Antinomianism
We’ve all tasted limited earthly love. Where relationships with our father or mother have broken down in past days, as one example, we may struggle mightily to see God as loving. Further, if we had a father or mother who was harsh, severe, or absent when we were young (I did not, praise God), we may well be conditioned even unthinkingly to approach love as though it is an extremely fragile thing.
This may well be true even if we hold to sound theology, can speak about biblical love to a degree, and currently have a relatively stable life. Love for us may seem heavily conditional, extremely nuanced, and highly qualified. We may feel a serious hitch in our spirit when we start talking about divine love in expansive terms, as though we were at any moment about to spiral into antinomianism (a term meaning “against the law,” such that one sins unrepentantly).
It’s the strangest thing: people born into legalism often graduate into antinomianism. It actually makes sense, however. If you grew up in a legalistic context where grace was fleeting and harsh rules dominated your existence, you experienced conditional love. In such a context, if you obeyed, you were loved; if you disobeyed, you effectively lost the love of your parents.
This is not an uncommon experience in our fallen world, tragically. Said more strongly, legalism (rules-driven religion that adds to what Scripture teaches) is very common. This kind of approach shapes us deeply, perhaps even more than we know. Legalism leaves pain and wounds and fear that do not quickly subside. This is not a therapeutic insight; this is a theological truism.
God’s Love Is Not Legalistic “Love”
Having been trained in legalism, we may feel for the rest of our lives that we are loved by God, but barely. Love in such a system is not strong as iron and thick as steel; love is fragile, flickering, and frail. Love is not dependent on God; love is dependent on us. As a result, love ends up being very small, and rules and retribution end up being very big indeed.
This constricted vision of love frequently has the opposite effect its adherents desire. Ironically, legalism ends up catapulting many people into antinomianism. (I say this as an observation, not an endorsement.) If you set up a family where love is small but rules are massive, do not be shocked if your children run—as soon as they can—into the arms of rule-breakers. They are not simply seeking to live according to the flesh (as they no doubt are); they are hunting for affection and belonging.
Having lived under conditional love, they yearn for unconditional acceptance. Again, this is driven by sin. But it is also an effect of their upbringing. Of course, some children raised in Christian homes, including joyful and grace-saturated homes, will rebel against God and their parents no matter what. But with that nuance stated, we cannot miss this: some folks embrace a fleshly life in part because they were raised under conditional love.
God’s Love Is Not Antinomian “Love”
Legalism is a viper, as I am been at pains to say. It is unsound and corrupting. But this system is not alone in offering a wrong conception of divine love. In contrast to the legalist and their doctrine of highly conditional love (small love, in other words), an antinomian might talk a big game about God’s love, but shrink it so that it is not transforming. Strangely, the legalist and the antinomian make the same mistake, albeit from the opposite direction: they make the cross small.
Why is this so? In an antinomian worldview, one’s personal sin is of little account. An antinomian wrongly thinks that the greatness of God’s grace means that they can live any way they choose. They thus treat God’s kindness as a license to sin. Like a child at a carnival, they make no effort to claim the forgiveness prize, reasoning to themselves that they can always do that later.
In this way, the antinomian shows not that they have a big vision of grace, but that they have a very small vision of grace. This is because for the antinomian, grace is not transformative; grace is merely affirmative. The antinomian fails to see that God’s grace does not affirm our internal evil, but always calls for holistic repentance and committed obedience. The cross was necessary to ground such pursuit, and shows us in visceral form both the wages of sin and the shocking cost of forgiveness: the Messiah’s death in our place.
The antinomian does not understand holiness or grace, in truth. In biblical terms, the grace of God working in us leads to a greater zeal for holiness. Without holiness, Scripture says, no one will see the Lord (Heb. 12:14). We must carry our cross every day we live (Matt. 16:24). By the Spirit’s power, we must kill the flesh and cultivate spiritual fruit (Gal. 5:19–23). Indeed, the reason any Christian loves righteousness and hates unrighteousness is because the Spirit is living in us and cultivating these inclinations in our hearts and minds.
As we can see, antinomianism is a lie. It is an unsound system. Contrary to what it teaches, our sin is never a small thing. Nor does the love of God enable a fleshly faith. We all stumble in many ways (James 3:2), but biblical love leads to humiliation, repentance, confession, faith, and a daily walk with Christ. Antinomian “love” produces no such effects; it is a counterfeit.
God’s Love Is Cruciform Love
We oppose unsound theology from different—even polar-opposite—directions. If antinomianism is a grave threat to the gospel, as it surely is, so too is the converse, legalism. The lie that drives antinomianism is the insignificance of fleshliness; the lie that drives legalism is the effectiveness of self-righteousness.
There is very good news in response to both of these systems. At risk of sounding like a superhero-movie protagonist, the antidote is at hand: the atonement theology of the Bible. Biblical atonement theology announces this wondrous news: like Israel, we are loved with an everlasting love (Jeremiah 31:3). Unlike our own love, it does not flicker or wither; it does not falter or fail.
As Moses learned, the Lord is a God “merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness,” a God who keeps “steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation” (Exodus 34:6–7).
Sin has effects, to be very sure. Severe sin, furthermore, will definitely—and rightly—bring serious consequences. But Yahweh the covenant God did not present himself as racing to anger; Yahweh was “slow to anger,” as Moses heard (v. 6). To wayward Israel, God’s everlasting love endured even in the low days of the Babylonian captivity: “therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you” (Jeremiah 31:3).
God’s love for sinners drove Jesus to death, even death on a cross, for us. God’s love, in turn, motivates his people to repent and confess their sin before him. As Christians, we do not wince before the Lord, fearing his backhand, his uncontrolled temper. We humble ourselves before him, knowing that he is very merciful, very patient, and very kind.
This is not love that is dependent on us, ultimately. This is not love that gets turned off rapidly like a faucet wrenched by a raging overlord. This is the love of a heavenly Father displayed in the agony of the Son. It is love so great and joyous that it inspires us to run hard after God, as I recently covered in an episode of my podcast, Grace & Truth.
We could summarize the point like this: the banner over the Christian life is the love of God. Indeed, as we see in Ephesians 1:3-14, God’s love accounts for our election before the earth’s foundation; God’s love appointed the cross as the means of our forgiveness; God’s love meant that the Spirit regenerated us and granted us saving faith and repentance; God’s love carries us in a tidal wave of forgiveness all the way to glory.
Conclusion
Divine love, in summary, is not a small thing. Many of us struggle to be loved. This struggle may occupy us the rest of our lives, in full honesty. We all tend to make the cross small, whether as a legalist, an antinomian, or some strange blend of the two. For people like us, we must remember the doctrine that runs through the entire Bible. It is this: God’s love is not dependent on us. God’s love is dependent on God.
This remembrance—or fresh discovery, for some of us!—leads us to cross-centered Christianity at the practical level. When we sin, we look to the cross. When we wonder whether God loves us today, we look to the cross. When we wonder whether God will keep loving us tomorrow, we look to the cross. The cross is where God assures us, in time and space, of his objective, unconquerable, unfading love.
There’s no greater miracle, and no better news, than this: the work of redemption is finished (John 19:30). Jesus need not be “re-sacrificed” or “re-presented” as an offering to God. The one perfect sacrifice has been given (Hebrews 7:24-27). No further contributions to atonement need to be made. All we must do is look back to Calvary, where Jesus died in our place, satisfying the wrath of God and expiating (cleansing) our guilt.
Over and over again, when we forget how much God loves us, we have just one place to look for hope and comfort: the cross.
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This essay is adapted from The Warrior Savior (P&R, 2024), and is used with permission.