Christians have pondered and praised God’s love for millennia, precisely because it is so vast and rich. Sometimes hymnists pose questions about God’s love to set us thinking:
What wondrous love is this
that caused the Lord of bliss
to bear the dreadful curse
for my soul, for my soul?
This question is our topic. How should we think about the love of God revealed at the cross, when “his love ran red?” In order to unpack the marvelous nature of God’s love revealed at the cross, we ought to ask at least three questions: Is God’s love in spite of his justice? Is there a more ultimate love at the cross? Was God’s love at the cross general or particular? I will answer these in order and then reflect upon how we should respond.
Love in Spite of Justice?
To begin with, we need to keep things simple, that is, we must remember the doctrine of divine simplicity. The doctrine arises from theological meditations upon how “the Lord our God, the Lord is one” (Deut. 6:4), “with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change” (Jas. 1:17). To say that God is simple is not to say that he is dull, dimwitted, or slow, but that he is not composed of parts—rather, all that is in God is God.[1] It follows from the fact that nothing existed prior to God (John 1:3). Kevin DeYoung helpfully explains divine simplicity this way:
1. See Matthew Barrett, None Greater: The Undomesticated Attributes of God (Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2019), 71–88.
Simplicity means we should not think of God as what you get when you combine goodness and mercy and justice and power and infinity and immutability and roll them all together into one divine being. That would make God the sum of his attributes, and then each attribute would be a percentage of God.
Therefore, as we study God’s love at the cross, we dare not make the mistake of thinking that God reveals his love and sets aside his justice, or that his love and justice were at odds. No; biblically speaking, when Jesus revealed God supremely at the cross (John 1:14, 18; 8:28), he revealed God’s perfect character—demonstrating both that God is “merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness . . . forgiving transgression and sin and iniquity” (Exod. 34:6), and that God “will by no means clear the guilty” (Exod. 34:7). Consequently, when we consider God’s love at the cross, we must keep in mind that we are not investigating a part of God but a way of describing God’s perfection. I am limiting my answers in the following questions to John’s Gospel because of the disproportionate degree to which he speaks about God’s love.[2]
2. John’s gospel accounts for over 17% of love language in the NT, while itself only being ~3% of it.
A More Ultimate Love?
In John’s Gospel, Jesus teaches us about a love that is more ultimate than God’s love for sinners. This love is more ultimate because it is both the foundation for and the deeper purpose of the other kinds of love we will see. In John 14:31, Jesus says, “So that the world may know that I love the Father, I do as the Father commanded me” (CSB). Earlier in John, Jesus said, “I always do the things that are pleasing to [my Father]” (John 8:29). Since Jesus accomplishes his Father’s will supremely at the cross (John 4:32–34; 17:4; 19:30), this means Jesus was voluntarily obedient unto death precisely to display his love as God the Son for God the Father (John 10:18)—it is the deeper purpose. This love on public display was shared between the Father and Son before the foundation of the world (John 17:24) and, as such, is more foundational than any other love.
General Love?
The love between the Father and Son did not, however, remain confined within the Trinity eternally; instead, the Father sent his Son into his creation so that he might “be lifted up” upon the cross “as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness” (John 3:14 cf. John 8:28; 12:32–34). John teaches us that God “loved the world in this manner . . . so that whoever believes in him would not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16 CSB). D. A. Carson aptly writes, “God’s love is to be admired not because the world is so big and includes so many people, but because the world is so bad.”[3] God sent his Son not because he was lonely but because we were needy. Thus, we might say, God loves the world generally by making salvation possible for any who would believe. Yet, fallen humanity refuses—of itself—to love God in return (John 3:19). God’s wrath, therefore, remains upon unbelievers (John 3:36). If anyone refuses to trust God’s offer of salvation, then—just like a snake-bitten Israelite with venom already in their veins (Num 21; John 3:14)—they will experience God’s just condemnation which they are already under (John 3:18). So, although God loves generally, no one is saved merely by this kind of love.
3. D. A. Carson, The Gospel According to John, The Pillar New Testament Commentary (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1991), 205.
Particular Love?
Even though fallen humanity refused to love the Creator when he came offering salvation, Jesus’ own received his particular or peculiar love. Jesus “loved his own who were in the world [and] loved them to the end (telos)” (John 13:1), especially when he cried, “It is finished (tetelestai)” (John 19:30). It is to these Jesus says, “I chose you out of the world;” and “you did not choose me, but I chose you” (John 15:19, 16). How did he choose them? On the one hand, they were given to him by the Father (John 6:37, 39; 10:29; 17:2, 6–9). On the other, Jesus says, “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you. . . . Greater love has no one than this, that someone lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:9, 13 cf. 13:37).
In some sense, therefore, Jesus chose his own by dying for their benefit. He did not die as a mere moral exemplar, because that would neither reveal his love nor save, as Carson writes,
In no case does [Jesus’ death for his sheep/own] suggest a death with merely exemplary significance; in each case the death envisaged is on behalf of someone else. The shepherd does not die for his sheep to serve as an example, throwing himself off a cliff in a grotesque and futile display while bellowing, “See how much I love you!”[4]
4. Carson, John, 386.
No, for the cross to reveal the love of God, Jesus’ death must have actually accomplished something for his own whom he peculiarly loved.
In John 10, Jesus says, “I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me . . . and I lay down my life for the sheep. . . . the Father loves me, because I lay down my life in order that I might take it up again” (John 10:14–15, 17). The term ‘for (hyper)’ is substitutionary in the majority of uses in John (cf. John 6:51; 11:50–52; 13:37–38; 15:13; 18:14), such that “for their benefit” entails that the shepherd dies so that the sheep would live. As the “Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29), Jesus dies in place of his sheep, a vicarious substitute, so that God’s wrath would not remain upon them (John 3:36) and they would not die in their sins (John 8:24).[5]
5. See my forthcoming article “Lamblike Servant” in Themelios.
Responding to Wondrous Love
At the cross, therefore, we have seen that Jesus loved God his Father (John 14:31), God loved the world (John 3:16), the Father loved his Son who would die as a substitute for his sheep and rise again (John 10:17), and Jesus loved his sheep to the very end not just with a peculiar love (John 13:1), but with a peculiarly sacrificial love (John 10:14–15; 15:13 cf. 1 John 4:10).
But perhaps you have forgotten or never felt the wonder of this love. If that is you, consider this: the infinite, eternal, and all-sufficient God has no needs (Acts 17:25). He has never and will never be lonely. Yet, in an overflow of love from within himself, he chose to create people to bear his image and represent him throughout creation by glorifying and enjoying him forever (Gen. 1:26–27; 1 Cor. 10:31; Matt. 22:37). Humanity rebelled, spurning God’s love, and has done so ever since. Forsaking the fountain of living waters, we complain that all we have are broken cisterns (cf. Jer. 2:13; Rom. 1:23–25; 3:23). The audacity! The outrage! God was not obligated to create, and he was not obligated to keep loving rebellious sinners—but he wanted to. Let that sink in. God always takes the initiative to love because he wants to (Deut. 7:7–8; 1 John 4:19). What a God.
Since God has no needs, what do you make of his desire to love you? It is not because he has some want that you could satisfy. It is because you want to be satisfied, and your Creator knows what is best for you—himself.[6] Your rebellion, however, presents a problem, “for the wages of sin is death” (Rom. 6:23). God cannot stop being righteous and keep being the God of the Bible (Deut. 32:4; Dan. 4:37; Rev. 15:3), so sweeping sin under the rug is unthinkable. Instead, God sent his Son as a vicarious substitute to be both “just and the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus” (Rom. 3:26). This is the wonder of God’s love at the cross! “Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God” (1 Pet. 3:18), and he did this not at our request. Rather, “while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8).
6. John Piper has articulated this more clearly than anyone else (here and here).
What is required of you is to stop drinking from the cesspool of sin that could never satisfy, and to turn every day to the God who is the all-satisfying fountain of living waters—whose love pours forth from the cross. “Let the one who is thirsty come; let the one who desires take the water of life without price!” (Rev. 22:17). What wondrous love is this? One that beckons you to come and be satisfied in and because of the love of our Savior.
