The Father’s Love is Constant

John Owen, Communion with God:

The love of God is like himself — equal, constant, not capable of augmentation or diminution; our love is like ourselves — unequal, increasing, waning, growing, declining.  His, like the sun, always the same in its light, though a cloud may sometimes interpose; ours, as the moon, has its enlargements and straitenings.

The love of the Father is equal; whom he loves, he loves to the end, and he loves them always alike. . . . On whom he fixes his love, it is immutable; it does not grow to eternity, it is not diminished at any time.  It is an eternal love, that had no beginning, that shall have no ending; that cannot be heightened by any act of ours, that cannot be lessened by anything in us.

Our Father will not always chide, lest we be cast down; he does not always smile, lest we be full and neglect him: but yet, still his love in itself is the same.  When for a little moment he hides his face, yet he gathers us with everlasting kindness.

Objection: But you will say, ‘This comes near to that blasphemy, that God loves his people in their sinning as well as in their strictest obedience; and, if so, who will care to serve him more, or to walk with him to well-pleasing?’

Answer: The love of God in itself is the eternal purpose and act of his will.  This is no more changeable than God himself: if it were, no flesh could be saved; but it changes not, and we are not consumed.  What then?  Loves he his people in their sinning?  Yes; his people — not their sinning.  Alters he not his love towards them?  Not the purpose of his will, but the dispensations of his grace.  He rebukes them, he chastens them, he hides his face from them, he smites them, he fills them with a sense of [his] indignation; but woe, woe would it be to us, should he change in his love, or take away his kindness from us!  Those very things which seem to be demonstrations of the change of his affections towards his, do as clearly proceed from love as those which seem to be the most genuine issues thereof.  ‘But will not this encourage to sin?’  He never tasted of the love of God that can seriously make this objection.

No Need to Ask For the Father’s Love

John Owen:

In John 16:26-7 our Saviour says, ‘I say not to you, that I will pray the Father for you; for the Father himself loves you.’  But how is this, that our Saviour says, ‘I say not that I will pray the Father for you,’ when he says plainly, ‘I will pray the Father for you?’ (John 14:16).  The disciples, with all the gracious words, comfortable and faithful promises of their Master, with most heavenly discoveries of his heart to them, were even fully convinced of his dear and tender affections towards them; as also of his continued care and kindness, that he would not forget them when bodily he was gone from them, as he was now upon his departure: but now all their thoughts are concerning the Father, how they should be accepted with him, what respect he had towards them.  Says our Saviour, ‘Take no care of that, nay, impose not that upon me, of procuring the Father’s love for you; but know that this is his peculiar respect towards you, and which you are in him: “He himself loves you.”  It is true, indeed (and as I told you), that I will pray the Father to send you the Spirit, the Comforter, and with him all the gracious fruits of his love; but yet in the point of love itself, free love, eternal love, there is no need of any intercession for that: for eminently the Father himself loves you.  Resolve of that, that you may hold communion with him in it, and be no more troubled about it.  Yea, as your great trouble is about the Father’s love, so you can no way more trouble or burden him, than by your unkindness in not believing of it.’  So it must needs be where sincere love is questioned.

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.“

Distinct Communication of Grace

In John Owen’s Communion with God, he establishes that Christians can have communion with each Person of the Godhead distinctly; with the Father, with the Son, and with the Spirit.  He says in regard to God’s communication of grace to the believer,

It remains only to intimate, in a word, in what this distinction lies, and what is the ground of it.  Now, this is, that the Father does it by the way of original authority; the Son by the way of communicating from a purchased treasury; the Holy Spirit by the way of immediate efficacy.

In other words, when it comes to receiving any aspect of God’s grace, the Father is the ultimate giver.  He is the originator of it all.  From him the plan and the power springs.  He is the divine Initiator.  The Son then communicates the grace of his Father to us by purchasing it for us on the cross.  Without the wrath-satisfying sacrifice of the Son, we would deserve only damnation and punishment from the Father.  The grace we receive from the Father is due only and completely to the cross-work of Jesus: his death, resurrection, and exaltation.  The Holy Spirit, then, is the immediate actor in our lives.  He works directly in us to bring the blood-bought grace of the Father to us.  There is, of course, overlap in any full description of the work of Father, Son, and Spirit, since there is but one God; yet I think Owen is basically correct in his analysis.

I don’t have time right now, so maybe next time I’ll provide Scriptural support for the above description of the distinct work of Father, Son, and Spirit.  After all, Owen’s words are worthless if they’re not from the Word of God.

What is Communion in General?

I’m reading John Owen’s book Communion with God.  One of the questions I had at the outset was, “What does ‘communion’ mean?”  The things that come to my mind when I think of “communion” are things like relationship, a sense of warm closeness, fellowship, or the Lord’s Supper.  Owen has a brief section entitled “What is Communion?” and here is what he says: communion is “a joint participation in anything whatever, good or evil, duty or enjoyment, nature or actions.”  So communion is, most basically, a joint participation.  Sharing something in common, whether nature, duty, enjoyment, actions.

More specifically, Owen says “communion is the mutual communication of such good things as wherein the persons holding that communion are delighted, bottomed upon some union between them.”  At first, this made me think of shared enjoyments.  If we share our common delight together, we are communing.  It made me think of John Piper’s book, The Pleasures of God, in which he discusses some things that God enjoys.  Communion with God would be sharing in his pleasures.  Loving what he loves.  Enjoying something in common and conversing about that enjoyment.

Then I noticed the odd word “bottomed.”  What it means is “grounded in.”  This communion is grounded in some union between the persons.  Of course, as Christians we have union with God through Jesus Christ.  We have been put in an unbreakable relationship with God through our union with Christ.  Built on the bedrock of that relationship, we can share with God “the mutual communication of” what delights us.

Then a couple paragraphs later I realized my initial understanding wasn’t quite what Owen was saying.  He writes, “Our communion, then, with God consists in his communication of himself to us, with our return to him of that which he requires and accepts, flowing from that union which in Jesus Christ we have with him.”  So what Owen had in mind was not necessarily the mutual enjoyment of the same thing, although I don’t think that’s wrong.  What he describes here, though, is God’s self-communication to us of what delights us about him, followed by our giving back to him what he delights in from us.

To generalize, then, communion is two people who have a relationship giving and receiving what brings joy to the other.  Owen then applies this to us and each Person of the Godhead in the rest of the book.  It occurred to me, however, that this description of communion could be applied to any relationship.  If communion were only the shared enjoyment of the same thing, it would be hard to commune with people with whom we don’t have much in common.  But if communion is giving and receiving what gives joy to the other, then we can commune with anyone, if we love them and are willing to work at it.  At a “less spiritual” level, a rabid football fan and I could have communion if I make an effort to communicate to him what he loves, namely football, and he makes an effort to communicate to me what I love, namely biblical studies.  Not that we have to talk football and theology in every conversation, me saying, “How ’bout that awesome touchdown?” and he replying, “Yes, it reminds me of the perseverance of the saints.”  Rather, in the dynamic of the relationship (that which we are “bottomed” upon, as Owen put it), we try to take an interest in what delights the other.  This requires love and should produce increasing closeness.

These thoughts made me think of the book about the “love languages,” (which I’ve never read) that basically describes how different people feel loved through different means, and we should learn how to express love in the particular ways that are meaningful to each person.  This observation has proven true in my marriage.  What makes me feel loved doesn’t work for my wife, and what makes her feel loved doesn’t work for me.  We speak different love languages.  Yet I constantly try to love her in the way that makes me feel loved.  I babble at her in my foreign love language and get annoyed when she doesn’t understand.  According to Owen, if I want to have communion with my wife, then I need to give her what brings her joy, and she needs to return to me what gives me joy.  I shouldn’t selfishly insist that she be the same as me, but in love give to her what brings her joy.  We must have “the mutual communication of such good things as wherein . . . [we] are delighted, bottomed upon some union between” us.

NOTE: It’s either David Powlison or Ed Welch (both biblical counselors) who has a critique of the love languages book, in which he notes positives and negatives, specifically that if our goal is to make a person feel loved we must be careful that we are not merely pandering to the idols of their heart.  I’ve read the critique of the book, but not the book itself, so I’m not qualified to weigh in at this point.

Communion With God: Gospel Sweet or Bitter?

I’m reading John Owen’s book entitled Communion with God (that’s the abbreviated title), in which he talks about how to have personal fellowship with the triune God, each Person distinctly.  In the preface he writes:

I shall speak nothing [in this preface] of the subject here handled; it may, I hope, speak for itself, in that spiritual savour and relish which it will yield to them whose hearts are not so filled with other things as to render the sweet things of the gospel bitter to them.

Reflecting on this statement, I asked myself the following questions: Is the gospel sweet to me?  Do I love and long for the things of the gospel?  Is there a spiritual savor and relish to the thought of and participation in communion with God?   Is my heart filled with the things of the gospel?  Or, is my heart filled with other things?  Am I distracted by, preoccupied with, or enamored with other things, whether good, bad, or indifferent?  What do I spend my time thinking about?  What do I ponder before sleep and when I wake?  What would I rather do than spend time in prayer?  What would I rather do than read and personalize God’s word?  Than meditate on God and his truth?  Than think about Christ and his glory and his salvation?  What am I drawn to?  What do I long for?  Is communion with God a sweet privilege or an unwelcome duty?  Is my heart open to receive God and all he has to offer, or is it full of other things that crowd out contemplation and enjoyment of the gospel–even make it bitter?