God's love and evangelism

by Alan Day                                                                                              Vol. XVIII, No. 1, January 2005

The cross is the grand revelation of the gamut of God's attributes. At the cross we see God's wisdom, holiness, wrath, justice, righteousness, patience, and mercy. But the incredible magnetism of the cross is found in its communication and illustration of God's infinite and universal love.

"For the love of Christ constraineth us; because we thus judge, that if one died for all, then were all dead" (2 Co. 5:14). The word translated in the King James as "constraineth" has a number of meanings one of which is "to take captive." Paul was a prisoner of love, captivated by the power of Christ's redeeming love and bound by the cords of everlasting compassion. The eternal God had set a trap for Paul, he seem to be saying. He fell into that divine trap while he was kicking and screaming against the Lord; but when he stopped his protest, he found himself being embraced by the God who is love.

A 19th century writer said that the first missionaries to Greenland thought the natives were too primitive to understand the cross, so they began teaching them about the existence of God and so forth. But there was no good effect produced by their teaching. Finally, someone completed the translation of John 3:16 and read it to a Greenlander. He asked the missionary, "Is that true that God loves all the world?" The missionary replied that it was. "Then why did you not tell us that at first, for that is good news indeed."

Nature and reason lead us to the truth that God is one. Our consciences tell us that God is a God of justice. But the truth that God is love, and that God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself, is a truth of revelation. It is revealed by Christ in history at a place called Golgotha. That is the reason that no one ever made the statement, "God is love," until after Christ had died for the sins of the world.

A few months before his death, Thomas Boston had been strengthened following a time of intense prayer for his healing. He wrote in his memoirs, "About that time I was let into a strengthening view of the fullness of a God in Christ, whereby I perceived, that whatever were the communications of divine love, to others more than to me, there was still the same room for me as if there were not another object of it in all the world." Like the great apostle, Boston came to realize that it was not enough to know that God loves the world. The pure deliciousness of the Gospel, as Paul put it, is that Christ "loved me, and gave himself for me" (Gal. 2:20).

[Alan Day is pastor of Edmond, OK, First. Reprinted from the Oklahoma Baptist Messenger, 15 Nov. 2001, p. 10.]