He Loved First

Everything gathered so far points toward one kind of love: a love that is named by its object, and an object that is God Himself, loved by keeping His commandments.

Yet Scripture will not let anyone begin there. Before it speaks of our love for God, it speaks of His love for us, and it says plainly which came first.

1 John 4:19 We love Him because He first loved us.

The order matters. Love toward God is never the first move. It is always an answer.

Not Because You Were More

On the plains of Moab, before Israel crossed into the land, Moses told the people why God had loved them.

Deuteronomy 7:7-8 Not because you were more than all the peoples did the LORD set His love upon you and choose you — for you were the fewest of all the peoples — but because of the LORD's love for you, and because He kept the oath which He swore to your fathers, the LORD brought you out with a strong hand, and redeemed you from the house of slaves, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.

“Did the LORD set His love upon you” is chashaq and “The LORD’s love for you” is ahavah, the same two words that also told of Shechem’s desire in Chapter 4. What sets God’s love apart is not the words but what He did and why.

Moses began by saying what the reason was not. It was “not because you were more than all the peoples.” Israel was not chosen for its size, for in fact it was “the fewest of all the peoples.” Then he gives the real reason, and the reason is entirely on God’s side: “because of the LORD’s love for you, and because He kept the oath which He swore to your fathers.” The reason lay entirely within God Himself: He loved them because He loved them, and He kept the oath because He had sworn it.

That love was not a feeling held at a distance. It acted. “The LORD brought you out with a strong hand, and redeemed you from the house of slaves, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.” The people God set His love upon were slaves in Egypt when He did it. They had nothing to offer Him. He loved first, and then He redeemed.

An Everlasting Love

The prophet Jeremiah heard the same love spoken in the first person.

Jeremiah 31:3 From afar the LORD appeared to me; and with an everlasting love I have loved you; therefore I have drawn you with lovingkindness.

“An everlasting love” is ahavat olam, a love that reaches as far as time reaches. The verb “drawn” in its last line is mashakh, to draw out, to pull toward. The people did not find their own way back to God. He drew them, and the cord He drew them with was His chesed חֶסֶד kheh'-sed, the steadfast covenant loyalty of Exodus 20:6 and Deuteronomy 7:9. The love that chose them is also the love that keeps pulling them home.

While We Were Still Sinners

The New Testament says the same thing of the love that sent the Son.

Romans 5:8 but God demonstrates His own agape ἀγάπη ag-ah'-pay(love) toward us in that while we were still sinners, Messiah died for us.

“Demonstrates” translates synistesin: God sets out His love where it can be seen. And He chose the time in which to show it: “while we were still sinners.” Paul does not say that Messiah died for people who had already turned to God, or who had begun to love Him; He died for them before any such turning. That is the same order Moses described, and Paul is not announcing a new idea; this is the everlasting love of Jeremiah at work. God did not wait for people to clean themselves up, learn the commandments and present themselves to Him. He set His love on slaves before He brought them out, and He gave His Son for sinners before they believed.

This is why a sinner is justified by grace through faith, as a gift, and never by keeping commandments in order to win God’s favor. No one can earn a love that was given while he was still a sinner, and no one can buy a love for which, the Song says, a man who gave all the wealth of his house “would be utterly despised.”

God Is Love

John puts the whole matter into a few verses of his first letter.

1 John 4:8-10 Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. 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. In this is love: not that we have loved God but that He loved us and sent His Son as the propitiation for our sins.

“God is love.” John does not say merely that God has love, or that He shows love now and then. Love belongs to who He is, and it was made manifest when God sent His only Son into the world. Verse 10, “In this is love,” is built much like the definition in 1 John 5:3, “this is the love of God,” yet what follows here is not our love for God but His love for us, which sent His Son as the propitiation for our sins.

The passage opens with a warning: “Anyone who does not love does not know God.” Love and knowing God stand together, and Scripture has much to say about what it means to know Him.

The Order Holds Together

Now the order can be seen as one line. God loved first. Because He loved first, we love Him. And love toward Him, John says only a few verses later, is this: “that we keep His commandments” (1 John 5:3). The order does not set grace and commandments against each other. It sets them in sequence.

The Torah itself follows the same order. Before God gave a single commandment at Sinai, He said who He was and what He had done.

Exodus 20:2 I am the LORD your God, who brought you out from the land of Egypt, from the house of servants.

The redemption comes first; the commandments follow. Deuteronomy 7 does the same. Verse 8 tells how God loved and redeemed the people, and verse 9 follows at once: He is “the faithful God (El), keeping the covenant (berit בְּרִית ber-eeth') and the kindness to those who love Him and to those who keep His commandments (mitzvah מִצוָה mits-vaw').”

So the command to love God is never a demand made on strangers. It is spoken to people who have already been loved, already been chosen while they were few, already been redeemed while they were slaves, already been drawn with an everlasting love. Their love is an answer, and the answer takes the shape of keeping His commandments.

That answer can reach as far as a life laid down. Yeshua spoke of a love greater than any other, and He defined it in words that join agape and phileo φιλέω fil-eh'-o, doing what He commands and giving one’s life.