Growing in Assurance of God’s Love
Saved to be a son.
We’re currently going through book of Exodus together on Sunday mornings as a church. Recently, in preaching on Exodus 4, I focused particularly on verses 22-23:
Then you shall say to Pharaoh, ‘Thus says the Lord, Israel is my firstborn son,and I say to you, “Let my son go that he may serve me.” If you refuse to let him go, behold, I will kill your firstborn son.’ ”
My hope was to unpack the nature of God’s redemption: he saves us from slavery in sin to enjoying life as his son. In 4:22-23, the idea of Israel as God’s firstborn son is clearly prominent. As we read the rest of Scripture we see that through Jesus the Son we can enjoy life with God our Father. He does not related to us begrudgingly but as a loving father to his children. As Paul encourages the Galatians, “So you are no longer a slave, but a son, and if a son, then an heir through God” (Gal 4:7). Likewise, the Apostle John declares, “See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are. The reason why the world does not know us is that it did not know him” (1 Jn 3:1). It’s a common theme throughout Scripture: we are redeemed to enjoy life as God’s children.
The question this has raised for me is that if I have been redeemed to be a son of God, why do I seem to prefer to live in slavery? Why do I want to stay in Egypt when I’ve been offered life in the promised land? The answer I’ve been mulling over is that I prefer slavery to sonship because my vision for the Christian life is just too small. I fail to realize how incredible of a blessing it is to be made a child of God by grace. I’m not grasping how great God’s love is for me.
A little help from Calvin.
I’m currently in the process of re-reading Calvin’s Institutes at a relatively leisurely pace. As I was reading this morning, I was struck that he addresses the concern I’ve been considering.
Therefore, by his love God the Father goes before and anticipates our reconciliation in Christ. Indeed, “because he first loved us” [1 John 4:19], he afterward reconciles us to himself. But until Christ succors us by his death, the unrighteousness that deserves God’s indignation remains in us, and is accursed and condemned before him. Hence, we can be fully and firmly joined with God only when Christ joins us with him. If, then, we would be assured that God is pleased with and kindly disposed toward us, we must fix our eyes and minds on Christ alone. For actually, through him alone we escape the imputation of our sins to us—an imputation bringing with it the wrath of God.*
In this section, Calvin is arguing that God loves us even before we’re reconciled to him through Christ. His love, in fact, is what prompts him to redeem us. One line in particular stood out to me:
If, then, we would be assured that God is pleased with and kindly disposed toward us, we must fix our eyes and minds on Christ alone.
The way for us to rest in God’s love—his pleasure and his kind disposition for us—is to look to Christ.
Fix our eyes and minds on Christ alone.
If we want to know how much the Father loves us, we look to Jesus. It does not get much more fundamental to our faith than this: ““For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (Jn 3:16). Jesus reveals the Father’s love for us.
Scripture invites us to say even more about how great God’s love for us is. How the Father loves the Son is how by grace he loves us. Hear how Jesus prays in his high priestly prayer, “. . . so that the world may know that you sent me and loved them even as you loved me” (Jn 17:23). Jesus prays based on the fact that the Father loves his children by grace just as he loves the Son. Our lives are now “hidden with Christ in God” (Col 3:3). Now that we have been united with Christ by faith and through the Holy Spirit, the Father looks on us and sees Jesus. We share in God the Son’s relationship to the Father because the Son came for us so that we could receive adoption as sons.
This truth that when we see and hear the Father’s love for his Son Jesus, we can, by faith, be assured that we now share in that love. Thus, when the Father announces over Jesus, “This is my beloved Son with whom I am well pleased.” By faith, we can receive these words for ourselves. In Christ, each person is now a beloved child of our heavenly Father. May we fix our eyes and minds on Christ alone to be reminded of this great love.
*John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, The Library of Christian Classics (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011), II.XVI.3 (vol 1, 506).
