Unerring Love to a Needy World

Well, if you have a Bible, I invite you to turn with me to Romans and to the fifth chapter. I’m going to read from there, in the first eight verses. And Paul writes,

“Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.

“You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a righteous person, though for a good person someone might possibly dare to die. But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”[1]

And then—and you needn’t turn to it—in keeping with this, 1 John 4:7:

“Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.”

And then, finally, in probably the most well-known verse in the entire Bible: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have [everlasting] life.”[2]

Last evening, Tom Holland was immensely helpful on multiple fronts, but not least of all in setting the story of the Bible—and particularly the emphasis on the Lord Jesus—setting it in a kind of panoramic historical setting. And it’s so important that we understood that, because what we’re dealing with when we’re dealing with the affairs of the gospel is actually history. But our history has to be understood theologically. In fact, it is very, very important that we understand that when we think about the things that are recorded for us, it is important for us to interpret history through our Bibles rather than interpreting our Bibles through history. It is the Scripture that gives to us an understanding not only of what has happened but also tells us why it has happened and also what it means, having happened.

It is important for us to interpret history through our Bibles rather than interpreting our Bibles through history.

And I want in this final opportunity this morning, and in light of the fact that we’re about to share Communion with one another, for us just to consider briefly the love of God. You will notice that it is the love of God that runs through each of the passages. And if we were to choose just a text, it would be that “God commend[s] his love toward[s] us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.”[3] Augustine said that the cross is the pulpit from which God preaches his love towards the world.[4] It’s a wonderful picture of God preaching, as it were, from the cross of Christ himself and declaring to men and women the wonders of his love.

In order to help us summarize it, I have three words. They each begin with A, and I’ll tell you what they are so that we know we’re making progress. The first word is arranged, the second word is achieved, and the third word is applied.

Arranged

First of all, then, we think about the way in which God has arranged these things—an arrangement or a plan, if you like, that is grounded in eternity.

It’s wonderful to be able to sing as we’ve done this morning: sing a psalm, sing a contemporary hymn. And some of us are of a vintage that we can still remember songs like “Oh, the love that drew salvation’s plan! Oh, the grace that brought it down to man!”[5] And the hymn writer, the songwriter there, is simply capturing this.

And I want us to understand this morning something that it is possible for us to miss. And I’ll tell you what it is: It is possible for us to become so focused on Jesus as to fail to recognize that it is the love of God the Father which is the source from which salvation springs. Don’t misunderstand me. Of course, our focus is in the Lord Jesus. The Father says, “This is my beloved Son. In him I am well pleased”;[6] “This is my Son. Listen to him.”[7] But it is the part of the Father to plan from all of eternity to save men and women, to save boys and girls, to save broken-up people living in a broken-up world. The Father from all of eternity has planned to do this. So I want us simply to grasp that: that the love of God the Father is the driving force—is, if you like, the impulsive power—that makes provision for our sins.

Loved before the dawn of time,
Chosen by my Maker,
Hidden in my Savior.[8]

In other words—and it’s straightforward. In fact, here’s another word that begins with A, as it occurs to me: that the love of the Father is antecedent. It is antecedent. It precedes time. It has nothing to do with who we are or what we are, save that we’re actually sinners in need of a Savior. It’s not that he has looked upon us and seen that which has prompted him to love us. In fact, no.

What an amazing arrangement, that before the dawn of time, in the realm of eternity, as best as our tiny minds can understand it, the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit entered into a covenant with one another! And what the Father arranged the Son agreed to.

Achieved

Not only did he agree to, but he achieved what he agreed to. That’s our second word: that that which has been arranged by God the Father is achieved by God the Son.

Jesus, you will remember, explained to his disciples, soon after Peter had finally answered the question the best… He went to the top of the class very quickly:

“Who do people say that I am?”

“Some say you’re a prophet. Some say you’re this and that.”

“Yes, but who do you say that I am?”

“Well,” he said, “you are the Christ, the Messiah, the Son of the living God.”[9]

And, you remember, Jesus says to him, “You’re very blessed, because flesh and blood hasn’t revealed this to you, but my Father who is in heaven has made this known to you.” And how he must have felt so amazed, and achieved such a wonderful thing, coming out top of the class. And then Jesus says, “And you should also know that it is the Father’s plan that I go now up to Jerusalem to suffer at the hands of cruel men, to be crucified and die, and on the third day rise again.” And the one who got the question right immediately gets the response wrong: “Oh no, Jesus! No, no, no! We can’t have that.”[10] And then he who had gone to the top of the class is put in the banishing division with the word from Jesus: “Get behind me, Satan!”[11] It’s amazing how quickly some of our supposed triumphs reveal the dangers in our own little hearts.

Well, Jesus says to his disciples, “No one’s going to take my life from me. I have the power to lay it down. I have the power to pick it up again.” But you will remember he also says, “This charge”—or, if you like, “What I am about to do”—“I have received from my Father.”[12]

So, that which is arranged is then agreed to. “No one has the power to take my life.” “I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd give[s] his life for the sheep.”[13] And the thing that is very important to understand is the harmony—what theologians call the intra-Trinitarian harmony—between the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit: that God, in the vastness of eternity, has purposed in this way; and then down into time steps the second person of the Trinity, “becoming obedient [even] to death … on a cross.”[14]

And what is he doing? Well, he is paying the penalty for sin that I as an individual deserve. He’s bearing the punishment that I as an individual deserve in order to grant to me as an individual sinner something that I don’t deserve—namely, a forgiveness; that the lawgiver, Jesus, lives as the lawkeeper, and then he dies in our place as though he were the actual lawbreaker.

I think it’s important that we ponder these things, especially when we come to Communion. Communion has come, for some of us, as something divorced, actually, from any theological or biblical framework. That reveals itself either in a sacramentalism that takes us into a realm of the numinous that we long for; or, at the other end of the spectrum, it takes us to a kind of PS at the end of a service, where what you do is you do this, and you sort of remember Jesus. But in actual fact, it is only as we’re brought into an understanding of these things—of what it means to receive Christ, what it means to believe on Christ—only then can we begin to understand what it means to feast on Christ. If anybody came from outer space and saw this, they would say, “Well, why would anybody call this a feast? You can’t have a feast with that. That doesn’t equal a feast.” This is not the feast! This symbolizes what it means for those of us who have come to Christ to recognize that just as we have spiritually received Christ, so we feast on Christ as we physically take that which is given to us in the emblems.

“The Father,” says Stott, “did not lay on the Son an ordeal he was [unwilling] to [experience], nor did the Son extract from the Father a salvation he was [unwilling] to [provide].”[15] It’s very, very important. It’s not unusual to hear people suggest somehow or another that the Lord Jesus was just trying to plead with his Father to do something that the Father didn’t want to do or that the Father was subjecting his Son to an experience that the Son did not want to engage in. Neither is true. Christ died in the sinner’s place as the supreme manifestation and expression of the love of God the Father.

Before I come to the third A, let’s acknowledge something here this morning: This which we now reflect upon and engage in, if we were to step out of this room, by and large, in the precincts of this beautiful hotel, and explain to folks what it is we’ve been doing—talking about the Bible, talking about Jesus, talking about taking the Bible to the ends of the earth, talking about saying to men and women, “There is salvation in no other person in the whole universe save that which is found in Jesus”—what is the standard reaction? “I’ve never heard anything so stupid in my entire life.” Would we be surprised by that? No, because Paul addresses it: “The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to [those] who are being saved it is the power of God.”[16]

I didn’t have an opportunity to talk with Professor Holland last night. I would love to have done so. Because it’s perfectly understandable that he would have been on the side of the Romans, on the side of Pilate. Because by nature, we’re all on the side of the Romans; we’re all on the side of Pilate—until our eyes are opened and our hearts are changed.

If that sounds melodramatic, then let’s just put it down at a different level. Let’s say we go out and we say to people, “You know, we were in here, and we were remembering that Jesus died for the sins of the whole world.” They say, “Well, that’s an interesting story.” And this is largely what we come across in middle-class Great Britain, at least as I listen to people talk: “Well, my opinion is that a good God will reward nice people—a good God, if he exists, will reward nice people—if they just do their best.” In other words, God is grading on the curve, as they say in America. So you don’t have to get a very high pass mark as long as you’ve got a few dunderheads in your class. You can get through. You can get the degree if you’ve got a few clowns, providing it’s being graded on the curve: “Well, I’m not as bad as her. I might be not as good as him.” All of that collapses on the floor when we think about the cross of Christ.

And incidentally—again to quote Augustine—he says if we believe what we want to believe in the Bible and disbelieve what we don’t want, then, said Augustine, it is not the Bible we believe; it is ourselves.[17]

Applied

Arranged by God the Father, achieved by God the Son, and applied by God the Spirit.

Rico Tice is a friend to many of us here, and when he came and spoke for us in Cleveland some years ago, one of the recurring phrases that he left behind and has become part of our common parlance as a church is simply this: Only God opens blind eyes, and only God softens hard hearts.

And when our eyes are opened, and when our hearts are softened, when our minds have considered the theology, the story of what has happened in time—which needs to be understood and explained—and then the explanation for why that story has unfolded in the way that it has done, then history and theology are to be viewed personally.

When someone comes to an understanding of this, then they are not aware of the fact that God is a God who dealt with sin, like, as if it was a big, generic deal: “He dealt with sin.” Yes, but he dealt with my sin. He dealt with your sin. He didn’t deal with… So when Paul gets there, remember, where he says, “The Son of God loved me and gave himself for me.”[18] The God who loved the whole world enough to send his Son is the one who comes to individual hearts and knocks lovingly, endearingly, entreatingly to bid us bid him welcome.

“Who has believed our [report],” says Isaiah, “and to whom has the arm of the Lord been revealed?”[19] Not very many, it would appear. Not very many. Richard Baxter, a Puritan in Kidderminster a long time ago, chided the ministers of his day for offering to their congregants the bread of life which, he said to them, “you yourselves have never eaten.”[20] [AM8]What a statement to make to your fellow clergy! But he was right. The impact of the Puritan preaching stood against the backdrop of a form of sacramentalism and all kinds of things that could never have been confused with clear expressions of the gospel. And so he—actually, he was to go and address them. He was unable to because of sickness, and he put it in a book—a big, fat book. And it is in that book that he says to them, “I warn you about offering the bread of life if you yourselves have not eaten it.”

The God who loved the whole world enough to send his Son is the one who comes to individual hearts and knocks lovingly, endearingly, entreatingly to bid us bid him welcome.

I wonder: Is it okay for me to conclude in this way? I don’t know this group. You’re not my congregation. I’ve enjoyed the personal conversations that I’ve had with a number of you. And we’re about to gather around this Table, which is, of course, an expression of our union and communion in the Lord Jesus Christ. But it is a family meal. Who’s in the family? Those who have believed. I don’t know that you have all believed. Now, you may be very excited that your resources are sufficient for you to make a dent in the world by the translation of the Bible. But the Bible is a book about Jesus, and it would be first that we had fed on him before we feed on this.

I was glad that they sang the 23rd Psalm. I’m always glad when they sing a psalm. It was known at least by every schoolboy and schoolgirl for many a generation. I don’t know if it still is. It’s also the most sung psalm at funerals in Scotland. Everybody could sing it. But you know, there are more lies told at funerals than at many other gatherings, and not least of all in the psalm. The psalm does not say, “The Lord is a shepherd.” He is. The psalm says, “The Lord is my shepherd.”[21]

I’m thankful for all the benefits that I’ve enjoyed through all my life. It’s stirring for me to be led in praise in this way this morning, along with you. It’s just a cascading reality of seventy years of life that are grounded in the fact that in the mystery of God’s purposes, the Father loved me and arranged for me to be saved; that the Son of God, in obedience to the Father, went to the cross in order that I might be saved; and that the Holy Spirit, in conjunction with the Father and the Son, worked in my sinful, rebellious little heart, through the work of Sunday school teachers and Bible class leaders who persevered when you apparently had no interest in the things at all.

Unnumbered comforts to my soul
Thy tender care bestowed
Before my infant heart conceived
From whom those comforts flowed.

When in the slippery paths of youth
With heedless steps I ran,
Your [hand conveyed, unseen, secured],
And [brought] me up to man.[22]

Let us pray together:

Our God and our Father, we thank you that you love us with an everlasting love.[23] We thank you, Lord Jesus Christ, that you have come and borne our sins in your body on the tree in order that we might die to sin and live to righteousness.[24] Thank you, Lord Jesus Christ, that when you ascended on high, you gave gifts to men[25] and poured out the Holy Spirit in order that we might take this amazing good news, this story of your unerring love, to a needy world. And so we pray this morning that with all of these elements that have been part and parcel of our time together, that as we break bread and share this cup, that we may do so and proclaim amongst one another the Lord’s death until he comes.[26] And in his name we pray. Amen.

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[1] Romans 5:1–8 (NIV). Scripture quotations in this transcript are from the 2011 edition of the NIV unless otherwise indicated.

[2] John 3:16 (ESV).

[3] Romans 5:8 (KJV).

[4] Augustine, quoted in Thomas Watson, A Body of Divinity (1962; repr., Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 2015), 175.

[5] William Reed Newell, “At Calvary” (1895).

[6] Matthew 3:17; Mark 1:11; Luke 3:22 (paraphrased).

[7] Matthew 17:5; Mark 9:7; Luke 9:35 (paraphrased).

[8] Stuart Townend and Andrew Small, “Loved Before the Dawn of Time (Salvation’s Song)” (2007).

[9] Matthew 16:13–16; Mark 8:27–29; Luke 9:18–20 (paraphrased).

[10] Matthew 16:17, 21–22 (paraphrased). See also Mark 8:31–32; Luke 9:22.

[11] Matthew 16:23; Mark 8:33 (ESV).

[12] John 10:18 (paraphrased).

[13] John 10:11 (KJV).

[14] Philippians 2:8 (NIV).

[15] John R. W. Stott, The Cross of Christ, 20th anniv. ed. (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Books, 2006). 151.

[16] 1 Corinthians 1:18 (NIV).

[17] Augustine, Contra Faustum 17.3.

[18] Galatians 2:20 (paraphrased).

[19] Isaiah 53:1 (NIV).

[20] Richard Baxter, The Reformed Pastor, ed. William Brown, 5th ed. (London: Religious Tract Society, 1862), 21–22. Paraphrased.

[21] Psalm 23:1 (ESV).

[22] Joseph Addison, “When All Thy Mercies, O My God” (1712).

[23] See Jeremiah 31:3.

[24] See 1 Peter 2:24.

[25] See Psalm 68:18; Ephesians 4:8.

[26] See 1 Corinthians 11:26.

We’ve sourced this before; leave this note in place, and I’ll replace with our existing citation. (Note that it should be marked as a paraphrase.)[AM8]