How to Know God's Love
There is perhaps no truth more central to the Christian faith than the love of God. Yet many people think of God's love only as a feeling, a vague kindness, or a comforting idea. Scripture gives us something far more concrete. It tells us exactly how God's love is known.
"But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." (Rom 5:8)
In a single verse, the love of God is grounded not in emotion or philosophy, but in the historical, substitutionary death of Jesus Christ.
Notice the verse does not say God merely showed His love. He commendeth it. To commend is to set something before others as worthy of the highest regard, to magnify it so that its full weight can be seen and considered. God is not quietly informing us that He loves us. He is magnifying the cross of Christ before the world and proclaiming the glory of what was accomplished there.
This is where the love of God becomes truly staggering. He did not die for us after we had cleaned ourselves up, stopped sinning, or after we had shown some promise. While we were yet sinners, in full rebellion, fully deserving of wrath, Christ died for us.
Human love can’t reach this far. A man may rarely lay down his life for a friend or for what he believes to be a noble cause (Joh 15:12-14; Rom 5:7). But the cross reveals something far greater. God died for His enemies (Rom 5:8,10). That is not just a greater degree of love. It is a different kind of love altogether.
Imagine if you broke into someone’s house, killed their entire family, robbed all their things, and then, in response, they took your death sentence in a court of law and also left you millions of dollars from their bank account. Our feeble, human minds can’t comprehend how this could happen. Multiply this billions of times over, and you’ve just scratched the surface of what Jesus Christ did.
Romans 5:8 is not about how special we are so that God decided to love us. It is about how great God is. His love required nothing from us because it originated entirely from Him. He loved us first (1Jn 4:19). We are loved by God for Christ's sake, and nothing in all of creation can separate us from that love when we trust the gospel (Rom 8:38-39).
At the same time, God abhors sin and His wrath rests on the ungodly (Rom 1:18; Psa 5:5-6). This is precisely what makes the cross so glorious. His compassion is so immeasurable that He chose to die in the place of the very people His holiness condemned, satisfying His own righteous judgment while opening a door of grace to a world of sinners (Eph 2:3-18, 3:1-12; Titus 3:3-7, Rom 3:21-26).
Understanding and trusting in this love is the most important thing in life. It is the very thing that not only saves a soul, but that compels and transforms the Christian life from the inside out (2Co 5:14-21; Gal 5:6; Eph 3:16-21).
The love of God is not an abstraction. It has a location: the cross. It has a cost: the death and blood sacrifice of His Son. And it has a scope: sinners, the ungodly, the unworthy. That means all of us qualify.
At the cross, God's justice was satisfied because sin was judged. By the cross, God's grace was revealed because Christ bore that judgment in our place and offers us eternal life instead (Eph 2:4-18).
This is why the cross is not just the starting point of the gospel. It is the message. Paul writes that the only thing he can glory in is "the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ" (Gal 6:14), and that the preaching of the cross is the power of God to salvation (1Co 1:17-18, Rom 1:16). The cross is central because of what Jesus accomplished and continues to accomplish by it.
The gospel that saves today, the preaching of the cross, is that Christ died for our sins, was buried, and rose again the third day (1Co 15:1-4). This is not a message for the put-together or the religious. It is for sinners, which is to say, it is for all of us. Anyone who trusts this gospel, not their own works, receives forgiveness, righteousness, and eternal life, not because they earned it, but because God, in His great love, commended it toward us through the death of His Son.
If you want to know how much God loves you, don’t look to feelings or circumstances; look to the cross of Christ.
