God's Love Trumps All

Another minister wrote to me: "I cannot imagine . . . that God’s love trumps the requirement of the gospel for sinners to repent in order to become God’s children."

This is my response:

God’s love does trump the requirement for sinners to repent in order to become God’s children. That is the heart of the Gospel. That is it. That is the core. We do not become God’s children by our choice, but by God’s choice, and he chooses us all, and claims us all through the saving death of Christ. If we do not agree on that, then I am not sure we are talking about the same Spirit, the same Gospel, the same God. Jesus said: “You tithe mint, dill and cumin, but neglect the weighter matters of the law: justice, mercy and love.” Paul says: “God shows his love for us in that while we were yet the enemies of God, he sent his Son to die for us.” Jesus says: “I desire mercy, not sacrifice.” And, Jesus tells the story of the gracious father of the prodigal son; and, the point of that story is not the repentance of the prodigal, but the love of the father that trumps all. Before the beaten and battered sinful son can even get down and repent before his father, his father embraces him and weeps tears of joy and celebrates. Before Jacob can tell Esau he is sorry, Esau embraces him and weeps. Jacob says: “To see your face is like seeing the face of God!” This is the Gospel. Before Joseph can stand to put his brothers to the test down in Egypt, he breaks down and cries and discloses who he is. He won’t even hear their cries of repentance. We love because God first loved us. God doesn’t wait for us to repent. God takes the first step, he reaches out and claims us all in Christ. That is grace. That is the Gospel. And, hell yes, God’s love trumps every other requirement in all creation, especially the church’s requirement that sinners repent first before being offered the free grace of God. Until we are loved of God, we don’t know how to repent. So long as you preach a gospel that sets up a gate and has requirements on the front end, you’ve not preached the gospel, but a human distortion of it. And, the sinful woman who wept at Jesus’ feet and wiped his feet with her tears. He says: “Her sins, which are many, are forgiven, because she loved much.” Jesus didn’t say: “because she repented, but because she loved.” Jesus didn’t want people’s sacrificial repentance, but their love. I desire mercy, not sacrifice. Jesus forgave the paralyzed man’s sins, and healed him – not because he saw the man’s repentance, but because he saw the man’s friends “faith,” which was also their love for him. In fact, the scripture doesn’t tell us one thing the paralyzed man did, but be claimed by the love of God in Jesus and saved, body and soul by it.

I think we need to get first things first.

I also think you have a view of a God who serves the Bible, not a Bible that serves God. Your one-to-one correspondence between the written canon and the Word of God cannot be sustained by any reasonable reading of the Bible itself or church history. Jesus takes the very words of scripture, such as: “you have heard it said, ‘an eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth,” but I say to you . . . Jesus overrules the previous written code by separating the wheat from the chaff, and by flatly claiming an authority above that of the written scripture. And, regarding the Reformers view of scripture. Luther’s view cannot possibly be the view you espouse in equating the written scriptures with the Word of God. If so, why did Luther and Calvin actually take books out of the canon (books that Paul had in his scriptures! And that the church had had for 1500 years!). Further, Luther flatly criticized Revelation and James, and at times, wanted them taken out of the canon as well. Everyone knows in how high a regard Luther held the witness of scriptures, calling it the ruler over the church and “the Word of God,” but, even Luther didn’t have the mechanistic view of equating written canon with Word of God as a simple one-to-one correspondence. If he did, he would never have removed some books from the O.T., and so harshly questioned James and Revelation. And, he would not have made his famous statement: “The Bible is the cradle that holds the Christ-child.”