Love of God

“God is love.”

— 1 John 4:8

God’s love is not primarily a feeling but a perfection of his own being: Father, Son, and Spirit love one another within the Godhead from eternity, and that same love overflows toward everything God has made. Scripture describes two distinct kinds of this outward love: a general, providential love toward all his creatures, and a special, distinguishing love set on the elect in Christ, given freely and not because of anything found in them.

Confessional Definition

The 1689 Second London Baptist Confession names love among God’s own attributes in the same sentence that lists his other perfections: God is “every way infinite, most holy, most wise, most free, most absolute; working all things according to the counsel of his own immutable and most righteous will for his own glory; most loving, gracious, merciful, long-suffering, abundant in goodness and truth, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin; the rewarder of them that diligently seek him, and withal most just and terrible in his judgments, hating all sin.”¹ In this older theological vocabulary, love names goodness precisely as it moves outward to give itself to another, with grace, mercy, patience, longsuffering, and kindness each naming a further degree of that same outgoing goodness: grace is love that is not owed, mercy is grace shown to the miserable, and so on down the list.² Naming love alongside holiness, wisdom, and justice in a single sentence guards against isolating it: God is love, but it is equally true to say God is holy and God is just, and none of his perfections operates apart from the rest.³

Biblical Basis

God’s love is directed first within the Godhead itself. The Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father, a love that preceded creation and rests on nothing outside the divine being itself (John 3:35; 5:20; 17:24, 26).⁴ From that eternal love, God’s love for what he has made overflows in two distinguishable ways. He bears a general, providential love toward all his creatures without exception, “good to all” so that “his tender mercies are over all his works” (Ps. 145:9; 36:6), sending sun and rain alike on the just and the unjust (Matt. 5:45) and giving even those who reject him “rains from heaven and fruitful seasons” (Acts 14:17).⁴ He bears, in addition, a special, distinguishing love toward his elect in Christ, a love not drawn out of him by any merit or attractiveness in its objects (Israel was not loved for her size, but simply because the Lord loved her, Deut. 7:7-8), and issuing in the greatest of gifts: election in Christ before the foundation of the world (Eph. 1:4-5), the giving of the Son to die for sinners while they were still enemies (Rom. 5:8; John 3:16), and the declaration that God’s own nature is itself love, proven “not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 John 4:9-10).⁴

Historical Development

Reformed theologians distinguished a love of benevolence, God’s will to do good to an object, from a love of complacency, his delight in an object already made good, and some arranged the two as successive stages, with God first willing a sinner’s good and only afterward, once grace had done its work, delighting in them. Gill rejected that sequencing as making God’s love, and so God himself, subject to change: God’s love “admits of no degrees, it neither increases nor decreases; it is the same from the instant in eternity it was, without any change.”⁴ The love God bears his people before their conversion is no smaller a gift than the love he bears them afterward. The everlasting covenant, the gift of the Son, and the gift of the Spirit to regenerate them are, if anything, greater gifts than any that follow, so nothing that happens in time adds to a love that was already infinite in eternity.⁴

Objections and Responses

If nothing in the elect causes God’s love, isn’t withholding it from others unjust? No one is owed this love in the first place: fallen human beings are, by nature, “no better than others, all being under sin,” so that extending distinguishing love to any of them is grace, not a debt God fails to pay everyone equally.⁴ The fairness of particular election is argued at greater length under election and monergism.

Doesn’t calling God’s love his defining attribute mean it overrides his holiness, justice, or wrath when they conflict? John’s statement that God is love is no less true, and no more exhaustive, than the statement that God is holy or that God is just; simplicity means each of God’s perfections is identical with his one undivided being rather than a lens that all the others must be read through.³ How love and wrath cohere without contradiction is treated further under wrath of God.

Doesn’t “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son” (John 3:16) make the Son’s death the cause of the Father’s love? The relation runs the other way: “the Son did not move the Father to love; electing love arose from the Father himself,” and Christ is the gift of a love that already existed, not its price.⁵

Related Doctrines

References

The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 2, “Of God, and of the Holy Trinity,” para. 1. ↩
Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 2, Faith in the Triune God, ed. Joel R. Beeke, trans. Todd M. Rester (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2019), 2:385. ↩
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 8, “The Living, Acting God.” ↩ ↩²
John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity; or, A System of Evangelical Truths, Deduced from the Sacred Scriptures, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by George Keith, 1769), book I, chap. 12, “Of the Love of God.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶
Bavinck, chap. 9, “The Triune God and His Counsel.” ↩