God’s Conditional Love (Evangelism, Part 4A)
Series: Evangelism (Part 4A)
Author: Dr. Steven L. Childers
Title: God’s Conditional Love
Message of Christ’s Saving Life
We begin looking now at what we’re calling the Gospel Events, beginning with Jesus’ birth. This is the theological doctrine of the incarnation.
His Birth
When describing Jesus’ birth, people often say, “God became a man.” There's a sense in which that's true. But you need to understand that in the incarnation, the Triune God didn't become a man. Instead it was the second person of the Trinity, the eternal Son of God who took on humanity, meaning a human soul and body. The eternal Son of God humbled himself and assumed the fullness of humanity but without sin.
His Life
One of the reasons the eternal Son of God took on the fullness of humanity is so that he might live a sinless life in our place. At Jesus’ baptism, when John the Baptist was hesitant to baptize Jesus, Jesus said to him, “Let it be so now to fulfill all righteousness.”
John the Baptist is looking at him in astonishment and saying, ”Me, baptize you?” It’s important to realize that Jesus came to do what Adam, and we who are in the lineage of Adam because of the imputation of Adam's sin, failed to do. Jesus came to live a sinless life in our place.
Notice what Paul writes in Romans 5: “Through the obedience of the one man, the many will be made (or declared) righteous.” The concept here that is often missing in the contemporary gospel is that Jesus saves you just as much by his sacrificial life as by his sacrificial death.
Jonathan Edwards put it this way: “Every act of Christ's obedience was propitious.” To propitiate is to satiate something. In his death Jesus satiated the wrath of God we deserved. And God did this to manifest the fullness of His holy justness.
To understand the gospel means to understand not only the good news of Christ's death for you, but also understand the good news of his life for you. He saved you just as much by his life as by his death.
Hear this good news: in every way that we have faced the reality of God's moral commands, been tempted to sin and failed, he has come to that same place, was tempted and suffered horribly resisting that same temptation, but he won, in other words he was severely tempted but without sin, Hebrews 2 and 4 tells us.
And therefore, through a process of many years of suffering against sin, he earned a perfect record resisting temptation and obeying God in our place.
This is why, in a strict sense, God cannot ever love unconditionally or he would be unjust. Let me try to clarify. The Christian understanding of God is not that God can do anything. There are several things the Bible teaches that God cannot do. God cannot lie. God cannot be tempted. God cannot change. And it’s also not possible for God to love unconditionally or He would no longer be just.
As a seminary professor, I would often tell the students that if I preach in their future churches they should know ahead of time what my sermon title will be. It will be
“God's Conditional Love” with a subtitle “How we can only be saved by good works.”
Throughout the Old Testament and New Testament, God has always and only saved people by good works. That’s because God can only save people by good works.
But the good news is that it's not your good works. We can only be saved by the good works of Jesus Christ.
In other words, God cannot grant, what we call today, amnesty. And a lot of people misunderstand that the good news of the gospel is that God somehow winks at sin, or like a political leader, just grants amnesty.
Never forget, there are certain things God can't do. He can't change. He can't lie. He can't be God and not be God. He can't be tempted. And he can't grant amnesty. You know what unconditional love normally communicates to people? Amnesty.
And people wrongly say things like, “You know what grace is?” We've been legalistic and moralistic, and now we're discovering grace. Basically, “Do you not know the depth of God's amnesty for you?”
Why do you think this kind of statement makes me angry?