Tyler Smith discusses the difference between God’s love for humanity in general and God’s specific love for the elect as it was accomplished in and applied by the atoning blood of Jesus Christ.  Whether you’re a Calvinist or not, you will enjoy this article!

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The Love of God: God’s Special Love for the Elect (Part 4/4)

By:  Tyler Smith

After having discussed God’s intritrinitarian love for His Persons, His providential love for all creation, and His general love for all mankind, we now turn our attention to the fourth and final installment to this series on the love of God. Though God loves every man (John 3:16) and calls every man to repent (Acts 17:30), there is a special kind of love in which God loves a select group of people, those chosen “in Him before the foundation of the world” (Eph 1:4).

This eternal elective love is first demonstrated in His choice of Abram and the nation of Israel (Gen 12:1-3). Abram was taken from a family of idol worshippers who “served other gods” (Josh 24:2-3). This taking of Abram from idolatry is called “choosing” or “election” in Nehemiah 9:7. Scripture speaks of God knowing[i] Abraham (Gen 18:17-19; Amos 3:2) in a special way, a way that affirms God’s treatment of him as His special or unique possession.[ii]

God’s selection of Israel was unconditional. His choice had nothing to do with their size as a nation (Deut 7:7); nor was it because of their goodness (Deut 9:4-6). Rather, God chose them because He freely loved them (Deut 7:8). There were countless other nations that God could have selected as His chosen people, but God’s special love found its object in Israel. God owns everything in the universe, and He reserves the right to take any people He desires as His special possession. It was in God’s love that He freely and sovereignly instituted this covenant relationship, and so it was and is God’s love that precedes any love that can be offered to God by man. Thus, both Old and New Testament believers love God “because He first loved us” (1 John 4:19).[iii]

The Old Testament is full of examples in which God provides discriminatively for His special people, Israel. The Exodus reveals God’s faithfulness to His covenant promises in the face of Egyptian bondage and captivity. God’s decision to release Israel from the stronghold of Egypt (Ex 5:1), the plagues unleashed against Egypt (Ex 7-12), and finally, the destruction of Egyptian armies in the Red Sea (Ex 14:19-31) all point to God’s sovereign and discriminative choice for His beloved Israel and against their enemies, Egypt.

There are other ways, additional to God’s direct choices of Abraham and Israel, in which God’s discriminating and special love is seen in the Old Testament. Of Abraham’s two sons, Isaac and Ishmael, God chose only one—Isaac, not Ishmael—to be the son of promise (Gen 17:16-22). Isaac had two sons, Jacob and Esau. Again, God chose only Jacob, and not Esau, to continue the lineage of His chosen people (Gen 27). In both these cases, God does something unexpected in and uncustomary to their culture: He chooses the younger child, instead of the older, to receive the inheritance. This, God does to show that His election is free, unconditional, merciful, and gracious.[iv]

The example of Jacob and Esau is especially instructive with regards to God’s special love for the elect. The Apostle Paul points to this love in Romans 9 as he explains that the election of Jacob instead of Esau was “according to” God’s “choice” (Rom 9:11). The election of Jacob and the non-election of Esau cannot ultimately be ascribed to their choice,[v] since this election took place “before they were born” (Rom 9:11). God’s affections are made known when He says, “Jacob I have loved, but Esau I hated” (Rom 9:13). This language cannot be reduced to the assumption that God simply loves Esau a little less than Jacob. Part of God’s love of Jacob is seen in His determination that Esau is judged (Mal 1:1-4). These verses distinguish God’s love for Jacob from His hatred of Esau and establish God’s intentions to display His loving grace and His holy wrath, while highlighting His eternal intentions for the existence and the functionality of both heaven and hell. Hell is not simply an after-thought in the mind of God, some unwanted thing. It is the objective of God to elevate His lavish generosity to His elect by its display against the backdrop of His endless judgment against the non-elect in hell. This might seem unloving and cruel to the people of today’s culture; however, one must understand and be shocked that God would choose to redeem the soul of any man. One must realize the magnitude and the hideousness of sin. Today’s culture needs to be reminded of the holiness and the justice of God. Only then will they come to have a biblically informed understanding of the love of God. Paul himself anticipates the man-centered response of our culture and responds, “What shall we say then? There is no injustice with God, is there? May it never be” (Rom 9:14)! The greatness of God’s sovereign judgment must be correctly understood as the contrasting backdrop of the greatness of God’s sovereign grace and love.[vi] This is exactly what Paul says, “What if God, although willing to demonstrate His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction? And He did so to make known the riches of His glory upon vessels of mercy, which He prepared beforehand for glory” (Rom 9:22,23).

Jesus’ message is no different than Paul’s. Christ explains to the non-elect why they do not believe. He says, “You do not believe, because you do not belong to my sheep (John 10:26).” It is important to notice what He does not say. He could have said, “You do not belong to my sheep because you do not believe,” but He did not. In the end, believing is contingent on being a sheep. In order to be a sheep, one must be given to Jesus by the Father. This is made clear when Jesus says, “My sheep hear My voice, and I know them, and they follow Me; and I give eternal life to them, and they will never perish; and no one will snatch them out of My hand.  ‘My Father, who has given them to Me, is greater than all; and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand’” (John 10:27-29). Belonging to the Father must precede coming to Jesus: “All that the Father gives me will come to me; and Him who comes to me I will not cast out… and this is the will of Him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that He has given me, but raise it up at the last day” (John 6:37-39).[vii]

It is upon this basis that believers are empowered to persevere to the end. God’s unconditional election of undeserving sinners exalts the greatness of God for His loving grace and humbles men in their indebtedness. Sovereign grace leaves no room for boasting. Sinners have done nothing to earn their salvation, and they can do nothing to lose it. The Son will lose nothing of all that the Father has given Him (John 6:39). This is not to say, however, that man is given free reign to sin (Rom 6:1, 2). It is in God’s love that He unconditionally initiates His covenant with man, but its continuity is conditioned on man’s obedience. Thankfully, however, these conditions are met in Jesus Christ, who secures salvation for them, motivating and guaranteeing (Ezek 37:27) their continued obedience to the end (Matt 10:22).[viii] Nothing can separate God’s chosen ones from His unconditional love (Rom 8:37-39).

Conclusion

In order to properly understand the doctrine of God’s love, on must seek to comprehend the scriptural testimony of God’s intratrinitarian love for His persons, God’s love for all that He has created, God’s general love for all mankind, and His special, saving love for the beloved. However, if any one of these aspects of God’s love is absolutized to the exclusion of the others, one’s view of His love will be unbalanced. Thus, a correct view of God’s intratrinitarian love understands that while God has not eternally demonstrated grace, mercy, and wrath within His Trinitarian relationships, He can and does demonstrate these qualities temporally to His creation. God’s love and provision for all of His creation must not be overemphasized to the strengthening of green ecology and to the detriment of the overall redemptive purposes of the Gospel via the cross of Christ.

Neither should God’s general love for all mankind be overstated. If this becomes true, the plight of the Arminian is strengthened, and the glorious truths of God’s holiness, justice, and wrath are diminished for the sake of an impotent view of God’s grace and love—one that is more interested in God’s emotional life than His glory. God, thus, becomes helpless and powerless to intervene in the lives of mankind: not with chastening, not in providence, and certainly not in salvation.

If one’s understanding of God’s love becomes overly centralized on His exclusive and special love for the elect, he stands the chance of stripping Scripture of its great commission initiative and its instruction to freely offer the Gospel to all. Additionally, an overemphasis on God’s special love for the elect might lead some to the endorsement of an easy-believism view of cheap grace or, on the opposite end of the spectrum, a works-based and merit theology.[ix]

Let every Christian make knowing God his greatest pleasure, his greatest aspiration: “I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, may have power, together with all the saints, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God” (Eph 3:17-19). How great is the love the Father has lavished on us, that we should be called children of God (1 John 3:1).

 [i] This is the same kind of knowing that Romans 8:29 terms God’s foreknowledge.

[ii] John Piper, The Pleasures of God: Meditations on God’s Delight in Being God (Colorado Spring, CO: Multnomah, 2000), 125-26.

[iii] John M. Frame, The Doctrine of God: A Theology of Lordship (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R Publishing, 2002), 421.

[iv] Piper, The Pleasures of God, 130.

[v] While this notion is wholly true—that one’s election is not ultimately his own choice—one must not conclude that evangelism and the free offer of the Gospel is without necessity and purpose. Scripture is clear that for a sinner to turn to Christ in repentance and faith he must hear and respond to the preaching of the Gospel (Rom 10:14). Paul understood that each man is responsible for his own sins; thus, he pressed them to repent (Acts 17:30). The doctrine of election gave the Apostle Paul confidence in his evangelism, since he knew that many of the elect awaited the life-changing Gospel in the cities he was going to evangelize (Acts 18:9-10) and that there are many elect sheep scattered throughout the world (John 11:52). Paul embraced this doctrine without reducing his zeal for the lost (Rom 9:1-5).

[vi] Again, hell is intended to be the backdrop of heaven, His judgment of Egypt as the backdrop of Israel, and Esau as the backdrop of Jacob.

[vii] Piper, The Pleasures of God, 138-39.

[viii] Frame, The Doctrine of God, 421-23.

[ix] D.A. Carson, The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God (Wheaton: Crossway, 2000), 21-23.