Why does God love us?

What, it may be asked, is the motive of such love as has been made known to us? There can be but one answer to the question — Love! It found its motive in itself. He loved because He loved. This is indicated in the words of Deuteronomy 7:7: "The Lord did not set His love upon you nor choose you" for any merit or greatness beyond others, "but because the Lord loved you." Not only was there no merit or worthiness in us to call out His love, but we were lost sinners.

We were powerless, unjust, evil, nothing but sinners, on the one hand; and God, on the other, had no motive for His love other than itself. It is emphatically His own love. Only God can love like this. Man, even the saint, must have a motive outside himself; God has none. He, and He only, is love. The spring is within, and He needs no object outside to call it forth.

Men in their natural state are described by the Holy Spirit as "foolish, disobedient, led astray, slaves to various passions and pleasures, passing our days in malice and envy, hated by others and hating one another" (Titus 3:3). Such a condition could not possibly attract an infinitely holy God — it must rather repel Him. Yet the gospel proclaims that God loved — not merely pitied, but loved — men so morally ruined and undone. He blesses and saves in the sovereignty of His love, finding sufficient cause in Himself, though none be found in man.

The teaching of the Bible is NOT that God is ill-disposed toward us, a frowning Deity who must be continually pacified by sacrifices that change His feelings toward us. That is the corrupt heathen idea. The Bible presents it like this: "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" (1 John 4:10). Far from our having to change His heart toward us by a sacrifice, His heart toward man is the very source of all our blessing. Our sins had made propitiation necessary, but He Himself provided the necessary sacrifice.

Do not suppose that God loved us because Jesus died for us — that He then began to love us. Did He love Israel in Egypt because the blood was shed and sprinkled on the doorposts? No, the blood was sprinkled as the token of His love. His purpose was to spare them. Christ lifted up on the cross was the display of God's eternal love to us.

God loved you when there was nothing lovable about you. He loved you because of what was in Himself. But the Father loves you because of what is in you. He has found something in you in which His heart has unbounded delight. What is it? Nothing but the little spark of love to His Son, which He has kindled there for Himself.

Just think of this: your hearts ought to have the awareness that He loved you as He loved Jesus! A child might say, "I am a foolish child, I think little about my mother" — but he has no uncertainty about his mother's love for him. We never grasp all God's love to us; still we know we are children and sons. It is no uncertain place: I know I am loved as Christ is loved.

If so, I find rest for the heart: it rests in God — knows God is perfect, knows He has met all its need and put all its sin away, and that He is perfect love. "We love him, because he first loved us." Do your souls rest in the love of God? Granted that He ought to be loved; but you are not honouring God if you do not trust what His love has been in the work of Christ on the cross.