unconditional love

When speaking of unconditional love, one must speak clearly. It seems common to intentionally confuse the language to increase the appeal. This is an error. Here R.C. Sproul speaks clearly and truly.

It has become fashionable in evangelical circles to speak somewhat glibly of the unconditional love of God. It is certainly a pleasing message for people to hear and conforms to a certain kind of political correctness. In our desire to communicate the sweetness of the gospel to people and the readiness of God to cover our sins with forgiveness and the incredible depth of His love that is displayed in the cross, we indulge in a hyperbolic expression of the scope and extent of His love. Where in Scripture do we find this notion of the unconditional love of God? If God's love is absolutely unconditional, why do we tell people that they have to repent and have faith in order to be saved? God sets forth clear conditions for a person to be saved. Now it may be true that in some sense God loves even those who fail to meet the conditions of salvation, but that subtlety is often missed by the hearer when the preacher declares the unconditional love of God.

What is heard by people who listen to the evangelist declare the unconditional love of God is that God will continue to love them and accept them, no matter what they do or how they live. We might as well declare an unabashed universalism as to declare the unconditional love of God without clear and careful qualification of what that means.

An interesting contrast can be seen by comparing the preaching of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century evangelists with modern evangelists. The stress in earlier centuries was upon the wrath of God directed toward impenitent sinners. Indeed Jonathan Edwards's preaching has been described as evangelistic preaching that employed a "scare theology." That approach has given way to a more positive emphasis on God's love. Of course Edwards also declared the love of God but not without reminding sinners that as long as they remained impenitent, they were exposed to the wrath of God and were in fact heaping up wrath against the day of wrath.

Edwards warned his people that they were more repugnant to God in their sin than rebellious subjects were to their princes. This was part and parcel of proclaiming the gospel of reconciliation. There can be no talk of reconciliation without first assuming there is some prior alienation or estrangement. Parties who are not estranged don't need reconciliation.

There can be no talk of reconciliation without first assuming there is some prior alienation or estrangement.

The Biblical concept of reconciliation presupposes a condition of estrangement between God and man. Much is said of man's hostility toward God. We are described as being God's enemies by nature. This enmity is expressed in our sinful rebellion against Him. The common contemporary view of this is that we are estranged from God, but He is not estranged from us. The enmity is all one-sided. The picture we get is that God goes on loving us with an unconditional love while we are hating Him.

The cross belies this picture. Yes the cross occurred because God loves us. His love stands behind His plan of salvation. However, Christ was not sacrificed on the cross to placate us or to serve as a propitiation to us. His sacrifice was not designed to satisfy our unjust enmity toward God but to satisfy God's just wrath toward us. It is the Father who is the object of the Son's act of propitiation. The effect of the cross is to remove the divine estrangement from us, not our estrangement from Him. If we deny God's estrangement from us, the cross is reduced to a pathetic and anemic moral influence with no substitutionary satisfaction of God.

In Christ the obstacle of estrangement is overcome, and we are reconciled to God. But that reconciliation extends only to believers. Those who reject Christ remain at enmity with God, estranged from God, and objects both of His wrath and of His abhorrence. Whatever kind of love God has for the impenitent, it does not exclude His just hatred and abhorrence of them that stands in stark contrast to His redeeming love.