Briefly, On God’s Love and Being In Jesus
I appreciated this post from Scott Sauls, particularly this opening quote from Rankin Wilbourne: “God does not love you to the degree that you are like Jesus. Rather, God loves you to the degree that you are in Jesus. And that’s 100 percent.”
One of the distressing operations of remaining sin is to convince the Christian that this is not true. Functionally, so many of us live our lives as if we need to do more to warrant God’s love, or prove that his love is well founded. As Sinclair Ferguson puts it in The Whole Christ, we exchange the beauty of God’s grace in our justification and sanctification for a sanctification built upon our own performance.
And we will fail. I can not be the Holy Spirit, just the Holy Spirit’s instrument. I think this is the source of so much Christian shame: I strive to be like Jesus, grounding my belief that God loves me based on how well I imitate the savior. And then I fail. I fail to follow Jesus well, I fail to avoid sin, and I feel as if I have failed the love of God. How much despair finds its origins here?
Repentance of sin and imitation of Christ are central to the Christian life, but only because our state is one of unseverable union with Christ. How freeing that it is! The wickedness of sin does not lessen, but the burden for the love of God is borne not by me, but by Jesus.
I’ve thought about this a lot since you posted it. “God loves you to the degree that you are in Jesus” seems to imply that God doesn’t love the unsaved, but we’re told that God loved the world and that he saved us while we were still sinners. Does God love everyone?
When Ephesians 2:4 speaks of God loving us while we were still sinners, God moves to make us alive together *in Christ*. And Romans 5:6-11 focuses on God demonstrating his love for us by Christ dying for us, *so that we are now* justified and reconciled by Christ to God. In both cases the flow of the gospel logic is that God’s love for us finds its expression *in Christ’s work* which has saved and reconciled us to God, not so that there is merely the option of us being vivified with Christ, but so that we actually are. God’s love for us, even before he resurrects us, looks at us through the future application of Christ’s finished work to which he has called us. In that sense, our election is still *in Christ* before we are even saved. This is the outline of Ephesians 1-3.
So, no, in that sense, God does not love everyone. In John 3, Jesus is speaking of God’s love for his creation generically (“the world”) and still limits the world being saved *through him* to those who believe, which is based on being of the Spirit, as the Spirit wishes (John 3:7-8). God’s love for the world as his creation is expressed in the purposes of his redeeming love of his people. He loves the world by loving his people and saving them by overcoming the world. This is one of the main themes throughout John, and can be seen more clearly in John 1, John 3:25-36, John 10, John 12:44-50, John 14:18-24, John 16:25-33, and John 17.
Edit – to put it simply, because God loves us, he saves us. This is an actual salvation, not a potential salvation, and this love is based not on our merit (who we are or what we have done), but originates from God himself and is expressed and upheld by our being in Christ.