Christ: His human nature and His love--for whom? (19c)

Dear Forum Members,
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In the last letter I addressed the question whether any possibility of kindness towards the reprobate exists in order that God may be delivered from the charge of being unkind and tyrannical. I answered this with an emphatic “No.” Neither Scripture, the Reformed Confessions, nor the Westminster Confession of Faith speaks of this general kindness of God. I stressed rather, that God is a holy God, that any sin against Him is terrible, and that God is also a God of perfect justice. In His holiness and justice He cannot overlook sin and be kind or gracious to the sinner – apart from Christ.
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Nor can God be charged with tyranny. He is good in all He does, even in His just judgment of the wicked. It is not tyrannical for God to punish the wicked with a punishment commensurate with their monstrous sin against His great holiness.
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Nevertheless, behind God’s just punishment of the wicked is God’s eternal decree of reprobation. According to this decree, God’s purpose eternally is to manifest His justice in the way of the punishment of the sinner.
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These considerations are closely related to other questions to which we now turn.
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One question that was raised by correspondence was the question whether Jesus, from the view point of His humanity, loved all men. The argument goes like this. When our Lord Jesus Christ came into our flesh, He came under the law (Gal. 4:4). The law demands of everyone under it that he love God and his neighbor as himself. A man’s neighbor includes all those without distinction with whom he comes into contact. No man under the law knows who is elect and who is reprobate, except our Lord Jesus Christ, who did know who were His people and who were not. And so, because Christ also was under the law, even though He knew His own and knew also who were not among His sheep, He had to love the reprobate as well as the elect if He was to keep the law – although this was only in His human nature.
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I recall that there was a controversy over this very point in a Presbyterian Church a number of years ago. The controversy centered in the gracious gospel offer, but involved the same line of argumentation as is used in this question we now consider. The defender of this view talked personally with me to explain his position. In order to explain his position on the discrepancy between Christ’s love for all revealed in the gospel offer and Christ’s sovereign love for His people only, he appealed to the distinction between the divine nature and the human nature of Christ. He claimed that Christ in His divine nature loved only the elect, but in His human nature, He loved all men.
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He was correctly charged by his church with Nestorianism, an ancient heresy, which separated the two natures of our Lord so completely that Christ possessed, according to this view, two persons. Nestorianism was condemned by the Council of Ephesus in 431 AD and by the Council of Chalcedon in 451.
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All that our Savior did while on earth and all that He now does is His work as the divine-human Mediator. It is wrong to say that Christ did one thing in His divine nature apart from His human nature, or to say that Christ does something according to His human nature without the involvement of the divine nature. It is yet more wrong to say that Christ in His human nature could do something completely at odds with His divine nature, so that the two natures did not agree with each other. Hence, in answer to the question: Did not Christ, who came under the law, fulfill the law by loving all his neighbors, whether elect or reprobate? we insist again that the Biblical answer is, No; Christ who knew His own that were given Him of the Father loved His neighbor, but only His elect neighbor. This truth is, in fact, clearly stated in John 13:1: “Now before the feast of the Passover, when Jesus knew that his hour was come that he should depart out of this world unto the Father, having loved his own which were in the world, he loved them unto the end.”
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I really do not understand very well the force of this argument. Neither for Christ, nor for us, is our neighbor every man who lives in the world. My neighbor is the one with whom I come into contact, with whom I must live, who is on my pathway, who requires my attention, who places me under certain obligations towards him. My neighbor is my wife, my child, my fellow saint – as well as the man along side of me in the shop. And I am called to love him in such a way that I, caring for whatever need he may have, seek his salvation. Love always seeks the good of the object of that love; and no greater good can we show to someone we love that to seek his salvation. I do this because I do not know who are elect and who are reprobate, and it may please God, should he be an elect, to use my love for him to bring him to salvation (Matt. 5:16).
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But the Lord loved His neighbor too. He sought the salvation of His neighbor and in fact accomplished it. But His neighbor was the one for whom He was sent into the world to die, the elect in this world whom the Father had given Him from all eternity. That neighbor was by no means kind towards Christ. That neighbor opposed him, rejected His gospel of the kingdom and finally crucified Him. But the power of the love of Christ on the cross, brought and still brings that neighbor to faith and salvation.
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This truth is clearly taught by the Lord Himself. At the time the Lord received a delegation from the imprisoned John the Baptist to inquire whether He was the Messiah or whether another was still to come, the Lord addressed the people by extolling the important place John had occupied in the working out of God’s salvation in Christ (Matt. 11:7-15). At the conclusion of this sermon, the Lord pronounced dreadful woes on the cities of Judah and spoke of the fact that Sodom and Gomorrah as well as Tyre and Sidon would not be punished as severely as Capernaum, Bethsaida and Chorazin (Matt. 11:20-24).
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Immediately after this solemn and divine pronouncement of judgment on apostate Judah, it seems the Lord paused to pray – although He must have prayed audibly: “I thank thee Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes. Even so, Father: for so it seemed good in thy sight” (Matt. 11:25, 26). This prayer was not, however, a conclusion to which the Lord was driven by what he observed as He witnessed the unbelief of the leading cities of Palestine; He not only acknowledged that such hiding and revealing belong to the sovereign work of His Father (“Thou hast hid these things . . . and revealed them . . .”), but He also emphatically states that He is on the earth to carry out this divine purpose of His Father: (“All things are delivered unto me of my Father: and no man knoweth the Son, but the Father; neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him” (27).
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I see no problem here.
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We can consider two additional questions in this letter. They are related to each other. One question asks about the possibility of hating a man’s sin, but loving the man himself. The figure of a judge is used. A judge may be utterly repelled by a man’s sin, but nevertheless have a sense of pity and compassion for the man. It is not necessarily true, so the questioner argues, that love and hatred are totally incompatible.
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The second question, related to the first, refers to Galatians 5:22, 23, where the fruit of the Spirit is defined as principally love. Did not Christ, so the question goes, have the Spirit? And did He not, therefore, love all those with whom He came into contact? The same can be said of us in our calling. We have the Spirit and if we show the fruit of the Spirit, we show love for our fellow man. Parenthetically, I observe that the question is reminiscent of our modern judicial system in which more pity is shown to the criminal than to the one against whom a crime has been committed. And, again, I remind you that sin is against “the most high majesty of God” (Heidelberg Catechism, 4/10).
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Now it seems to me that we ought to be clear on what is meant by love and hatred. And the questioner himself recognizes that an understanding of these two terms is essential to the problem.
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Love is a not a sentimental and romantic feeling. While love certainly has to do with the emotions, the emotions are, quite naturally, a part of the mind and will. Love is far more than a feeling. Scripture gives us what is almost a formal definition of love in Colossians 3:14: “And above all these things put on charity, which is the bond of perfectness.” The word translated “charity” in many places by our AV is, of course, the word for “love.” Now the text says two things about “love”. It is first of all a bond, and second, it is a bond of perfection. This definition holds whether we are talking about the love of God for Himself or for us, or the love we have for God or for our neighbor. Love is therefore, a bond of friendship and fellowship. But it is a bond that is characterized by perfection.
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Hatred, on the other hand, is exactly the opposite. Hatred is repulsion, abhorrence and total refusal to have fellowship with someone. God loves Himself as the holy and perfect One and has fellowship with Himself. That fellowship is a bond between the three persons of the holy trinity that is characterized by life, love and happiness.
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God loves His people, even while they are yet sinners (Rom. 5:8). Impossible, you say? Yes, indeed! But it is possible because God loves them in Christ and they are without sin, holy as God is, in Christ. He establishes with them a bond of fellowship that is characterized by life, love and happiness. And so great is the love of God that it reaches down to us through Christ and transforms us into a holy church in which God’s holiness itself is revealed.
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God’s hatred of the wicked is His revulsion of them because of their sins. (Psalm 5:5: "Thou hatest all the workers of iniquity;” Not: “Thou hatest iniquity,” but “Thou hatest all the workers of iniquity.”) God does not give them even for a moment any sense of His fellowship with them. He drives them away from His presence and causes them to experience His curse. When they die, He puts them into hell where they are made to suffer the just judgment of their sins. And hell is as far from God as one can be. God hated Esau, not only Esau’s sins (Malachi 1:3).
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We are called to love God; that is, to enter into fellowship with Him, live in the consciousness of that fellowship and give praise to Him as the infinitely holy One. We love Him because He first loved us and shedding abroad His love within our hearts, He makes us love Him (Rom. 5:5, I John 4:10). The work of making us as holy as He is includes the work of causing us to love Him, for holiness that comes from God draws us to Him and into His fellowship.
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Yet, as we have previously observed, God’s decree of reprobation stands behind man’s sin and punishment. Once again, this is true, not in such a way that God is the author of man’s sin, but in such a way that God’s sovereignty is revealed in the way of man’s sin and God’s just punishment for sin.
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We may not like this truth; we may protest against it; but let it be known that our puny and worthless objections do not (thank God!) change the truth and will not ever change the fact that God is absolutely sovereign in all He does. We add to our sin when we persist in our questioning. It is our calling to bow in worship and adoration. “Nay but, O man, who art thou that repliest against God? Shall the thing formed say to him that formed it, Why hast thou made me thus? Hath not the potter power over the clay, of the same lump to make one vessel unto honour, and another unto dishonour? What if God, willing to shew his wrath, and to make his power known, endured with must longsuffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction” (Rom. 920-22)?
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The difficult part comes in our calling to love our neighbor when our neighbor is wicked. When our neighbor is holy as we are, that is, also a saved sinner, that love is (at least, theologically; in fact very difficult) no problem. We love our wives, our children and our fellow saints because we love God as they love God. We have fellowship with them and live in the bond of life, love and joy.
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But some of our neighbors are wicked. How are we to love them? This is how we must do it. The answer seems so obvious. Because love is the bond of holiness, our love for them is an earnest desire to have them saved. We do not know who are God’s people and who are not. We hope and pray they may be elect, loved by God, and so we seek their salvation. This does not mean that we neglect their needs; God placed them on our pathway because they need us. But we supply their needs in order to seek their salvation. We bring them food when they are hungry, but in order that we may display the love God has for us who are undeserving sinners; we, therefore, tell them that such love as God has for us, poor sinners, can and also will be theirs, if they repent of their sins and turn to Christ in faith.
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Obviously such love is a “one-way street,” for we refuse to have fellowship with them in their sin. In that sense of the word, we love them, but hate their sin. We, in our love for them, condemn their sin and seek their repentance. We refuse to have fellowship with them in their sin, just because we love them and seek their salvation. God acts towards us in the same way, though in an infinitely higher way. He shows His hatred of sin and His love for us in giving us Jesus Christ – while we were yet sinners. And in Jesus Christ we are sanctified and have the true fellowship of love with Him.
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How that all works out in our lives is obvious. Our love for our neighbors has the same two-fold effect as the preaching of the gospel, for that kind of witness is empowered by the gospel. Our love for our neighbor will either save or harden. It will save our wives, our children, our fellow saints and God’s elect among the unbelievers. But the love we show to our neighbor will also harden the reprobate in their sin. God does good in all the gifts He gives them and they are hardened in their hatred against God. So with our gifts to them. Try it once. Go to them in God’s name and in the name of Christ. The more we bring to them our earnest entreaties for them to repent and believe in Christ, the angrier they become, for they do not want to be told that they are sinners who will perish if they do not repent.
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God works His salvation through us, for He always uses His church to accomplish His purpose in the world. As the wicked increase in their hardening we find it increasingly difficult to have anything to do with them. They want nothing to do with us. They despise the gospel we bring to them and despise us for continuing to bring it. They demonstrate that they hate God and hate those who represent the cause of God in the world. And so the time comes when the child of God cannot even have that limited one-way-street-love any more. He can no longer seek their salvation, for they slam the door in his face. Every child of God has experienced this. And the believer’s response is: “Do not I hate them, O Lord, that hate thee” (Psalm 139:21)?
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For myself as well as for others who sincerely desire to know the truth of these matters, it is essential that we begin with God and not with ourselves or our conceptions of what God ought to be like. As I said before, we cannot climb the ladder of our own thinking to reach the dwelling place of God who makes the heavens His throne and the earth His footstool. We will always end up fashioning our conception of God according to the pattern of what we think He ought to be.
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God must reveal Himself; that is, He must tell us who He is and what He does. Scripture is very, very clear on how great God is. I sometimes think it would be well for us simply to sit down and read Job 38-41, for, if we truly hear God speak, we will say with Job, “I know that thou canst do everything, and that no thought can be withholden from thee. Who is he that hideth counsel without knowledge? Therefore I have uttered that I understood not; things too wonderful for me, which I knew not. Hear, I beseech thee, and I will speak; I will demand of thee, and declare unto me. I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee. Wherefore I abhor myself, and repent in dust and ashes” (Job 42:1-6).
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Or perhaps we ought to read Paul’s cry at the conclusion of Romans 9-11: “”O the depth of the riches both of the wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments, and his ways past finding out! Or who hath first given to him, and it shall be recompensed unto him again? For of him, and through him, and to him, are all things: to whom be glory for ever. Amen” (11:33-36).
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That is a summons to lay our hands on our mouths and bow in the earth in worship!
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With warmest regards,
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Prof Hanko