God’s Love – Romans 8:38-39

 Have you ever seen the 40-year-old movie “Camelot?” It came out in 1967 back when some of you were still going to movies and before you gave up television. It began as a Broadway play starring Richard Burton and Canadian Robert Goulet as Sir Lancelot. Early in the film, Lancelot, displaying uncharacteristic Canadian pride, sings a song about himself. He asks: “Who is the bravest, smartest, most handsome, strongest, most agile knight in world?” And to every question that he asked, he came up with the same answer: “I am.” Well, it turned out that some people agreed, but there were a few nay-sayers.

I think that as a rule most people have a little higher opinion of themselves than other people have of them. It might be beneficial if sometime we would take a sheet of paper, drawing a line down the center of the page. Then in one column we listed, in single words, things that we think describe our character. We might have words like: honest, talented, daring, shy, and loyal. But then, if we let other people describe us on the second column, we might just end up with a dozen words that we would never even consider. They might come up with words like: tardy, weak, hypocritical, unfaithful or confused.

Similarly, the Bible means many things to many people, and we could make a list of simple words to describe it. You and I should have such words as holy, eternal, comforting, exciting, encouraging and supernatural. Unfortunately, there are others which might say: ridiculous, irritating, fictional and worthless. Everyone has his opinion about things and sometimes they are quite contradictory. I think that the word “revelation” should come pretty close to the top of the Christian’s list of words about Bible. The Bible is the revelation of Jehovah, where He opens the door to His house and to His heart. And out of the Bible we can come up with many simple words which describe the Lord. The Lord is gracious – that is a direct statement found in every corner of the Bible. And the Lord is merciful – “Gracious is the LORD, and righteous; yea, our God is merciful.” “Be ye therefore merciful, as your Father also is merciful.” Psalm 135:3 – “Praise the LORD, for He is good” “Good” is such a simple word, and one which even the smallest of children can understand. But it is not a word that can be properly applied to many of the people of this creation. The Bible is filled with declarations that God is great, and that many things about Him are great. “Behold, God is great, and we know him not, neither can the number of his years be searched out.” “Wilt thou trust him, because his strength is great? or wilt thou leave thy labour to him?” “His glory is great in thy salvation: honour and majesty hast thou laid upon him.” “For thy name’s sake, O LORD, pardon mine iniquity; for it is great.” “For thy mercy is great unto the heavens, and thy truth unto the clouds.” Something else which the Bible says over and over again is that the Lord is righteous and that He is holy. Moving into the New Testament we read that God is a Spirit – John 4:24. That means that He is incorporeal – that he is not confined to a body, as we are. Neither in Heaven nor on earth will we see God, the Father or the Holy Spirit. Thank the Lord that it pleased the Father “that in Christ should all the fullness of the God-head dwell.” I John 1:5 says that God is light. This means that He is the opposite of darkness and all that it represents. He is not simply the God OF light, but He IS light. And “ye were sometimes darkness but now are ye children of light.” Then among a hundred other words we might use to describe Lord, we know that God is LOVE – I John 4:8. I John 4:8 doesn’t merely say that “God loves.” While that is true, this scripture says that “God IS love.” Also please be aware that “love is not God” – but God is love.

Even more than the many splendored love of human beings, God’s love is infinitely more splendored. In fact it is so wondrous that at least 98% of all human beings are confused about it. And sometimes it turns my stomach and breaks my heart to hear people talk about the love of God. It ought to be a wonderful subject and a joy to hear discussed, but such is not often the case. Visualize a hundred pounds of mixed candies melted together, and poured out into a bowl in front of you. That is some people’s opinion about the Lord’s love – a gooey, sweet, chocolate, mint, caramel mess. I hear people speak about God’s love as though it was some sickly syrup that covers a really bad pancake. Many think that God’s love is nothing but an amiable weakness that makes him overlook our wickedness. No wonder so many people have so little love for the Lord.

What does the revelation of God tell us about the love of God?

First, it says that God’s love is SOVEREIGN and UNINFLUENCED.If a person doesn’t have his heart filled with the Word of God, when he attempts to talk about God’s love he’s more like a three-year-old trying to talk about physics than a spiritually intellectual man. He is like a gorilla trying to play a piccolo. Without a Bible to guide us we are so clumsy, we’ll not even come close to being in tune with the Lord.

For example, just because God is love, that doesn’t mean that He is obligated to love everyone. That seems to the first place where most natural men begin to get intellectually derailed on this subject. Our message this morning is the first of several yet to come on this subject. In the next chapter we read, “As it is written, Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated. What shall we say then? Is there unrighteousness with God? God forbid. For he saith to Moses, I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.” There are probably no more clearly stated and yet vehemently denied scriptures in the Word of God. There was once an average family into which twins were born, but God loved only one of those twins. Despite all the rhetoric, human logic, and theological contortions, God does not love all people equally. He is sovereign in dispensing His love; it goes where and to whom He wants it to go. It is either confusion, heresy, or both, to wear a bumper sticker that merely says, “Smile God loves you.” While that is true in part it is only an half truth, and the omitted side is the heavier half. There was no “Smile, God loves you” sticker on the bumper of Noah’s ark. If the Lord loved those people, as He did Noah, He would have saved them just as He did Noah. There are billions of Esau’s in this world, and there are hundreds of thousands of Jacobs.

“Yes,” someone says, “but Jacob was a good boy, and Esau was bad.” No sir, God’s love is not influenced by such petty things as your estimation of people’s character. Furthermore, Jacob was not a good boy, and neither was Esau. In fact, if you had asked their father, he might have said that Esau was the better of the two boys. But then probably their mother would have disagreed. And that disagreement is perhaps the crux of the matter – it doesn’t matter what any people might think. There is nothing in any person which activates love in the Lord towards him. What saith the scriptures? Deuteronomy 7:6-8 – “Thou art an holy people unto the LORD thy God: the LORD thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself, above all people that are upon the face of the earth. The LORD did not set his love upon you, nor choose you, because ye were more in number than any people; for ye were the fewest of all people: But because the LORD loved you, and because he would keep the oath which he had sworn unto your fathers, hath the LORD brought you out with a mighty hand, and redeemed you out of the house of bondmen, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.” God didn’t love Israel because they were richer than all the rest of the world; or wiser, or more polite, generous, kind, forgiving, faithful, merciful or worshipful. He loved Israel because He chose to do so. Exodus 33:19 – “And God said, I will make all my goodness pass before thee, and I will proclaim the name of the LORD before thee; and will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will shew mercy on whom I will shew mercy.” And this doesn’t apply only to nations, like Israel – it is true of God’s love no matter how it is dispensed. I John 4:19 – the only reason that any human being loves God, is because He first loved us. There is nothing good in any nation, tribe or individual which should make God love any of us.

It is impossible to buy or earn the love of the Lord, or later to begin to be worthy of God’s love. Yet it is a sin for us not to love the Lord. Jesus himself said that the first of all the commandments is that we should love the Lord our God with all our hearts, souls and minds. Jesus asks the personal question: “Peter, do you love me?” Just because we do not and cannot love God, despite the command to do so – that is not God’s fault. It is our fault through the sin of Adam. And yet the command remains.

A second thing about God’s love is that it is INFINITE and ETERNAL. “The LORD hath appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee” – Jeremiah 31:3. Everything about God is infinite and superlative. No astronomer has peered farther into space than the Creator of that space – the universe. No scientist or engineer has come up with a microscope that can see more minutely than God’s sees. No man or body of men can lift things which the little finger of the Lord can lift. But more than these sorts of things – there are the intangibles. For example, no one has ever hated as much as the Lord hates. There is not a sin on earth which the most righteous and clear-seeing human hates more than God hates it. There is no human compassion which is deeper or richer than the compassion of God. There is no holiness and purity found in man which begins to compare to the holiness of God. And there is no love of any kind which equals or exceeds the love of God. He is before all things, and behind all things, above and below all things. And everything about Him must be exactly the same as He is.

Look at Romans 8:38-39 once again. “For I am persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our Lord.” God’s love is eternal and not even the strength of death can break, steal or corrupt it. Life, of course, includes everything that life can throw at us. For some people life involves the threat of hurricanes and tornados, but those things do not disprove or disrupt the love of God. Life means attacks upon that life from disease and accident, but these things don’t disrupt God’s love. Life often means the hatred and even the love of other people, but neither stanches the love of God. There is not any creature, on earth or in heaven, that can separate us from the love of God. Nothing that man can devise, of things now made or that he can manufacture can break the bond of God’s love. And some of the books of prophesy tell us that wicked men will even strive to stifle God’s love, or at least the knowledge of God’s love, but they will all fail. Nothing can break God’s eternal love towards those whom He has called. How ridiculous is the human theory that a child of God can be disinherited. That someone who is Christian today, can become a child of the Devil once again is not logical, let alone Biblical. The love of God cannot be broken; for it is infinite and eternal.

Taking that a step further, God’s love is IMMUTABLE.Before our kids were born, Judy and I lived in Lethbridge, Alberta for year. Southern Alberta and the city of Lethbridge are places that know winter. For example, in the winter of that year, we had over 36″ of very wet, heavy, cold snow on night. Besides that, Lethbridge knows arctic temperatures that Spokane can only imagine. And the wind doesn’t ever seem to stop blowing during the winter. Just to the west of Lethbridge in the Crowsnest Pass, engineers have erected hundreds of wind generators, because it is guaranteed that their investment will pay off because of the unceasing wind. Lethbridge has a river that runs beside it, called the Old Man. The winter that we spent in Lethbridge was cold enough to freeze the surface of that river. Then in the spring at the time of break up chunks of that ice, dammed up and brought the flow of water to nearly a complete halt. Here was a mighty river completely blocked by a temporary dam of its own creation.

A bullet can be stopped by a piece of special glass. A car can be stopped by less than a square foot of rubber. But God’s love is not only infinite, but powerfully immutable. There are no distortions and no degrees in God’s love. When the Lord chooses to love, that love cannot be stopped or turned away. Glass can’t stop it, walls of ice can’t dam it up, no system shoes and breaks can slow it down. It can never run cold. I’ve seen dozens of people apparently overflowing in love, marry, but then their ardor quickly began to cool. But God’s love can change only as He changes, and that, of course, is impossible. Malachi 3:6 says, “I am the Lord, I change not.” We might interpret that to say, “I am the Lord, my love never changes or fails.” If you should pick a daisy and pluck out its petals, it is not – “He loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, he loves me not.” With God, the pattern is, “He loves me, He loves, He loves me…”

However, God’s love is absolutely HOLY.Human love can be one of the most destructive forces on earth. This is because even our love is rooted in sinful hearts. And “the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked.” Human love is often misdirected – as in the love of money, which is the root of all evil. Human love often demands sinful things in exchange for its pleasures. Human love often displays its corruption by spoiling its object.

But the eternal love of God cannot do such things, because it is as holy as the Lord Himself is holy. Don’t be angry with God when He refuses to ignore your sin. “Ye have forgotten the exhortation which speaketh unto as unto children, whom the Lord loveth he chasethenth and scourgeth every son whom He receiveth.” Don’t think for a moment that God’s love will allow you to get away with wickedness. God’s love can’t be used to soothe a guilty conscience or hide a wicked plot. It is holy, just as He is holy. So be ye also holy, in every aspect of your life, out of love for the Lord.

Of course we cannot speak of God’s love without noting that it is GRACIOUS and SACRIFICIAL.A love that does not give cannot be true love. Ladies love to be told that they are loved, but they would rather see the fruit of it. Gifts and sacrifices are evidence of God’s love.

Can you picture God sitting at ease with self-satisfied disinterest in the people whom He loves? Can you imagine Him loving them but permitting them to loose their salvation? Impossible! Why not? Because we know that He is the God who is love. James 1:5 reminds us that the Lord is a God who giveth, and giveth, and giveth. John 3:16 – God has loved creation since He created it, and even before. He loved it as he looked upon it in Genesis 1. He showered upon it the tokens of his love for the last six or ten thousand years. But two thousand years ago He presented the highest of all tokens of love. “God commendeth his love toward us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us.”

But don’t get confused and think that John 3:16 and Romans 5:8 hint that Jesus died for the sins of the whole world. If he had then there wouldn’t be a single soul in Hell. John 3:16 says that out of love God sent his son that “whoseovever believeth on Him should not perish but have everlasting life.” Love sent my Saviour to die in my place. Don’t speak of my God as a God of disinterest and cruelty; a bully and ogre. Yes He is a holy God, avenging sin upon multitudes of this race. But God so loved His creation that a Saviour was provided to rescue a remnant of those sinners.

Lift up your eyes and see the great love wherewith God loved us, when men dead in their sin hath he quicken together with Christ. Think of these verses and what they teach about the love of God. Realize that one of the primary motivating factors of the crucifixion of Christ was pure love. And humble yourself before that love – repent of your sin, put your faith in Christ, and vow to love the lover of your soul.