52 Books, 52 Weeks (Book 3)
Though it is a short book (84 pages), The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God by DA Carson is a weighty and difficult read but worth the effort. It's divided into four chapters that were originally given as lectures:
- On Distorting the Love of God
- God is Love
- God's Love and God's Sovereignty
- God's Love and God's Wrath
It is difficult to reconcile the wrath of God with the love of God and the love of God with His sovereignty over a world filled with evil. On a personal level, it is challenging to believe that God loves me, when I see all that is unlovable in me clearly. This book addresses all these issues from a theological perspective but also in its practical implications.
A highlight from chapter 2,
What we have then, is a picture of God whose love, even in eternity past, even before the creation of anything, is other-oriented. This cannot be said (for instance) of Allah. Yet because the God of the Bible is one, this plurality-in-unity does not destroy his entirely appropriate self-focus as God. As we shall see in the last chapter, because He is God, He is therefore rightly jealous....The love of Allah is providential, which, as we saw in the first chapter, is one of the ways the Bible speaks of God. But here there is more: in eternity past, the Father loved the Son, and the Son loved the Father. There has always been an other-orientation to the love of God. All the manifestations of the love of God emerge out of this deeper, more fundamental reality: love is bound up in the very nature of God. God is love.
- page 39
The book sweeps from the intra-trinitarian love of God (as highlighted above) to His love for the world and His love for the elect which culminates on and is displayed most profoundly on the Cross. The book concludes with the practical implication of absorbing the kind of love described in Ephesians 3:14-21,
All this has transformed us, so that we in turn perceive the sheer rightness of the first commandment - to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength. As that is the first and greatest commandment, so the first and greatest sin is not to love God with heart and soul and mind and strength. For this there is no remedy, save what God himself has provided - in love.
- page 84
I do recommend this book to anyone who has a love for doctrine and wrestles with believing God's love but I wouldn't hand this book to just anyone. The original lectures the book is based on were given to seminary students and some areas of the book are difficult to understand (though worth wading through if you're so inclined).
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