The Love of God for us (Rom 5:6-8)
If you belong to Christ by faith, then you need to know that God loves you. We don’t just need to know that God is love in some sort of generic sense. We need to know that God loves us, which is what the apostle Paul is surely talking about in verse 5, when he says that God pours out his love in our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. This is a sense of God’s love to us, not just a general knowledge that love is one of God’s attributes. It is the ability to say with the apostle Paul, “I live by the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:20).
When we talk about the assurance of salvation, this is really what we are talking about. The assurance of salvation is not the bare confidence that when we die we will go to heaven; it is the confidence that we are loved by God himself. For God to love us means that God is for us, and this is what guarantees our salvation. If God is for us, who can be against us (Rom. 8:31)?
So we need to know this. But we need to know this, not only because it gives us assurance of eternal life, but because it is the foundation of all our comfort and hope and peace in this world and the next. It is our only hope in life and death. If I really believe that God loves me, then I will have peace even when I am going through hard and difficult times. Even if I cannot understand why I am going through a trial, I can do it if I believe that God loves me and has not stopped loving me. It is therefore the key to perseverance in the faith.
It is also the wellspring of all our holiness. The apostle John says, “We love him, because he first loved us” (1 Jn. 4:19). I think there are at least a couple of things John is saying there. One thing he is saying is that God’s love for us is the cause of our love for him. Out of love, God chose us before the foundation of the world, in due time sent his Son to die for us, and gives us spiritual life by the work of the Spirit in our hearts. By changing our hearts, we are turned from hating God to loving God. But the second thing that I think is implied here is not only that God’s love is the efficient cause of our love to him, but also that it is when we really come to see God’s love for us that we learn to love him too. This is what the apostle is saying in the third chapter of the same epistle: “Behold, what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God: therefore the world knoweth us not, because it knew him not. Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when he shall appear, we shall be like him; for we shall see him as he is. And every man that hath this hope in him purifieth himself, even as he is pure” (1 Jn. 3:1-3). Note how all this is tied up together: a sense of God’s love to us and amazement over it, hope in eternal life, and holiness of life now.
But that leads us to the question: how do we really know that God loves us? Well, last time we noted that we come to the assurance of God’s love for us through the knowledge of and belief in his promises to us in Christ, through the evidence of the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit in us, and through the immediate shedding abroad of God’s love in our hearts by the Spirit of God. But all this would be vain in the end if there were not some objective ground outside of us demonstrating the love of God to us. Assurance can’t depend merely on a feeling or on some subjective state of our heart; it must be grounded in some objective proof of God’s love to us. And that is what the apostle is talking about in verses 6-8.
You will note the word “for” at the beginning of verse 6: “For when we were yet without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly.” Paul has just been talking about God’s love revealed to us in our hearts in verse 5; now he is arguing that we can be certain that this love is real because it has been demonstrated for us once and for all in the death of Christ for us. Verse 6 is functioning as a ground for verse 5; this is the role of the word “for” at the beginning of verse 6. You can also see this by the parallel between verses 6 and 8. In each verse, the apostle says that Christ died for us while we were helpless and ungodly (6) and sinners (8). But in verse 8 the apostle explicitly says that this is how God demonstrates and commends his love to us. The phrase, “But God commendeth his love toward us” at the beginning of verse 8 makes explicit what the word “for” is saying at the beginning of verse 6. The demonstration of God’s love in the cross of Christ is the ultimate ground of our assurance of God’s love to us. As our Lord himself put it in that famous verse in John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”
I think this is best understood in light of what is sometimes called limited atonement, or particular redemption, the doctrine that Christ died only for the elect. Why do I say that? I say it because the doctrine of universal atonement inevitably means that the love of God is as much directed at those who end up in hell as it is for those who end up in heaven. But if that’s the case, how can God’s love function as a basis for assurance? In the Arminian scheme, God’s love clearly doesn’t save anyone; it just makes salvation possible, and it is ultimately up to us to complete the circuit to get saved. But if God’s love is an electing love that guarantees that all for whom Christ died will be saved, then it makes sense to point to God’s love as the ultimate basis of our assurance. In that case, God’s love is a truly saving love. It says that God the Father set his love upon a people from before the foundation of the world, and he gave these people to Christ to save, and that is exactly what Christ did. I remind you of his words: “All that the Father giveth me shall come to me; and him that cometh to me I will in no wise cast out. For I came down from heaven, not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me. And this is the Father's will which hath sent me, that of all which he hath given me I should lose nothing, but should raise it up again at the last day” (Jn. 6:37-39).
It is therefore important that we understand how the cross of Christ demonstrates the love of God for us. And in verses 6-8, we see three ways the love of God is shown, manifest, displayed, and proved to us. It is shown in a sacrifice, in a Savior, and in a sinful people. First, in the sacrifice made, which was death upon a cross. Second, we see it in the one who died: Christ, the Son of God. Finally, we see it in the ones for whom Christ died: they are those without strength, ungodly, sinners, enemies. As we consider these things, I hope that for all of us who trust in Jesus as Savior and Lord, that it strengthens our faith and hope in his love for us and causes us to love him more.
The Love of God is commended in the Sacrifice made.
Let me first say that the love of God is not commended in the absence of suffering in our lives. This is obvious even in the fifth chapter of Romans, as we look back to verses 3 and 4. God has a good and gracious purpose in allowing the tribulations in our lives that we go through. I know we tend to reason in this way, but it is not the Biblical way of thinking: “If God loved me, I would have a better life, a better job, a better family, a better marriage. If God loved me I wouldn’t be suffering. If God loved me I wouldn’t have experienced this tragedy. If God loved me he wouldn’t have allowed me to make that foolish decision.” Nowhere does the Bible measure God’s love to us by the absence of suffering. Rather, the Bible measures the love of God to us not in the absence of suffering in our lives, but in the fact that the Son of God suffered for our sins and that in suffering for us he has purchased for us every spiritual blessing in heavenly places.
The love of God is commended to us in the death of Christ for us. Christ is prophet, priest, and king. He is prophet to us in the sense that he declares to us the word of God. He is king in the sense that he rules over us and defends us from all his and our enemies. But both the prophet and kingly aspects of Christ’s office as Mediator would be meaningless and impossible apart from his priestly role. As a priest, he offered himself up for us and for our sins. This is the fundamental basis of our salvation, and this is fundamentally how God has demonstrated his love to us in saving us.
One of the implications here is that there is no Christian doctrine of the love of God apart from the death of Christ upon the cross. I feel like I have to say this because there have been and are folks who want to keep the name “Christian” but who want to do away with the cross, and replace it with vague talk about God’s love for mankind. But there is no way, Biblically at least, to even talk about God’s love to us apart from the death of Jesus Christ upon the cross. Paul makes it very clear that this is how we understand that God loves us. His love is shown to us in the death of Christ for us.
It is also important to note that this was a death “for the ungodly” (6) and “for us” (8). In other words, the death of Christ upon the cross was a substitutionary atonement. Now I realize that these words in and of themselves don’t prove that, but when you add this to the language of redemption, propitiation, and sacrifice in Rom. 3:24-25, it follows that “for us” means “in our place.” He didn’t die merely as a martyr or as an example, but as one who took the guilt and punishment of our sins upon himself, suffering the penalty due to our sins in our place, and thereby perfectly satisfied God’s justice so that his righteousness might be freely given to us when we are united to Christ by faith.
Christ died. But he didn’t just die; we must go on to consider the way in which he died. He didn’t die a peaceful death; he died a violent, painful, and shameful death. And he underwent all for us that so that we might be saved. But think of the sacrifice here. Paul puts it so clearly when he tells the Corinthians, “For ye know the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, that, though he was rich, yet for your sakes he became poor, that ye through his poverty might be rich” (2 Cor. 8:9). Or, as he put it to the Philippians, “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus: who, being in the form of God, thought it not robbery to be equal with God: but made himself of no reputation, and took upon him the form of a servant, and was made in the likeness of men: and being found in fashion as a man, he humbled himself, and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross” (Phil. 2:5-8). The poverty to which Christ exposed himself was not a poverty of divesting himself of his divinity. It was not by subtracting anything, which is the way we become poor. He became impoverished by adding something, namely, a human nature, and by coming into a world and suffering in it. He was humbled unto death, a death that was cruel and impossible for us to imagine. He suffered not only the physical pain of crucifixion, but the indignities of his persecutors, and above all things the wrath of God.
A lot of the suffering we endure we either deserve or can’t avoid. But God didn’t have to subject himself to suffering. Yet he did it for us. The sacrifice of Christ for us and in our place is unmistakable proof of God’s commitment and love to us.
The Love of God is commended in the Savior who died.
We are told that “Christ died for us” (8), and that we are reconciled to God by the death of his Son (10). Now one of the things I want to point out here is that the death of Christ for us isn’t proof that God loves us if Christ is not God, if he is not the Son of God and does not eternally share in the nature of God. If Jesus of Nazareth was in the end just another prophet, just another wise man, then how does his death for us demonstrate God’s love for us? How does it prove that God loves us by sending someone else to do the dirty work? But if Jesus is God’s Son who is of the same essence with the Father and the Spirit in the Holy Trinity, then it is true that in a real sense the death of Jesus is the death of God for us. And thus the death of Jesus is not just the act of the love that a mere man had for mankind; it is the act of the love of God himself for the world. This is why Paul the apostle could say to the Ephesian elders in Acts 20, “Take heed therefore unto yourselves, and to all the flock, over the which the Holy Ghost hath made you overseers, to feed the church of God, which he hath purchased with his own blood” (28). Now it is true that God as God is not flesh and blood (Mt. 16:17). And it is also true that the blood that was shed on the cross was human blood. Jesus was truly man. But in the person of Christ we have the union of the divine nature and the human nature. Because of this union, what is true of one nature can be attributed to the other nature. Hence, since Jesus is both God and man, fully God and fully man, without confusion or composition of the natures, it can be said that the man Jesus who is also God purchased the church with his own blood. Human blood, yes, but human blood that belonged to one who was not only human but also God.
And because Jesus is truly the Son of God, we can understand how the giving of his own Son for death was truly an act of love on God the Father’s part as well. Hence the words of John 3:16, “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son.” Or, as John would put it later in his epistle, “In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him. Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins” (1 Jn. 4:9-10).
You see this illustrated in a parable our Lord told (Mt. 21:33-46). He tells about a vineyard whose owner hired people to care for it in his absence. When the harvest came, he sent servants to receive the fruits of the harvest. But the hired hands mistreated the servants, beating some and killing others. We are then told: “But last of all he sent unto them his son, saying, They will reverence my son. But when the husbandmen saw the son, they said among themselves, This is the heir; come, let us kill him, and let us seize on his inheritance. And they caught him, and cast him out of the vineyard, and slew him” (37-39). The vineyard owner is God, the vineyard is Israel, the servants were the prophets, and the Son is Jesus. In the parable, Jesus is the only son of Father, and he is clearly distinguished from the prophets. He is not just another prophet. He is not just another wise man. He is the only begotten Son of God. This is the one who died on the cross. This is ultimate demonstration of God’s love for us. As Michael Card so beautifully wrote,
At the same time, Christ died, who was and is both God and man. We must also emphasize the humanity of Christ. He was not God in a human costume. He was truly man, with a human body and soul. As a man, “Jesus increased in wisdom and stature, and in favour with God and man” (Lk. 2:52). He did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped but made himself of no reputation and took the form of a servant by becoming fully human (Phil. 2:6-7).
It is good and right for us to remember this, not only because it is true, which it is, but also because it helps us understand that our Lord’s death on the cross was experienced by his human nature the same way any other man would have experienced it. He didn’t cheat on the cross by using his divinity to shield him from the pain and the suffering. In fact, as our Lord’s hour of death approached, we read in the gospels that he became more and more apprehensive and anxious. We are told that in the Garden of Gethsemane he was “in an agony” (Lk. 22:44), and it took an angel from heaven to strengthen him for the task ahead (43). He even asked his Father to remove the cup of suffering and death from him (42). The suffering of the Savior was real. The pain he experienced was real and terrible. Crucifixion is a horrible way to die, and that is how Jesus died. His body really did break down to the point that his heart stopped beating and the lungs stopped taking in air.
Why did he do this? He didn’t have to in the strictest sense. There was nothing about mankind that required God to do this. But there is an explanation, and it is the explanation of Scripture: he died because he loved those whom the Father gave him to save. He is the Good Shepherd who willingly laid down his life for the sheep that they might have life and have it abundantly.
The Love of God commended in the Sinners for whom he died.
Here is where we get to the heart of the apostle’s point. In each verse, 6,7, and 8, the apostle is underlining the fact that those for whom Christ died were in fact unworthy of the love of God. In verse 6, the apostle reminds us that “when we were yet without strength, in due time, Christ died for the ungodly.” Note what the apostle focuses on: God’s love is demonstrated in the fact that Christ not only died for those unable to save themselves, but for those who were in fact ungodly and therefore unworthy to be saved. Then in verse 7, he contrasts this with what people normally do: “For scarcely for a righteous man will one die: yet peradventure for a good man some would even dare to die.” It is a big thing for one to give their life for someone who is worthy, for someone who is righteous or good. It does happen, but we note when it does happen because it is rare. But who would die for the unworthy? Who would die for one’s enemy? But this is what our Lord did. Paul goes on to underline this again in verse 8: “But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.” And then in verse 10, he reminds us that Christ died for us when we were his enemies.
What this means is that Jesus didn’t go to the cross and give himself for us because he saw something in us worth dying for. There are some so-called Christian songs that make it sound like this is what God did. But that is not what the apostle tells us. No, we were ungodly. We were unlike God, ugly to him, gross, disgusting, abhorrent. God tells that in our sin we are like an unclean thing and that even our righteousness is like filthy rags to him (Isa. 64:6). Our sins are abhorrent to God, they are abominable to him. We should not hesitate to say, with the hymn-writer, comparing himself to the thief on the cross,
Nor should we hesitate to say, with Isac Watts,
Vile, worms! Think of leprosy and how revolting that is. But sin is even worse in God’s eyes, and those who, like Isaiah, have come to see the holiness of God, can only say, “Then said I, Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips: for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts” (Isa. 6:5).
The thing is, if we have anything good in us, it is because God in his grace gave that to us. It is the gift of the cross. Jesus didn’t go to the cross because we were good; he went to the cross to make us good. The love of God is not something that has its springs in us; it is entirely from himself. The love of God is freely and immutably given. There is nothing like it in the world. We are to love like God loves, yes, but we can only faintly approximate it.
As ungodly and sinners and enemies to God, we are “without strength” (Rom. 5:6). What does that mean? It means that in our sin we were unable to help ourselves. But let’s be clear about this. We were not unable in the sense that we wanted to be saved and yet couldn’t save ourselves. We are unable in the sense that apart from the grace of God we love our sins and love the chains our lusts forge around our hearts, and we don’t want to be rescued. We are God’s enemies. We hate his word and his commandments. We may say that we love God, but when an unsaved person is confronted with the God of the Bible, they don’t like him. They like their idea of who God is; they love their idol. Their idea of God allows them to live how they want; he allows them to retain control over their own lives. But they do not like this God of the Bible, who is sovereign, who demands their allegiance and their obedience and their trust and love. They want their self-sovereignty, even if it is ultimately self-destructive.
So we were ungodly and incapable of wanting help and certainly incapable of helping ourselves. There is only one way we can be saved, and that is if the love of God intervened to save us. This is what God has done in the redemptive death of his Son. This is a love that comes at an inexpressibly great cost to God. It came at the cost of the life of his own Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.
Now the apostle is going to apply this in verses 9-11, and we plan to look at this next time. But I want to make the following observations today.
First, God has revealed his love to us so that we will respond to it. How do you appropriately respond to the love of God? You do it as John did, when he said, “Behold, what manner of love the Father has bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God!” (1 Jn. 3:1). It ought to amaze us. We should never take it for granted that this is of course something God would do. God’s love and his grace and mercy are intertwined. There is no love of God to us apart from the grace of God for us, and this is the point that Paul is making here. We are ungodly; we are sinners. There is nothing worthy in us to call forth God’s love for us. It is a sheer act of grace on God’s part. Now we are going to see that this also has tremendous implications for assurance, and hopefully you can already see that here. But the love of God in the death of Christ ought to always been seen by us in the context of his free grace towards sinners.
I emphasize this because so many people think that God’s love is something we can just count on, as in, “Of course God loves us.” But God does not owe any of us one moment’s notice, let alone his love, and the fact that he has shown his love to us in the death of his own Son ought to make us deeply and eternally grateful for it.
But you may ask, “But how do I know that I am one of those for whom Christ died? How do I know that God loves me?” And my response to that is to look back at the context. How does this chapter begin? It begins with the words, “Therefore being justified by faith we have peace with God.” They are loved by God who are justified by God, and you are justified by God when you put your trust in his Son, the Lord Jesus Christ. What makes this even more sure is that even the faith by which we are justified is a gift of God!
In other words, my first business is not to determine whether God loves me because of a feeling I have; my first business is to obey the Bible and put my trust in the Lord Jesus Christ. The Bible make it very clear that all are commanded to repent of their sins and believe in Christ. The warrant to believe in Jesus is the warrant of Scripture, which says, “this is his commandment, That we should believe on the name of his Son Jesus Christ” (1 Jn. 3:22). The warrant of faith is not anything good in you, not any good feeling, or any good deed. The warrant of faith is the command of God. And is the promise of God that all who believe on Christ will have all their sins forgiven and will be saved. Our Lord himself tells the church to go and say, “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved; but he that believeth not shall be damned” (Mk. 16:15-16). So put your trust in Jesus, and go home rejoicing that you too are embraced in the saving love of God.
Let me close with one final observation. The apostle John and our Lord himself draw a tight connection between our being loved by God and loving others, especially the brethren. Here is the way John put it: “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love one another” (1 Jn. 4:10-11). We need to love one another! And we need to demonstrate that in deed and in truth and not just in words. Oh how easy it is to admire love from afar, but balk at it when we are put in the same room with difficult people! But love causes us to lay down our lives for others. What does this look like? It means that we need to be patient and kind to one another. It means we need to stop envying one another and stop boasting of our own accomplishments. We need to stop being arrogant and rude to our family and to our brothers and sisters in Christ. We need to stop insisting on our own way. We need to stop being irritable and resentful. We need to stop rejoicing in wrongdoing and always rejoice in the truth. We need to be people who bear all things, believe all things, hope all things, endure all things (cf. 1 Cor. 13:4-7, ESV). We are to “walk in love, as Christ also hath loved us, and hath given himself for us an offering and a sacrifice to God for a sweetsmelling savour” (Eph. 5:2).
And this is the best evangelism, isn’t it? It is said that one of the traits of the early church that drew pagans into the faith was the love that believers had for one another. Brothers and sisters, we have not only the command of God to love one another, but we have the example of Jesus. This is why I think John said that the commandment to is not only an old commandment – it has always been true – but also a new one, because it has been newly demonstrated and illustrated in the life and death of Jesus Christ for us. How can we say that we are grateful for how Jesus has loved us and go on living for ourselves? May the love of God stamp itself on our hearts, on our lips, and on our lives!
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