We run our website the way we wished the whole internet worked: we provide high quality original content with no ads. We are funded solely by your direct support. Please consider supporting this project.
The Perfect Love of God
The Father, Son and Spirit exist as the infinite intensity and unsurpassable perfection of eternal love. We know this about the triune God not by speculation but because Jesus demonstrated that love (Rom 5:8) in his willingness to go to the furthest extreme possible to save us. When the all-holy God stooped to become our sin and our God-forsaken curse, which is the very antithesis of himself (2 Cor. 5:21; Gal. 3:13), he revealed the kind of love that God is. This is a love that could not possibly be made greater than it is.
Nothing could possibly reveal the love of the Trinity more than the God-forsakenness of the cross, as demonstrated when Jesus cries out, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matt 27:46). For the truth is, no sacrifice could possibly be greater than for Son of God to experience God-forsakenness on our behalf. How could anything be further from the Trinity—united in unsurpassable, intense love—than for God to experience his antithesis?
To support this claim, I want to quote a few people. Feldmeier and Spieckermann observe that Jesus’ revelation of God’s very nature as love “attained perfection in his Passion.”[1] Anders Nygren states that in the New Testament, “the Cross of Christ and the love of God are viewed as one.”[2] And Michael Gorman reasons: “If on the cross Christ conformed to God, then God ‘conforms’ to the cross.” In this light, Gorman argues, we can only conclude that “[t]he cross is the interpretive, or hermeneutical, lens through which God is seen; it is the means of grace by which God is known.”[3] In my estimation, there could not be a revelatory insight that is more important than this one.
The Crucifixion cannot be regarded as merely one of the many acts Jesus engaged in during his earthly life. Nor should we think that it is a mere contingent fact that God’s love is fully revealed on the cross, as though God could have just as easily expressed it in some other way. We need to grasp the logic inherent in the revelation of God in the God-forsaken criminal hanging on Golgotha. The cross is God’s quintessential revelation precisely because the unsurpassable perfection of the love that defines the Triune God throughout eternity is inextricably linked to the unsurpassable extremity of his sacrifice.
God is revealed to be a God whose love could not be improved upon precisely by making a sacrifice of love that could not possibly be improved on. The infinite intensity of the love that unites the three Persons is revealed in the infinite intensity of the pain God experienced when God the Son became his very antithesis and experienced sin and God-forsakenness on our behalf.
In this light, while we must affirm that everything about Jesus’ life and teachings reflects God’s loving character, I submit that it his sacrifice on the cross that does so most profoundly and most unambiguously. And it could not be otherwise, in my view. For only by condescending to dive an infinite distance into our hellish sin and God-forsakenness could the infinite intensity of God’s perfect love be expressed outside the triune community.
[1] Feldmeier, Spieckermann, God of the Living (Waco, TX: Baylor Univerisity Press, 2015), 127,
[2] A. Nygren Agape and Eros, trans. P. S. Watson (London: SPCK, 1953), 117
[3] M. Gorman, Cruciformity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 17.
Photo credit: Lawrence OP via Visual Hunt / CC BY-NC-ND
Category: General
Tags: Cross, Cruciform Theology, God is Love, Jesus, Triune Love
Topics: Attributes and Character
Related Reading
Eye for Eye: That Time Jesus Refuted An Old Testament Teaching
One of the most surprising aspects of Jesus’ teaching is that, while he clearly shared his contemporaries’ view of the Old Testament as inspired by God, he was nevertheless not afraid of repudiating it when he felt led by his Father to do so (Jn. 8:28; 12:49-50; 14:31). For example, while the OT commands people…
Did Jesus Encourage a Flat Power Structure in the Church?
Greg talks about church leadership. http://traffic.libsyn.com/askgregboyd/Episode_0053.mp3
Crucifixion of the Warrior God Update
Did you know that authors generally don’t have much say-so about the cover art for their books? It’s considered part of the marketing, so the author may or may not like how it ends up looking. I’ve had a few book covers that made me scratch my head. (I won’t tell you which ones, but it would…
Was Jesus Violent in the Temple?
Many adopt the attitude depicted in the picture above, saying that Jesus used violence when he cleansed the temple. But Jesus’ stance on nonviolence is clear not only from how he responded to threatening enemies at the end of his life; it’s also strongly emphasized his teachings. We need to understand what Jesus was up…
The Centrality of Christ in Hebrews, Part 2
The intensely Christocentric reading of the Old Testament that I introduced in the previous post is reflected throughout the book of Hebrews. Here I want to cite two more examples of how this writer saw Christ at the center of the OT. Hebrews 7 Here the author argues for the superiority of Christ’s priesthood over…
Do the Gospels Fabricate Prophetic Fulfillment?
Skeptically-inclined scholars, and especially critics of Christianity, frequently argue that the Gospel authors created mythological portraits of Jesus largely on the basis of OT material they claim Jesus “fulfilled.” In other words, they surveyed the OT and fabricated stories about how Jesus fulfilled those prophecies. In response, it’s hard to deny that there are certain…