The Manifest Love of God (David Martyn Lloyd-Jones, 1899-1981)

1 John 4:9,10

“In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him. Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins."

The love of God can only be finally understood and appreciated in the Lord Jesus Christ. It is what God has done in Him and through Him that ultimately reveals it all. “In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him. Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation54 for our sins” (1Jo 4:9-10). That is the manifestation of the love of God, says John, and here again is a compendium55 of theology, a synopsis of doctrine. There is no greater theological statement in the whole Bible than these two wonderful verses.

John does not say, “God is love,” and then pass on to something else. He says, “If you want to know anything about love, you must realize these truths because it is in this way that God has manifested His wondrous love to us. Apart from these things, you know nothing about love.” But let me go further. The love of God, I maintain, is only understood and felt in terms of theology, and to reject the theology is to reject the love of God and to be bemusing56 ourselves with some hypothetical57 and imaginary love. “In this was manifested the love of God,” and here we have John’s exposition of it.

Having, therefore, emphasized that fundamental attitude, let me attempt with reverence to look at this glorious and sublime statement. Would you like to join “with all the saints,” as Paul puts it, in trying to measure and estimate “the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; and to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge” (Eph 3:18-19)? This is how John proceeds. We are, of course, attempting the impossible. We are going to measure the immeasurable; we shall try to plumb the depths that no man can ever reach; we shall ascend the height that no man can ever aspire unto; and yet, says Paul, let us do it. And as we attempt to do so now, let us be guided by the apostle John.

His general proposition is this: God’s love has been manifested in what He has done for us or in us in the Lord Jesus Christ. So, let us start in the depths. Let us start to look at the love of God and attempt to measure it by looking at ourselves. You will never know the love of God until you know yourself. We will never appreciate the love of God until we know the startling truth about ourselves apart from Him and about His wondrous grace. God, we are told, has loved us. Why? Has God loved us because we are lovable? Has He loved us because we are such kind and wonderful people, so deserving of His favor?

Consider the answer of the apostle John in these two verses: the love of God—let me emphasize it again—is only to be understood theologically. Here is what we are told: God sent His only begotten Son that we might live through Him. From [this] I deduce that apart from Him, we are dead; and that is the fundamental statement about man as the result of sin that runs right through the Bible. “You hath he quickened,” says Paul writing to the Ephesians, “who were dead in trespasses and sins” (Eph 2:1). All of us, apart from Jesus Christ, are in a state of spiritual death. We not only lack a knowledge of God, we lack an understanding of spiritual things; the great spiritual faculty that God gave man at the beginning is lying dormant. As a result of sin, we have no life in us: we do not live, we exist. Read the first three verses of Ephesians 2, and there you have it: “And you hath he quickened, who were dead in trespasses and sins; Wherein in time past ye walked according to the course of this world, according to the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience: Among whom also we all had our conversation in times past in the lusts of our flesh, fulfilling the desires of the flesh and of the mind; and were by nature the children of wrath, even as others.” Dead—dead to God and to His spiritual qualities—dead to everything that is truly uplifting and ennobling58—living according to the course of this life and of this age—an existence in a state of death. This is what John says, namely, that Christ came that we might live through Him; without Him, we are dead.

But not only that. According to the Bible, far from being lovable and loving, men and women by nature hate God. “Herein is love, not that we loved God”; that is, it is not the case that we in our natural state loved God and He responded to our love. The picture of the Bible is not that people are ever seeking for God because they love Him. That is the popular theology—that men and women are seeking God and that God responds to their request. Not at all! “Not that we loved God, but that he loved us.” People, by nature, do not love God. According to the Bible, by nature and as the result of sin and the Fall, they are enemies of God. “The carnal mind”—the natural man—“is enmity against59 God,” says Paul; “it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be” (Rom 8:7).

Is all that not the simple truth, and must we not all confess that by nature and apart from the light we have had in the gospel of Jesus Christ, when things go wrong the feeling is one of enmity? We are enemies, aliens, strangers, at enmity against God. “God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners…For if when we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son…” (Rom 5:8, 10). That is the picture that is given of man: dead and hating God, far from loving Him, but rather feeling opposed to Him. And because of all that, man by nature is under the wrath of God and deserves the punishment of God for his sins. That is Paul’s statement, and it is the statement of the Bible everywhere.

We are, let me remind you, trying to measure this amazing love of God, and that is the first measurement: men and women down in the dregs and depths of sin, deserving nothing but wrath, and with nothing to be said for them. And the whole argument of the New Testament is that until we see that that is the simple truth about us, we do not begin to know anything about the love of God. That is the first step in measuring it.

But let us go on to the second. Let us proceed immediately from the depths right up to the heights. We have seen man. Now let us look at God and see what He has done, and the astounding thing we are told is that God has “sent his only begotten Son into the world.” That is the central message of the New Testament, and indeed of the whole Bible; it is about a person called Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Who is He? John has been talking about Him; his whole message is about this person, and this is what he tells us about Him: He is God’s “only begotten Son.” The original reads like this: “In this was manifested the love of God toward us, because that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, that we might live through him.” His Son—His only begotten Son. That statement means that this person has a unique kinship with God. It is John’s way of saying that Jesus Christ is none other than the eternal Son of God, co-eternal, equal with God,60 dwelling in the bosom of God, the effulgence61 of God, one with God, the second person of the blessed Trinity.62

But, you see, John puts this in another form: God “sent” His Son. So, if Jesus Christ is someone Who has been “sent” into the world, He must have existed before. None of us have been sent into the world. We are born into this world, but here is someone Who was sent from somewhere else. He existed before, in eternity. His birth at Bethlehem was not the beginning for Him. He began His earthly course, He came, He was sent from heaven. That is another way of estimating the love of God. God has manifested His love towards us in that He, there in glory, has sent from heaven, with its eternal bliss and absolute perfection, into this world His only begotten Son. We cannot fathom this—it escapes us. But can we try to imagine something of what this means? God, we are told, “sent” His Son; He asked Him,63 His only begotten Son, to come into this world, consisting of men and women such as I have already been describing. “In this was manifested the love of God,” that out of heaven He “sent His only begotten Son,” the One Who is in His own bosom.

Fathers and mothers, does this mean anything to you? Think of your own love to your children and multiply it by infinity, and that is God’s Father-love to God the Son; and yet He sent Him into the world. So, you know nothing about the love of God unless you believe the doctrine of the incarnation.64 Believe me, you cannot talk of the love of God dwelling in you unless you know that Jesus of Nazareth is the unique and only begotten Son of God. If you are uncertain about the person of Christ,65 you have no love of God in you—you are fooling yourself. You must not put the love of God as an opposite to the doctrine of the person of Christ. He is the God-man; all the miracles and the supernatural power, all the fullness of the Godhead dwells in Him bodily (Col 2:9). Understanding the person of Christ is absolutely essential to understanding the doctrine of the love of God.

But let us pause there. From the heights let us come down again to the depths, and let us glance for a moment at what the Lord Jesus Christ has done. We have said that God has “sent His only begotten Son” from heaven; but He sent Him, John says, “into the world.” O blessed be His holy name! The Son, the only begotten Son, came into this world. We are measuring the love of God—and this is the way to measure it. Look at the world into which He came. You remember His birth and what we are told about it. This is the sort of world that the eternal Son of God, Who had come from heaven, came into: there was no room for Him and for Mary and Joseph in the inn. The selfishness of mankind was such that even a woman in this condition did not get a room and had to go into a stable; so the Lord of glory was placed in a manger in a stable. That is the sort of world He came into; a selfish, grasping, self-centered world in which every man is out for himself.

You also remember the story of Herod and the massacre of the innocents—all the malice, envy, hatred, and bloodshed. And, oh, the poverty into which He came! They could not afford to give the price of the highest offering for Him; they had to offer the two turtledoves—they could not afford any more. He was born into a very poor home; He knew something of…the need that accompanies poverty. And for thirty years, He lived a very ordinary life as a carpenter, mixing with ordinary people. Can you imagine what it must have meant to Him, the Lord of glory, the eternal Son of God Who came out of God’s eternal bosom, to see sin firsthand? To look at the ugliness of evil and sin and see it face to face? The shame of it all and the foulness of it all! We are measuring the love of God, and that is the measure of it. How could He in all His purity and holiness ever come from heaven and live for thirty years in the kind of world in which you and I are living? How could He have done it? How could He stand or bear it?

Then watch Him in His ministry, teaching His pure, loving, holy doctrine, seeing the opposition that arose. Look at the people looking at one another, asking their questions, trying to trip Him—the cleverness they display in trying to pull Him down. Look at the scheming; look at the treachery even among His own friends; look at Him deserted by all His disciples; look at Him on trial; look at the crown of thorns they put upon His holy brow—that is the world into which He came. “In this was manifested the love of God…that God sent his only begotten Son into the world.”

But more, He sent Him, we are told, to be “the propitiation for our sins.” What does this mean? Here, of course, is the great classic doctrine of the atonement,66 and it means that He sent Him into this world in order that He might become the sin offering for us. It means that God “hath made him to be sin for us, who knew no sin; that we might be made the righteousness of God in him” (2Co 5:21). It means that Jesus Christ is not only the priest, but He is also the offering, the propitiation, the sacrifice offered. God sent Him into the world in order that God might punish our sins in Him.67 He has made His Son the sacrifice; it is a substitutionary offering68 for your sins and mine. That was why He was there in the Garden sweating drops of blood because He knew what it involved—it involved a separation from the face of His Father. And that is why He cried out on the cross, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Mat 27:46). There we see the love of God not only in the world He came into, but in the propitiation, the sacrifice, the substitutionary death, so that you and I might be delivered. Herein was manifested the love of God, that God sent His only begotten Son to death, to the cruel shame and agony and suffering of the cross, to be made sin for us Who Himself knew no sin and so was innocent.

But, thank God, it did not stop at that. He raised Him again from the dead and thereby proclaimed that the sacrifice was enough, that the Law was satisfied, and that everything was complete. I say again, you do not begin to know anything about the love of God until you see that if Christ had not died on the cross in that way, God could not forgive sin. I say it with reverence: that is God’s way of making forgiveness, for without the doctrine of the atonement you do not understand the love of God. Let me beseech you, never again put the love of God and doctrine as opposites. It is only in this way you understand the love of God. There is the depth again.

But let us once more rise from the depths to the heights; let us rise with Him in resurrection,69 and let us look at what He has meant to us as the result of that. Christ died—that is what we are told. He has been made “the propitiation for our sins.” In other words, as the result of what He has done, God forgives us for our sins; by His death we are reconciled to God in Him; we have redemption through His blood. The blood is essential; never speak about it as if it were something that is legalistic. “In whom we have redemption through his blood, even the forgiveness of sins” (Col 1:14). In Him, we are reconciled to God, pardoned, forgiven, and restored. Yes, and even more, God sent His Son into the world, that we might live through Him. We receive the gift of life; we begin to live because He came. We are given His nature; we are given His power. He becomes One Who resides in us. We live in Him, and He is in us; we live through Him. There we again rise to the height.

That is what God has done for us in His love through Christ—pardon, forgiveness, peace, reconciliation, life anew. We begin to live in a new world, and we see new possibilities. We know something of His mighty working in us and the power that operates in us. That is how the love of God is manifested, that He sent His Son, and the Son has taken hold of us and, as Paul puts it, has “raised us up together, and made us sit together in heavenly places in Christ Jesus” (Eph 2:6).

David Martyn Lloyd-Jones, "Life in Christ: Studies in 1 John"

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54  propitiation – appeasement; “Propitiation has reference to the wrath or displeasure of God. To propitiate is to satisfy the divine justice and thus to appease His wrath. In the biblical usage of the term, the justice of God is satisfied by the propitiatory sacrifice.” (Morton H. Smith, Systematic Theology, Vol. 1, 382)

55  compendium – short but comprehensive summary of a larger subject

56  bemusing – confusing

57  hypothetical – based on something that is possible and imagined rather than real or true

58  ennobling – giving greater dignity of character to

59  enmity against – hostile to; the state of being an enemy

60  See FGB 230, The Deity of Christ, available from Chapel Library.

61  effulgence – great brilliance or brightness

62  See FGB 231, The Triune God

63  See FGB 236, God’s Eternal Purpose

64  See FGB 234, Incarnation

65  See FGB 219, The Person of Christ

66  See FGB 227, Atonement

67  See FGB 225, The Work of Christ

    68  See FGB 207, Substitution

    69  See FGB 235, Resurrection

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The Christian’s chastisements flow from God’s love. Not from His anger or hardness, nor from arbitrary dealings, but from God’s heart do our afflictions proceed. It is love that regulates all the ways of God in dealing with His own. It was love that elected them. The heart is not warmed when our election is traced back merely to God’s sovereign will, but our affections are stirred when we read “in love: having predestinated us” (Eph 1:4-5). It was love that redeemed us. We do not reach the center of the atonement when we see nothing more in the cross than a vindication of the Law and a satisfaction of justice: “God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son” (Joh 3:16). It is love that regenerates or effectually calls us: “With loving kindness have I drawn thee” (Jer 31:3). The new birth is not only a marvel of divine wisdom and a miracle of divine power, but it is also and superlatively a product of God’s affection.—A. W. Pink

In Christ’s love, you have begun a banquet that will never end. “May the love of God be with you all” is meant for all God’s people. But is that love with all present? If you have not tasted God’s love, you do not know what life, true life, means. The richest, the most celestial, the most transporting joy that mortal mind can know is a full assurance of the love of God.—C. H. Spurgeon

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