God’s love is certainly good news. But it doesn’t follow that the love of God is itself the gospel.
It’s expressed one way or another in every aspect of Jesus’ person and activity, and so can’t be reduced to any single dimension of it.
‘A message of the cross-shaped love of a Saviour who died on a love-shaped cross.’
The One Thing People Still Know
In popular western culture — whenever it ventures an understanding of God at all — nothing seems so self-evident as divine love.
Those who otherwise know little of the Bible, and who generally disdain its teaching, will still know that it says ‘God is love’ (1 John 4:8, 16).
Love is what people today like, and find most attractive about God. If they think about him at all, this tends to be what they prefer to think about — God as an abundant source of love, generous beyond measure.
And They’re Not Wrong
It’s true that God is infinitely loving, personal and relational. Equally true that human beings, made in the image and likeness of this loving, personal, relational God, are ‘made to know, to give, and to receive love.’1David Wells, God in the Whirlwind, 77.
In our highly inward-looking, overly subjective, emotionally driven and identity-absorbed age, such thoughts come naturally to us. And they go some way toward explaining ‘why it is we assume we know automatically what God’s love is.’2David Wells, God in the Whirlwind, 79.
Surely it cannot be wrong to believe that God really is love.
Yet in sentimental, strongly narcissistic times, ‘the question, though, is whether we are thinking about this truth in a biblical framework or not, and whether we are drawing the right conclusions from it or not.’3David Wells, God in the Whirlwind, 78. Well’s situmlating broader discussion of the love of God is set out here, 77-100. Useful cultural analysis is offered by Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (Norton, 1979) and prescient ethical analysis and foresight is provided by Alasdair Macintrye, After Virtue, Third Edition (Duckworth, 2007).
That’s the sharp point. The problem isn’t the belief. It’s the framework we import when we hold it.
Love With a Specific Target
The good news about the love of God in Jesus has a specific concentration. Its focus is the love of God in its action upon — and overcoming of — sin.
The gospel concerns the greatest and most particular demonstration of that love: the sin-bearing death of God’s Son. It’s here that we may truly see what it means for God’s love to be ‘generous beyond measure.’
In the gospel, God’s love is directed toward dealing with sin and all its consequences.
The good news does not revolve around the fact that God so loved the world he created generally, in some broad sense — as though the gospel were simply a declaration of divine benevolence, generosity and providential care.
It’s rather that God so loved a world that was and is in open rebellion against him, that in the midst of human hostility, misery and satanic sinfulness he acted with such grace and at such cost that he gave his only Son to perish, so that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life (John 3:16).
Read that verse slowly with the emphasis where John puts it. The Son perishes so that we don’t.
Enemy-Love
The gospel does not deal primarily with the generic, universal love of God, but with something far more specific: the love of God that saves sinners by dying in their place.
It speaks of an enemy-love, displayed at its most costly and most luminous in the fact that ‘Christ died for us’ — indeed, ‘died for all’ (Rom 5:8; 2 Cor 5:14; cf. John 15:13; Gal 2:20).
As David Seccombe puts it, the gospel is ‘the announcement of the arrival of God’s kingdom, which is the kingdom of King Jesus, who is the crucified one, who “died for us men and for our salvation,” who calls us to know him and share his kingdom forever. The gospel of the kingdom is a message of the cross-shaped love of a Saviour who died on a love-shaped cross.’4Seccombe, The Gospel of the Kingdom, 150.
The Whole Christ, and Especially His Death
The gospel concerns the person and work of the Lord Jesus Christ, broadly and fully conceived. Every New Testament definition confirms this — Mark 1, Romans 1, 1 Corinthians 15, 2 Timothy, and elsewhere.
The whole Christ, the totality of his person and work, his entire identity and action as Lord and Saviour — including all his words and deeds — is good news from God concerning salvation from sin.5The Whole Christ is the title of a 2016 book by Sinclair Ferguson, published by Crossway.
Yet the gospel particularly concerns his death in our place and his resurrection from the dead (1 Cor 2:2; 15:3-4): the good news of the promised Messiah crucified and raised, the Saviour-King who died for our sins and rose again for our justification (Rom 4:25).
The especial stress falls on Jesus’ death — to save us from our sins and put us right with God (1 Cor 15:2-3; Rom 5:6; Gal 1:4; 1 Pet 3:18).
In these and many other passages, the gospel’s principal — though not exclusive — focus is the death of Christ: what his cross achieved, and how it is bound up with justification, atonement, reconciliation, and all that follows.
Augustine on the Proof
In the cross of Christ we have the greatest demonstration of God’s love. There, wrote Augustine:
‘We have received from God a great proof of his great love, a proof proper to the good alone. It is certainly true that we can never thank him enough for the fact that we exist, that we have life, that we behold heaven and earth, and that we have mind and reason by which to seek him, the very one who created all these things. But beyond this, when we were burdened and weighed down by sins, turned away from the contemplation of his light, and blinded by our love of darkness (that is, of wickedness) he did not utterly abandon us. Rather he sent us his Word, who is his only Son, so that — from the fact that he assumed flesh, was born, and suffered for our sake — we might learn how very much God valued human beings and might be purified of all our sins by that one sacrifice, and, with love of him spread abroad in our hearts by his Spirit and all our difficulties now overcome, might come into eternal rest and the ineffable sweetness of contemplating him. What hearts, what tongues, could ever claim to be adequate to thank him for this?’6Augustine, The City of God, 7.31; trans. Babcock, 285.
Notice how Augustine builds. Creation itself already deserves more gratitude than we can produce — existence, life, sight, reason. And then he says beyond this.
The love that made us is not the same as the love that came after us when we had turned away. Both are real. Only one is the gospel.
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- 1David Wells, God in the Whirlwind, 77. ↩︎
- 2David Wells, God in the Whirlwind, 79. ↩︎
- 3David Wells, God in the Whirlwind, 78. Well’s situmlating broader discussion of the love of God is set out here, 77-100. Useful cultural analysis is offered by Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (Norton, 1979) and prescient ethical analysis and foresight is provided by Alasdair Macintrye, After Virtue, Third Edition (Duckworth, 2007). ↩︎
- 4Seccombe, The Gospel of the Kingdom, 150. ↩︎
- 5The Whole Christ is the title of a 2016 book by Sinclair Ferguson, published by Crossway. ↩︎
- 6Augustine, The City of God, 7.31; trans. Babcock, 285. ↩︎