As we continue to discuss what the phrase “God is love” means, we must wake up to reality though some will think it is brutal. What some call God’s love in saving sinners is really nothing more than sentimental humanism. If God saved sinners from hell and did not give them a true love for Himself in their heart, then the new birth did not happen and sinners have wicked hearts and yet would be delivered from something called hell. What this ends up as is simply a false god and no true salvation. What we end up with is a group of sinners who love nothing but themselves and what is good for them ending up in heaven where all the focus is on God. They would absolutely hate it there. Saving sinners from hell is not the whole of true salvation. True salvation is being saved from a sinful heart which earns hell and being given a love for God in order to love Him. If we only have a God who is focused on doing external good for human beings, then there is nothing but hell left for us all.
When men and women want to be loved for who they are and what they are, they are cutting their own spiritual throats in their pride. How wicked it is to wish for God the Father to turn from His love for His Son to love human beings. How wicked it is for us to want the Son to focus His love on us rather than on the Father. This shows us that we don’t really want to be saved from sin, self, and pride, but we want to be saved with the wickedness of our sin of self and pride intact. Until we desire for God to save us from our self-love and pride, we don’t really want to be saved from sin and to love God in truth. Until we desire to be delivered from our self-love and pride our only desire is to be delivered from hell. Our desires to be delivered from hell also reflect our idolatry in many cases. If we desire to be delivered from hell even if God has to change and be idolatrous to do so, then we don’t love God and instead love ourselves at the expense of God.
The so-called “Gospel” in most of America today is about a god that loves human beings so much that he could not live without them. He wanted them so much that he sent his son to go and do something so that human beings would not have to suffer. That is not the Gospel of God, that is the gospel that sinners love while staying in their sins. They want to be delivered from the guilt of their sins and not the power of sin itself which resides in their hearts in self-love and pride. Oh sure they will go to church and start to live better in an outwardly moral way. Oh sure they will make some self-sacrifice because escaping hell is worth it. So we end up pleading with men and women who are in the bondage of self-love and pride to trust in Christ out of motives and intents that are no better than their self-love and pride afford. The true Gospel demands that men and women repent of their sin of self-love and pride. The true Gospel is that God changes the hearts of men and women from their self-love and pride and gives them a love for Himself and even shares His life of love with them.
It matters little whether people are Reformed or not in the academic or creedal sense if they do not see that God loves Himself in perfect love and the only hope of sinners is that God would change the hearts of sinners based on His love for Himself and give them that fountain of love that He has and will rejoice in for all eternity. When the evangelism of modern people who call themselves Reformed really has no difference with the Arminians and Pelagians except a little better theology, then we know that there is a problem. Most likely it is located in the area we are discussing now in what the phrase “God is love” means. If we do not believe and love the teaching that God loves Himself and our only hope is in that, then our foundation to understand the Gospel is weak at best. If people are going around evangelizing people based on a method that God loves them so much and now they must do something, they have missed the true Gospel. If we go to people to get them to believe something or to get them to make a choice based only on their self-love, we have a message for them that will leave them in their sins and perhaps harden them in their self-love and pride. We have given them a false gospel and not the Gospel of God.
I hope that it has become obvious that the teaching that God loves Himself has important and vital ramifications for all theology and of life. It is not just something we can tack on here and there, it is utterly vital to all of Christianity. As we have seen in previous posts, it is this understanding of God which helps us to understand grace in its beauty and glory. It is this understanding of God which alone allows for a perfectly sinless Savior and so a true Savior. It is this teaching alone that gives the sinner any true hope of being delivered from self and pride and so to deny self and go to Christ. Self-love and pride will never move a sinner to anything more than self-love and pride. Self-love will never cast out self-love and pride only blinds us to our pride. We must have a triune God who loves Himself so much that He sent His Son to deliver us from hell and from the bondage of self-love and pride. That same Beloved Son lives in His people by love and faith. That same Son gives and is grace itself.
God Loves... Himself 
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