06/19/2021
The Lord loves you - this much.
Tomorrow he comes for you. Body and blood, given and shed for you.
You in him and he in you.
1 John 4:10, ’In this is love, not that we have loved God but that He loved us and sent His son to be the propitiation for our sins.’
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What is LOVE according to 1 John 4:10? It is that in God which moves Him to send His Son—and moves the Son to harmoniously respond to the Father’s sending—as the propitiation or ‘wrath absorbing sacrifice’ for our (ie, any who would trust in Him) sins. Love is displayed, then, in the act by which God, in love, bears tho totality of divine wrath in the place of His enemies so that they might become His friends, indeed, His Beloved Bride.
Notice one thing: Within the creaturely experience, Love is definitively and essentially manifest precisely in the moment that it swallows up the wrath that is justly turned against us in our sin….in other words, the reality and damning severity of WRATH blazes at the heart of and is the necessary context of LOVE (again, within creaturely experience). When I look into the radiant heart of divine LOVE, what do I see? I see myself, justly damned for my sins under divine WRATH, **in the flesh of Jesus Christ.** Yes, love is manifest as I see myself damned in the willing and vicarious condemnation of my Lord….
So much flows out of this! However, just one implication is that, if we explain away the reality of God’s wrath, we eviscerate the power and potency, the beauty and radiance of His love…if we would have a wrath-less God, we will ultimately have a loveless God as well.
But we need to go one step further…because it is not simply that God reveals one aspect of His character in the wrath-absorbing death of the resurrection-illumined Christ…No, in revealing this Love, He reveals HIMSELF…the supreme act of redemption is redemptive only when received as the supreme act of revelation….the beauty of the cross is the beauty of GOD manifest in the full panoply of His splendor as the Spirit-opened eye of faith beholds the anastasiform flesh of the crucified Jesus. Thus, if we deny the wrath of God, we deny not only His love, but we deny the Name and Beauty of God Himself, setting up in His place a thin and vapid idol made in our own image. May He guard all of us from this all-too natural tendency…
