Communion In the Father’s Love

In John Owen’s book Communion with God, he talks a little about communion in general, then writes about communion with each Person of the Godhead: Father, Son, and Spirit.  He writes, “I come now to declare what it is in which peculiarly and eminently the saints have communion with the Father; and this is love — free, undeserved, and eternal love.”

The entire section about communing with God the Father is all about his wonderful love and how we should understand it, receive it, and respond to it.  Owen points out that when 1 John 4:8 says “God is love,” it means specifically, “the Father is love,” because what immediately follows is, “In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him.”  So the Apostle John specifically means the One who sent the Son when he says “God is love.”

The biblical passage continues, “In this is love, not that we have loved God [the Father] but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”  Owen notices that the Scripture makes the Father’s love “antecedent to the sending of Christ, and all mercies and benefits whatever by him received.”  The Father’s love was prior to and foundational to the sending of the Son to pay the penalty for our sins.  Yes, God is full of wrath for unrepentant sinners.  Yes, God is just and holy and will by no means leave the guilty unpunished.  Yet it is not as though Jesus saw his Father’s rage, had compassion on us poor sinners and decided to intervene.  That’s not what the Bible teaches at all.  Instead we find the Father, full of justice, holiness, and wrath, yet also full of love.  So much so that he can be called “love” itself.  And out of that overflowing love he decides to graciously show mercy on damnation-deserving rebels.  So Jesus came, as he often said, to do the will of his Father.  The Father was the original authority (as noted in a previous post) behind everything the Son did to redeem us from slavery to sin and free us from the Father’s coming wrath.

How we should meditate on the Father’s love!  It is foundational to our very existence, to the existence and purpose of the universe, and to the details of our own personal history.  If you are a believer, everything that has ever happened in your life or ever will happen — “good” and “bad” — has and will only come from the hands of a heavenly Father who has loved you from eternity past with a free, undeserved, and eternal love.  The Father’s wondrous love is so central, so foundational, so essential to absolutely everything in our lives.  It explains everything, and yet it’s an unfathomable mystery.  It exalts us to share in the divine nature, yet it humbles us to the dust.  And as Owen says, “His love ought to be looked on as the fountain from whence all other sweetnesses flow.“