In an age when everyone has their own take on things, when in ancient times each god had their own emphasis and activity, it is striking the God would demonstrate his “own love” to us.
God had to actively demonstrate his love to us because otherwise we wouldn’t believe it, or trust it, or rely on it—because our ideas of love are so different, so distorted.
This love is not a “general idea” of love, not an “already known” or “textbook” kind of love. It is God’s OWN LOVE.
Today, this is what stands out to me as I continue reflecting on God’s demonstration of love in Romans 5:8.
God doesn’t just prove “love” to us.
God doesn’t merely exemplify the idea of “love” for us.
God demonstrates God’s own love for us.
God’s unique kind of love.
God’s very own love.
“But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8 NIV).
God’s Love in the Weeds of Greek
The Apostle Paul’s sentence structure is clarifying and emphatic in the Greek.
Paul could have use the more common sentence structure of using a possessive pronoun after the noun, as is common in English. Paul could have spoken about “the love of God” for us.
We see this sentence structure in
- Romans 8:35 (“the love of Christ” / agapes tou christou)
- Romans 8:39 (“the love of God” / agapes tou theou)
- Romans 15:13 (“the love of the Spirit” / agapes tou pneumatos)
- 1 John 4:9 (“the love of God” / agapes tou theou)
- 1 John 4:12 (“his love” / agapes autou)
But in Romans 5:8 Paul uses a reflective pronoun before the noun, for clarification and emphasis (“his own love” / ten heautou agapen).
“But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Rom. 5:8 NIV).
God’s Own Love
God is not redirecting love from somewhere else (as if God isn’t the sources of all thing anyway).
God is not encouraging or coxing someone else to show love to us (as if there were someone greater that God would turn to).
God is not showing us an example of love we would already know (as if we could really know love outside of God’s love).
No!
God is offering God’s own love, from God’s own abundant resources, from God’s own compassionate disposition toward us, from God very own nature and being.
So, in more emphatic translation,
“God demonstrates for us the love that is specifically God’s, coming from God’s very being.”
Or,
“God actively demonstrates through God’s own action, the love that is uniquely God’s, for us.”
The New Standard of Love
Not only does God stoop down to prove something to us (when it is us who should prove something to God) (link to post).
Not only does God step down into our weakness, offering his own abundant life. (link to post)
But God is demonstrating his own kind of love to us and for us, a love that is unique to the God first revealed to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and now fully revealed in the Son (Hebrews 1:1-3).
This love, unique to God, is the standard of all other loves ancient and modern, natural and supernatural, relational and even political.
This really is love: While we were weak, wounded, even at war with God, Jesus died for us.
So Foreign to Us
Of course, this kind of love is so foreign to us that we can hardly comprehend it, we don’t believe it, and we suspect anterior motives when we experience it.
This is why we needed a demonstration, an embodied expression of love. Otherwise we would never believe it.
And this is why I have to keep thinking it over, reflecting on it, and burrowing into it, so that this love might wash over me, sink into me, and overflow out of me.
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Posts in “Unsystematic Thought’s on God’s Demonstration of Love” Series:
- From Abstraction to Demonstration of Love (#1)
- While We Were Still Weak (#2)
- God Proves to Us (#3)
- On God’s Unique Kind of Love (#4)
- While We Were Still Warring (#5)
- Enemy Love as Forgiveness (#6)
Embodied Faith Podcast Episode:
Other Posts on Love