Following Judah's Lion

Love Without a Demonstration is Dead

Adam is born through God’s life giving breath and suddenly the God of Love has a reflection of His own image. Now whatever the length and depth of that truth reveals, will always be partly a mystery but a truth nonetheless. Adam dwells in fellowship with the Father and in peace with God’s creation. God even creates a help meet for Adam to whom Adam can share his life and love while always remembering who it was who created Eve. But then Adam rebels.

Now all creation will see if God’s love extends beyond Adam’s sin, and if the love of God will elicit an offer of redeeming love, which from our perspective, is the deepest kind of love ever known. Is love expanded when it is offered to perfection or is it put to its strongest test when it is offered to rebellion with no guarantee of like kind return? Is the magnificence of love most transparent when it is offered completely without regard to the giver but with full regard to the receiver? And in a prophetic revelation of God’s redemptive love God clothes Adam and his wife with the bloody garments of animal skins, dripping with the impossible truth of God’s restorative love. It is the first looking glass into the coming glory of a future bloody scene, again offered to the undeserving.

Now let us examine what this act of redemptive love teaches us about the quality and expansiveness of that love. We can see here that true love always is accompanied by a demonstration, an offer, that reveals the quality of that personalized love. Sovereign love, sitting separate and august from contact, proclaiming an interactive love yet offering no redemption when one is available, can never be fully defined as love, especially not the type of love that says it not only emanates from God but is God. When God offered redemption to Adam He proclaimed His love was downward, with a glorious demonstration of condescending grace, incomprehensible in its understanding, and willing to intermingle with the condition of man’s sin so deeply so as to render all of man’s sin as gloriously forgiven and cleansed. Simply and profoundly by God’s love.

Every man is now born in the same condition as fallen Adam and just as Adam, God’s offers His redeeming love. Jn.3:16 simply states that God love is so great that He gives His love through His Son to everyone. God cannot claim to love all men if that love is void of the same redemption that was offered to Adam, that would mean that God actually does not love everyone. Some would claim that this would mean God must save everyone which would void God’s justice. God is not playing games either, but God’s love offer’s Rahab’s red rope to the entire world before the destruction must come.

What marriage is loving when its love only involves words? Real love, God’s love, is demonstrative, supernaturally demonstrative, and His demonstration of that love respects no person. The glory of God’s love is not that He offered it to one sinner, or even some sinners, it is that it is offered to all sinners. Any suggestion that God’s redemption is limited is to redefine the love that was shown to Adam and proclaimed by Christ Himself. James tells us that faith without works is dead, how much more love? How can we honestly tell people God loves them without a demonstration of that love to them personally? We cannot. Are we to take Paul’s description of God’s love whose breadth and length and depth and height is unknowable and limit that by the intellect of man? The word “limit” can never apply to God’s love, only man’s faith.

God’s offer of love substantiates the quality and power of that love. Christ speaks prophetically that when He presents Himself as God’s manifestation of love, He will draw all men to it. How glorious and wonderful, that God’s love has permeated man’s sin and demonstrated a redemptive love which is eternal. No one can ever challenge God by saying “Prove your love to me”, He has proven it openly to the entire world. Not limited, not finite, not even confined to the security of His own control, but dangerously and extravagantly poured out upon every single undeserving sinner. Even though it is offered to many, few will receive it, but still He offers it to those who refuse. And like Jerusalem who would not listen, God still calls those who refuse His love. No one will be able to arrive in hell and accuse God that no demonstration of God’s love had been offered to them, no, even those who will never hear of the cross will realize that God has no fault in the matter, the communicating His offer was never seriously spread by the many generations of the church, but the power and the tools to do so were always given to her.

We should as believers re-evaluate the truth and seriousness and of course glory of God’s love, and in that light, adjust the level of sacrifice that we are willing to give to have it reach the ears of those to whom it is given. That is what God desires and commands and it should be our demonstration of our love for Him.