Everlasting love is a before love—there before we were born. None of us is an accident of life, alive by chance. Every man and woman has been the focus of God’s love since he or she was a thought in His mind. Each one of us was called forth into existence by the love of God.
O LORD, You have searched me and known me...For You formed my inward parts; You covered me in my mother’s womb. I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Marvelous are Your works, And that my soul knows very well. My frame was not hidden from You, When I was made in secret, And skillfully wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed. And in Your book they all were written, The days fashioned for me, When as yet there were none of them.
Psalm 139:1,13-16
The psalmist is standing in wonder of the fact that he was known before he was born. The word in verse 1 of this Psalm “know” in the Hebrew is yada,2 which is a word that means knowing intimately by observation. It is used to describe the knowing between lovers, and is the word used for the most intimate union of husband and wife.
He contemplates the fingers of God caressing and fashioning him and us in our mothers’ wombs. He delights in the microscopic baby that God’s love has called into being: “When I was made in secret, and skillfully wrought in the lowest parts of the earth.”
The Amplified Bible renders these words:
My frame was not hidden from You when I was being formed in secret [and] intricately and curiously wrought [as if embroidered with various colors] in the depths of the earth [a region of darkness and mystery].
Psalm 139:15
God was there at the delivery to welcome each one of us into the world. It is His love for us that draws us to Him even in the years when we do not recognize His voice. He puts the questions in our hearts concerning the emptiness of our existence; He creates the longings for a love we could not find on earth. He put within us the discontentment with our search for happiness and stirred up the longings for endless joy. He inspired all our yearnings after Him.
You were conceived into the love of God in the womb. You were birthed into the arms of His love. You are the object of His love here and now, simply because you exist.
Limitless Love
When we think of His love, we must remember that in all that He is, He is limitless—or the theological word is infinite. It means that there is no limit or boundary to Him. We humans are limited in all that we are, and in terms of love we can only give ourselves away in total love commitment to one person. But God being unlimited is present to each one of us in the fullness of His love. Each one of us is the focus of His love as if he or she were the only person in creation.
In the parables of Luke 15 Jesus tells the story of one lost sheep that goes astray, even though any shepherd will tell you that sheep follow sheep, getting lost in groups! He speaks of one coin that rolls into the dirt to become the object of the woman’s search. The last parable of the chapter is the story of a father who has two sons but deals with each of them as individuals. He runs out to meet the one son returning from his wasted life in the far country, ambushing him with his love. Jesus then portrays him as leaving the feast that welcomes the wayward son to go out to tenderly call the other self-righteous one into the feast.
He is portraying the sheep as being treated as the only sheep and having all there was of the shepherd to have. One coin is treated as the solitary desired object of a woman’s search. Each of the sons is treated as if he were the only one, being the sole object of the father’s love.
Paul could look at the love of God in Jesus Christ and His death and resurrection and speak of it as being for himself in the most personal application: ...who loved me and gave Himself for me(Galatians 2:20).
We cannot find an illustration of this love among humans; the nearest we come to it is the love of a mother for the newborn child. She pours her love upon the baby, providing every need, feeding and protecting not because the child has done something to merit her attention and love but simply because the baby is there. The infant does not deserve all that is poured out; it would be obscene to speak in terms of earning and deserving in matters of maternal love. If we were to speak of deserving, then we would have to admit that the baby is selfish, demanding, and smelly! Even if she has other children, she gives her entire self to the baby. The love initiated and bestowed is freely given because of who the mother is—the baby contributes nothing except its existence.
Realize that you are the babe in the arms of God’s love, loved because of who He is, loved as the one who has His sole attention and delight.
The love of God is ultimately revealed in the sending of the Son of God, Jesus Christ, into the world. In Christ, God joined us where we are in our sin-blasted world and futile existence, taking our humanity and living among us a true human life. It was finally demonstrated in His joining us in our death, dying for us and as us on the cross, and manifested love triumphant in resurrection. It is in this that His love achieves its ultimate goal and makes the covenant between God and humankind.
The believer is described as one who has come to know and believe the love of God and has entered into a union with Him. God becomes the believer’s habitat even as the believer becomes the dwelling of God.
And we have known and believed the love that God has for us. God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God in him.
1 John 4:16
Discovering Unconditional Love
To come to know and believe the love that God has for us must not be thought of as an interesting religious curiosity! The knowledge of God’s love toward us constitutes a major revolution in our lives as the story that a young woman recently told me. Her name is Pam, and it would be hard to describe the state of her Christian life before she came to know and believe his love. She had made a commitment to Christ at a summer camp when she was ten. She never doubted that she meant it when, to signify her commitment to Christ, she deliberately threw a stick onto the fire in front of all her friends. The counselor prayed with her as she simply invited Jesus into her heart. She felt no great emotion but knew that God had accepted her, and with that she was content.
When she came back from camp and told her parents, they were very happy and the pastor said that it was the greatest decision she would ever make. And that was it. Through her teenage years, she was a member of the church youth group, who had all made the same decision to follow Jesus. They formed a kind of subculture in the Midwestern town she called home. They did not smoke, drink, take drugs, or smoke pot, and they went to church every Sunday twice a day and to the youth group on Wednesdays.
Through her teens and twenties, she tried to be a good Christian, read her Bible, and pray every day, and tried to witness to her neighbors about Jesus, which basically meant that she invited them to her church. Her Christian life came in spurts that usually began after she had answered a call to rededicate her life to Christ. At times, she would find herself wondering if she would be a Christian if she moved to another city. How much of her faith was bound up in her family tradition and their respectable little town? At other times, a longing rose up within her to know God in the way some of the speakers passing through her church seemed to know Him. At such times, she would tell herself that she knew no more of God now than she did when she was ten years old. If there was anything else to this Christianity, she would like to know it.
She married in her early twenties, and her husband, Jeff, had a faith that was much the same as hers. They sat in church every Sunday, the model couple, and would have remained that way for the rest of their lives, but a weekend changed their lives. A friend invited Pam to a retreat I was leading in Oklahoma. I will let her continue in her own words:
“I went along because Dorothy had paid for me, and I did not want to offend her. I expected the usual camp meeting kind of preaching, telling us how lukewarm we all were and calling us to rededicate our lives to God. It was about that time when my last dedication had worn off
and I needed a verbal spanking and a renewal of my dedication to God, and so I figured the weekend would not be wasted. I always believed that one day I would make the dedication of my life that would bring me to really knowing God. Who knows? This retreat might do it.
“That retreat turned my whole life upside down. In the first hour, I heard that God loved me unconditionally. He loved me because He was love, not because I was good. I had been in church all my life, but I had never heard that before. I did not realize how desperately I needed to hear it until I heard it, and then I knew I was like a woman dying of thirst in a desert and someone had just given me a long drink of cold water.
“Whatever our pastor believed, I had always heard that I had to reach a certain level of behavior, a certain determined dedication, before God would love me. In fact, I had the strong impression that God was tired of us half-hearted backsliders and was always on the verge of giving us a good thrashing. That He loved us with no reference to our behavior was a totally new thought to me.
“I could not sleep that Friday night. My mind was racing, or maybe I should say dancing, with this new concept. Now I know that the Holy Spirit was working overtime, having finally got through to me! I lay in the bed listening to the crickets outside as I made a survey of my life. Why did I go to church, read my Bible, and pray? Why did I abstain from the things that others of my age were doing? Why did I attempt to witness to my neighbors? I realized that my true motive was to make sure He wouldn’t be really mad at me! My whole Christian life was a halfhearted attempt to earn His love.
“And now this new concept changed everything. If He loved me because He is love and not because of my good behavior, then I did not have to earn His love because I was already loved! As I lay there, I found myself weeping with relief and joy as I drank in the water I had not known I was looking for. I said, ‘Thank You, Jesus!’ over and over, and the words felt strange on my tongue. I had not said or felt anything like that before. I found myself saying, ‘I love You, Jesus!’ I had certainly never said anything like that before!
“I knew my life could never be the same again. This wasn’t a rededication; it was a changing of my understanding of life. It wasn’t something I was doing to try to be a better Christian but my response of love to His loving me. That night, my life of trying to earn His love and please Him (or maybe I should say, keep Him happy) was over. It died and was buried that night in Oklahoma. The entire weekend, I found myself quietly praising God, laughing, my eyes overflowing with tears of joy. I repeated the words over and over to myself, ‘I am loved; I could not be more loved by God, because He is love!’
“If He loved me, what was I doing spending my whole life trying to convince Him that He should love me? In those few hours, a burning desire rose within me to read my Bible and discover this God I had never known. I wanted to pray and talk to Him. I was not afraid of Him anymore. I had the greatest news in the world to tell my neighbors and couldn’t wait for the first opportunity.
“When I got home and tried to explain everything to Jeff, he thought I was nuts. Since then he has come to see God’s love for him, but it took time and there were difficult days. I was amazed that many of my church friends did not want to hear what I had come to see; they preferred the drudgery of trying to earn God’s favor, and I lost some friends. It has not been easy. I have had many personal trials since that day ten years ago, and I have not been all I long to be; but I have had a compass to guide me through it all—the magnetic north of His love for me.”
Like Pam, there are countless believers who go through life with no concept of the unconditional love that He has for us. Part of our being lost from God is that we are born into a world that has turned away from His love. We have been raised in a society of sin; selfish, failing, human love; abuse; and dysfunction. As children, we were shamed and taught in hundreds of ways that we were not worthy of being loved. We were taught to despise our poor efforts to perform in a way that would make us worthy of love. Our contact with the church has often projected the shame that we knew from our family into our understanding of God. He was presented to us as shaming us and demanding the keeping of impossible standards before He would love us.
Let us be honest: Many believers reading this chapter will have the reaction that such love is for someone else; God could not love them being the kind of people they are. When confronted with His unconditional love, they feel disgusted and ashamed, designating themselves as the exception to the rule of His limitless love.
Among the words I hear the most from believers when I teach and confront them with the unconditional love of God are “I cannot believe that God loves me like that.” There are others who despise themselves and bitterly say that it would be impossible for God to love ones as sinful and worthless as they believe themselves to be. And there are always the pious “humble” who, with downcast eyes, tell me that they are not worthy of His love. They are shocked when I tell them that what they believe to be their extreme humility is, in fact, their extreme bloated pride!
If any of these statements of disbelief in the totality of God’s love is taken seriously, then we are denying some of the most basic tenets of the Gospel. All these statements have in common the total misconception of the Gospel. All of the above people who cannot find it in them to believe that God so loves them, find it difficult because they believe themselves to not be good enough for Him.
I have some very serious questions for such persons that will help determine whether they have truly heard in their hearts this Gospel:
If God is infinite, unconditional love, then are we not slandering His character to say that He does not love us, or could not love us? By making ourselves the exception, we are denying both that His love is infinite and that it is unconditional.
What has being worthy to do with the good news contained in the new covenant?
Do we think that God loves us because we have done something good?
Do we think that the love of God is the warm feeling we get after we have evaluated our lives and decided that we are good enough, at least for the present, to be loved by Him?
Are we not trying to control God, telling Him that we are not ready to be loved by Him and when we are ready, we will give Him permission to extend His love to us?
“I do not feel worthy” is a feeling of religious flesh. It must be crucified and named as a lie that comes from the one who first said, “Has God said...?” I do not doubt that you do not feel worthy, but what has that to do with faith, which in the face of such feelings declares the truth and stands in speechless awe before such a God? To believe in those feelings and exclude oneself from His love is to build a twisted, distorted idol and call it the God revealed in Jesus.
When we first hear of His unconditional love, our response is delight; they are the most wonderful words that we have heard. But it is not long before the words become a scandal to us—how could He love me? It would be true to say that we do not truly know His love until we have deliberately submitted to it against all the better judgment of our moral, religious flesh. Submitting to His love means that we take a stand against the raging feelings of our phony flesh that despises itself, and against the sneering voice of the accuser of the brethren.
While our feelings hypnotize us with the lie, and self-loathing demands that it be believed, we must open our mouths and declare aloud His love for us. Faith is not a feeling; it is a choice against our feelings, sometimes against every feeling in our being, to believe the revelation of God in Jesus Christ.
One thing is sure—all of our whining that He could not love us does not stop Him from loving us! His love is almighty and does reach us wherever we are. He set His love upon us before we were born, without asking our permission; it is eternally too late to argue with Him on this issue. He is the God who, so Jesus tells us, delights to throw wild parties for the undeserving failures in life, to celebrate them and declare them His own.
You are not working toward His love; you are now, in this moment,
loved. We begin our journey into understanding the new covenant by knowing that we are loved and highly valued by God. The only explanation to His making the covenant is His love for us. We receive His love with thanks; we surrender to that love and rest secure in it.
Chapter 6: The Representative Man
God has a radical agenda of love! He reaches to every man and woman to reconcile us to Himself, to include us in the circle of His intimate friends, and to return each one of us to the reason for our creation. How does He achieve this goal of totally transforming the man or woman who is dead in sin?
He achieves it with no help from us. He makes the new covenant: a unilateral covenant, originating solely with Him and freely offered to man as His gift; a covenant based on the oath of God, who swears by Himself because He can swear by none greater.
Power of the Blood Covenant: Uncover the Secret Strength of God's Eternal Oath Page 7
