GOD’S WORD FOR MAY 16
GOD’S WORD FOR MAY 16 ~ ~ Romans 1:20 ~ ~ “For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even His eternal power and Godhead, so that they are without excuse,”
“It is impossible to overstate the greatness of the fatherly affection God has for His one and only Son. We see this unbounded affection behind the logic of Romans 8:32…
“He who did not spare His own Son, but gave Him up for us all, how shall He not also with him freely give us all things?”
The point of this unspeakably precious verse is that if God was willing to do the hardest thing for us, give up His cherished Son to misery and death, then surely that which looks hard, giving Christians all the blessings that heaven can hold, will not be too hard for God! (therefore we can trust Him for every need that we have)
What makes this verse work is the immensity of the Father’s affection for the Son. Paul’s assumption is that “not sparing His own Son” was the hardest thing imaginable for God to do. Jesus, as Paul put it simply in Colossians 1:13, is “the Son of His Love.”
If there ever was a passion of love in the heart of God it is a passion for His Son.
A.W.Tozer, said, “God never changes moods or cools off in His affections or loses enthusiasm” If there is any enthusiasm in God of which this is true, it is for His Son. So It will never change; it will never cool off. It burns with unimaginable fervency and zeal. Therefore, I affirm with Jonathon Edwards:
“The infinite happiness of the Father consists in the enjoyment of His Son.”
(He is looking at the type of love the Father has for the Jesus, because the Word affirms that He loves us with the same love as He does for Jesus, so we need to understand how that can be. We can see that we have every reason to believe He will always do well by us in this life and the next according to His infinite Wisdom.)
When we say that God loves His Son, we are not talking about a love that is self-denying, sacrificial, or merciful. We are talking about a love of delight and pleasure. (A love extended to a peer, not to a lower being)
(In other words:)
God is not stooping to pity the undeserving when He loves His Son.
That is how God loves us (the undeserving creatures) It is not how He loves His Son. He is well-pleased with His Son. His soul delights in Him. When He looks at Jesus, He enjoys and admires, cherishes, prizes and relishes what He sees.
To avoid a harmful mistake about God’s love for His Son, we need to go further now and show that the Son of God has the fullness of deity.
A person might agree with the affirmation that God has pleasure in the Son, but then make the mistake of thinking that the Son is merely an extraordinarily holy man that the Father somehow adopted to be His Son, because He delighted in Him so much.
Colossians 2:9 gives us a very different angle on things. “In Christ the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily.”
(this is an important verse)
The Son of God is not merely a holy and faithful man. He has the FULLNESS of deity. (Godhood). God did not look for a holy man whom He could somehow take up into the Godhead by putting deity in Him. Rather, “the Word became flesh” in an act of incarnation (John 1:14)
God sought a humble, faithful woman, and, through the virgin birth, united the fullness of His deity with a child of His own conceiving.
“And Mary said to the angel, “how can this be, since I have no husband?” And the angel said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you and the power of the Most High will overshadow ypu; therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God” (Luke 1:34-35)
God did not take a holy man up into deity. He clothed the fullness of deity with a virgin-born human nature, Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of God—-the God-Man, in whom “the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily.”
(He was fully God AND fully Man at the same time—otherwise He could not have fulfilled salvation. More from Mr. Piper tomorrow.)
Live in the Light of Our Lord 