Why does God love me?

At some point every Christian has frankly evaluated their own sin and has stood amazed by the grace of God. This leads us to ask the question: Why would God send his pure and eternal Son to be smudged and murdered at the hands of vile sinners—for me? Or said more directly: Why does God love me?

The answer to this question is simple and profound.

In a sermon on John 3:16, Puritan Thomas Manton (1620–1677) answers the question this way—

Love is at the bottom of all. We may give a reason of other things, but we cannot give a reason of his love … Why did he make so much ado about a worthless creature, raised out of the dust of the ground at first, and has now disordered himself, and could be of no use to him? We have an answer at hand: Because he loved us. If you continue to ask, But why did he love us? We have no other answer but because he loved us, for beyond the first rise of things we cannot go. And the same reason is given by Moses, Deuteronomy 7:7–8: “The Lord did not set his love upon you, nor choose you, because you were more in number than any people, for ye were the fewest of all people; but because the Lord loved you…” That is, in short, he loved you because he loved you. All came from his free and undeserved mercy; higher we cannot go in seeking after the causes of what is done for our salvation.*

Similarly, in his devotional treasure, Light and Truth, Horatius Bonar’s (1808–1889) writes that God does not love us because of Christ’s work on the cross. Bonar writes—

This free love was not produced or purchased by Christ’s death. That love existed before in all its largeness and freeness. Christ’s death did not increase that love. It was wide as the heart of God, and could not be increased. Christ’s death did not make the sinner a more suitable object for that love. The sinner was loved before; and it was love to the sinner that made the Father send the Son: “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son.” That love rested on the sinner before. His circumstances as a sinner, so far from quenching God’s love to him as a creature, increased it; for they added all the amount of misery, and gloom, and exposure to eternal ruin, which called up that profound and unutterable compassion which a father feels toward a prodigal child that has ruined himself. Nothing in us, nothing in the world, nothing in heaven or earth, nothing in man or angel produced the love of God. It was uncreated, unbought, undeserved, and unfathomable. God loved the sinner because He was God, and because the sinner was a sinner. That is the end of the matter.**

God loves you because he loves you.

This is the simple—and profound—answer.

————

* Thomas Manton, The Complete Works of Thomas Manton (Solid Ground, 2008), 2:340-341
** Horatius Bonar, Light and Truth (Dust and Ashes, 2002), 3:12

The Absurdity of Liberal Theology

One of the most endearing features of atheist Christopher Hitchens is his intolerance of intellectual posturing. Do you believe Jesus was God incarnate and raised from the dead for sinners? Fine. Hitchens will respect your position and argue with you in honest debate. But claim to be a Christian and doubt the essence of the faith and Hitchens will sniff out your inconsistencies, find them, and slap you in the head with them. Like he did recently with Unitarian Marilyn Sewell. You’ve probably seen this, but if not, this is from a recent interview. And if you have seen this, it’s worth reliving again:

Sewell: The religion you cite in your book is generally the fundamentalist faith of various kinds. I’m a liberal Christian, and I don’t take the stories from the scripture literally. I don’t believe in the doctrine of atonement (that Jesus died for our sins, for example). Do you make and distinction between fundamentalist faith and liberal religion?

Hitchens: I would say that if you don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah, and that he rose again from the dead and by his sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you’re really not in any meaningful sense a Christian.

Sewell: Let me go someplace else. …

… like the nearest cave.

Nietzsche’s Pity

If I had a list of favorite books from 2009 … the more posts I begin with this phrase the closer I come to completing the list. But really, if I had a list of favorite books for 2009 Graham Cole’s God the Peacemaker: How Atonement Brings Shalom would be my choice for the coveted BOY award. But the runner-up bouquet would fall on the neck of N. D. Wilson for his Notes From the Tilt-A-Whirl. And here is what I believe to be the finest excerpt from the whole darned thing (pages 124-125):

Nietzsche published The Anti-Christ in 1888. Along with many other things, he had this to say about pity: ‘Pity thwarts the whole law of evolution, which is the law of natural selection. It preserves whatever is ripe for destruction; it fights on the side of those disinherited and condemned by life; by maintaining life in so many of the botched of all kinds, it gives life itself a gloomy and dubious aspect.’

One year later Nietzsche entered into madness. True or false, the story is that he was overcome by the sight of a horse being whipped. Unhinged by pity. He wouldn’t die until 1900. For a decade he was kept alive and maintained through his insanity, strokes, and incapacitating illness. At the age of fifty-five, partially paralyzed, unable to speak or walk, he discovered what life waited for him beyond the grave.

Nietzsche lashed out at his Maker with his tongue, the only notable muscle he had—his greatest gift. The Lord gives and the Lord takes away; blessed be the name of the Lord.

There was little that Nietzsche loathed more than the heritage of his Lutheran father.

I have never been irritated by Nietzsche, never annoyed. At his most blasphemous, at his most riotously hateful and pompous, I have only ever been able to laugh. But even then, there is something bittersweet about the laughter. I know his story. I know how his bluff was called, how he was broken.

Again from The Anti-Christ: ‘The weak and the botched shall perish: first principle of our charity. And one should help them to it.’ Spake the paralytic. The man fed with a spoon by those who loved him.

‘What is more harmful than any vice—Practical sympathy for the botched and the weak—Christianity….’

And yet, because I see the world through my eyes and not his, I have sympathy for Nietzsche himself. Bodies and minds are not all that can be botched in a man. Souls can be hollow, twisted, thrashing, more bitter than pi**.

My weekend in one picture:

The Psalms

From John Piper’s sermon, “Songs that Shape the Heart and Mind” (5/25/08):

“The Psalms, more intentionally than any other book of the Bible, is designed to carry, express, and shape our emotions, to give vent to them—all of them, and shape them, to reign them in, and to free them up, to explode them, and to kill them when they should be killed. It is an amazing gift to the Church. … The Psalms are songs and poems, and songs and poems exist because something more should happen to us than doctrinal refinement.”

The Life of Heresy

From Religio Medici written by Sir Thomas Browne (Boston, MA: Ticknor and Fields, 1862), pages 15-16:

“…for indeed heresies perish not with their authors, but like the river Arethusa, though they lose their currents in one place, they rise up again in another. One general council is not able to extirpate one single heresy: it may be cancelled for the present; but revolution of time and the like aspects from heaven, will restore it, when it will flourish till it be condemned again. For as though there was metempsychosis, and the soul of one man passed into another, opinions do find, after certain revolutions, men and minds like those that first begat them.”

HT: T-Bomb

On Reading

Today my friend Stephen Altrogge interviews yours truly on the topic of reading. You can read the interview here. Thanks for the opportunity, Stephen!

For a broader look at books and reading see my interviews with Josh Sowin (3/26/07) and Guy Davies (2/6/09). While we’re on the subject, here are some links to a short series of posts I wrote last year:

On Reading

Tip 1: Capturing Reading Time

Tip 2: Read with a Pen in Hand [later revised, expanded, and posted on JT's blog here]

Tip 3: Read With Purpose in Mind

Learning to Walk Holy

In a recent blog comment Tom posted a gem from C. S. Lewis’ twisted little satire Screwtape Letters. It forms a nice complement to the previous Lewis quote. Here we see how Lewis articulates the Christian’s growth in godliness when the desire to obey has vanished but the intention to obey has not. Multiple themes converge here in this rich, little paragraph. I commend it to you for your slow contemplation.

“He [God] leaves the creature [believer] to stand up on its own legs—to carry out from the will alone duties which have lost all relish. It is during such trough periods, much more than during the peak periods, that it is growing into the sort of creature He wants it to be. Hence the prayers offered in the state of dryness are those which please Him best. We can drag our patients along by continual tempting, because we design them only for the table, and the more their will is interfered with the better. He cannot ‘tempt’ to virtue as we do to vice. He wants them to learn to walk and must therefore take away His hand; and if only the will to walk is really there He is pleased even with their stumbles. Do not be deceived, Wormwood. Our cause is never more in danger, than when a human, no longer desiring, but intending, to do our Enemy’s will, looks round upon a universe from which every trace of Him seems to have vanished, and asks why he has been forsaken, and still obeys.” (p. 40)

Calvary’s Magnetism

From Arthur J. Gossip’s book on preaching, In Christ’s Stead (1925):

“It was not for nothing that Christ said so confidently that always if men see Him dying for them, He will win [“And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself” (John 12:32)]. Certainly it has not always been at Calvary that their hearts have been most moved. It makes an interesting study to note how different generations have been won mainly by different things in Christ. … And yet in every age there are always those who cannot come within sight of the Cross without being thrilled and moved and won, for whom that is the deepest and most appealing of all facts. And nobody, surely, can remain face to face with it quite untouched. Get them in sight of Calvary, pause there, saying little, hushed and reverent; enable them to look, to see it, make it real to them, not just an old tale that has lost its wonder and its stab, but a tremendous awful fact.” (142–143)

Preaching to Thin Pews

I know that a number of you who read this blog are pastors of small churches (thanks for reading!). Tonight I came across this from Arthur J. Gossip in his book on preaching, In Christ’s Stead (1925), pages 27–28. I thought I would pass it along:

“…religion is by far the most interesting subject in the world, and the people prove it by the way they flock to hear about it, even yet [1925]. Take any other theme you choose, politics let us say, and through a heated fortnight at an election time you can gather eager meetings. But let them continue, in scores and hundreds of places in the cities, week in and week out the whole year round, and what size would they be in a year? But you—oh, you at times will be grumpy over thin pews. Watch yourself then; be sure that that is really zeal for Christ, and not, as is much more likely, merely hurt pride that stings you. Never rail at a congregation because it is small. It is not the fault of those who are there. And in your deeper moods you will stand gazing in amazement at the folk coming back, sitting there looking hopefully toward you, not yet discouraged, it appears, by the sad persistent failures of the past, apparently still sure that God is going to break through all our imperfections to them.”

[HT: T-Bomb]