Praise is the consummation of enjoyment. All enjoyment tends towards praise and adoration as its appointed end. In this way, God’s seeking his own glory and God’s seeking your good converge.

1. God’s Love Is Not Something God Owes Us

While it is true that God is love (1 John 4:16), this does not mean he is obligated to express that love to anyone, much less toward hell-deserving sinners like you and me. In other words, God is sovereign in his decision either to bestow his love or withhold it. Here is how John Murray put it:

Truly God is love. Love is not something adventitious; it is not something that God may choose to be or choose not to be. He is love, and that necessarily, inherently, and eternally. As God is spirit, as he is light, so he is love. Yet it belongs to the very essence of electing love to recognize that it is not inherently necessary to that love which God necessarily and eternally is that he should set such love as issues in redemption and adoption upon utterly undesirable and hell-deserving objects. It was of the free and sovereign good pleasure of his will, a good pleasure that emanated from the depths of his own goodness, that he chose a people to be heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ. The reason resides wholly in himself and proceeds from determinations that are peculiarly his as the ‘I am that I am.’1

Thus, to say that love is sovereign is to say it is distinguishing. It is, by definition as saving love, bestowed upon and experienced by those only who are, in fact, saved (i.e., the elect). Although there is surely a sense in which God loves the non-elect, he does not love them redemptively. If he did, they would certainly be redeemed. God loves them, but not savingly, or else they would certainly be saved. All this is but to say that God’s eternal, electing love is not universal but particular.

2. God’s Love Is Not Uniform or Monolithic

God displays his love in various ways and degrees depending on his good pleasure, purpose, and the most effective way to bring honor and glory to his name. We see this in the difference between the love of God as manifest in common grace versus his love as seen in saving grace.

The love of God as manifested in common grace is his love as creator which consists of providential kindness, mercy, and longsuffering. It is an indiscriminate and universal love that constrains the bestowing of all physical and spiritual benefits short of salvation itself. It is received and experienced by the elect and non-elect alike (see Matt. 5:43–48; Luke 6:27–38).

The love of God as manifested in special grace is the love of God as savior, which consists of redemption, the efficacy of regenerating grace, and the irrevocable possession of eternal life. A discriminate and particular love leads him to bestow the grace of eternal life in Christ. It is received and experienced by the elect only.

Helpful in this regard is the way D. A. Carson identifies five distinguishable ways in which the Bible speaks of the love of God.2

First is the peculiar love of the Father for the Son (John 3:35; 5:20) and of the Son for the Father (John 14:31).

Second is God’s providential love over all of his creation. Although the word “love” is itself rarely used in this way, there is no escaping the fact that the world is the product of a loving Creator (see the declaration of “good” over what God has made in Gen. 1:4, 10, 12, 18, 21, 25, 31).

Third is God’s saving love toward the fallen world (John 3:16).

Fourth is God’s particular, effectual, selecting love for his elect. The elect may be the nation of Israel, the church, or specific individuals (Deut. 7:7–8; 10:14–15; Eph. 5:25).

Fifth is God’s love toward his own people in a provisional or conditional way. Often the experience of God’s love is portrayed as something that is conditioned upon obedience and the fear of God. This doesn’t have to do with that love by which we are brought into a saving relationship with God but rather with our capacity to feel and enjoy the affection of God. See Jude 21; John 15:9–10; Psalm 103:9–18.

3. God’s Love Does Not Mean That Everyone Will Eventually Be Saved

As already noted, the saving love of God is poured out only on the elect. They are not deserving of it any more than are the non-elect who remain in their sinful and fallen condition. God has the sovereign freedom to love some in saving power but not all. Those who depart this life unsaved are not treated unfairly but in accord with perfect justice.

Some have argued that for people to languish in eternal hell demonstrates that God has failed and that his love was ineffective. But that would only be true if his loving and saving intent was to secure the salvation of all. Clearly, though, it was not. And God would experience defeat only if evil and idolatrous unbelievers escaped divine judgment. But they will not. And when they are consigned to eternal damnation, none will raise an objection or protest that they are undeserving of such treatment and deserving of eternal life.

4. God’s Love Was Not Secured by the Death of Jesus Christ

Jesus didn’t die for sinners so that God would love them. God loved them and therefore sent his Son to die for them.

The love of God, then, is clearly the source or cause of the atoning work of Christ. God does not love people because Christ died for them; Christ died for them because God loved them. The death of the Savior is not to be conceived as restoring in people something on the basis of which we might then win God’s love. The sacrifice of Christ does not procure God’s affection, as if it were necessary, through his sufferings, to extract love from an otherwise stern, unwilling, reluctant Deity. On the contrary, God’s love constrains to the death of Christ and is supremely manifested therein. In a word, the saving love of God is giving. 

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