God's Love

Old post from old blog. But you knew that already.

In the post on God’s goodness, I mentioned that God’s love and God’s goodness are closely related. God is both loving and good because he is by nature a giver. While the term love is sometimes used in scripture in relation to God’s general providence (the work of God in sustaining his creation), it is most often used in relation to redemption (the rescuing or saving work of God). In fact, throughout the New Testament, the redemptive work of Christ on the cross is revealed to be the way it is that God loves:

….God is love….. In this is love:…. that he loved us and sent his Son to be the atoning sacrifice for our sins. (1 John 4:8-10)

And again:

For this is the way God loved the world: He gave his one and only Son….(John 3:16 NET)

Redemption is the supreme example of God’s love. God is love, so he saves even at great cost; costly redemption is the way he loves.

Examining the cost of redemption proves to us the infinite depth of God’s love. He saves sacrificially, giving up his own Son, and his sacrificial giving is done, not for those who are in some way giving back to him, or even neutral toward him, but for those who are rejecting him. The kind of love God has is the kind of love that gives sacrificially to those who hate him.

But God demonstrates his own love for us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us….while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son (Romans 5:8,10 NET).

God’s love is a love that rescues the unlovely and unworthy by giving up something precious in order to do it. That’s mind-boggling love. God’s love is immeasurable in the same way that all the other aspects of his character are, for scripture tells us that his “love is great to the heavens.”

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What is it to pray in the name of Christ?

To pray in the name of Christ is, in obedience to his command, and in confidence on his promises, to ask mercy for his sake;[1] not by bare mentioning of his name,[2] but by drawing our encouragement to pray, and our boldness, strength, and hope of acceptance in prayer, from Christ and his mediation.[3]

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The Supposed Contradiction of God's Omniscience

Commenting on my post on God’s omniscience, Godlessons objects that the doctrine of the omniscience of God contains paradoxes. (I’m thinking that he—or she, but I’m betting on he—means contradiction rather than paradox.)

In order for God to be omniscient, he can’t not know something. This means that not only would he know all possible futures, he would know the future that was going to happen as well, which means there is no other possible future.

How can I resist? Here’s my response:

You are equivocating on the term possible futures. When you use possible futures in the way you first use it, the term means something like “all the things God has the power and knowledge to accomplish—events God could have planned to occur had he desired.” They are possible in that sense—God has the ability to bring them to pass if he wanted to. They are conditional possibilities: They are possible, had God willed them. In this sense of the term, there are innumerable possible futures and God knows them all. 

In your second use of the term possible futures, you are refering to “the one conditional future which can actually come to be because God has planned for it to be.” This category contains the one conditional possible future for which the condition is met by God’s decision to bring this future into existence. In this category, we’re talking about actual possibilities, not conditional ones. There’s only one actually possible future, and God knows it because he decided it.