As I have been meditating upon the fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22–25), I have been focusing especially on its manifestation of love for the past week. Scripture, it will not surprise you to hear, has a lot to say about love — so much, in fact, that I have not been able to take it all in adequately to have the intended post on the subject ready for today. However, the following passage has given me much food for thought. Take special note of verses 6–8.
Deuteronomy 7:1 “When the Lord your God brings you into the land where you are entering to possess it, and clears away many nations before you, the Hittites and the Girgashites and the Amorites and the Canaanites and the Perizzites and the Hivites and the Jebusites, seven nations greater and stronger than you, 2 and when the Lord your God delivers them before you and you defeat them, then you shall utterly destroy them You shall make no covenant with them and show no favor to them. 3 Furthermore, you shall not intermarry with them; you shall not give your daughters to their sons, nor shall you take their daughters for your sons. 4 For they will turn your sons away from following Me to serve other gods; then the anger of the Lord will be kindled against you and He will quickly destroy you. 5 But thus you shall do to them: you shall tear down their altars, and smash their sacred pillars, and hew down their Asherim, and burn their graven images with fire. 6 For you are a holy people to the Lord your God; the Lord your God has chosen you to be a people for His own possession out of all the peoples who are on the face of the earth.
7 “The Lord did not set His love on you nor choose you because you were more in number than any of the peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples, 8 but because the Lord loved you and kept the oath which He swore to your forefathers, the Lord brought you out by a mighty hand and redeemed you from the house of slavery, from the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt. 9 Know therefore that the Lord your God, He is God, the faithful God, who keeps His covenant and His lovingkindness to a thousandth generation with those who love Him and keep His commandments; 10 but repays those who hate Him to their faces, to destroy them; He will not delay with him who hates Him, He will repay him to his face. 11 Therefore, you shall keep the commandment and the statutes and the judgments which I am commanding you today, to do them.
What stands out to me in this passage is God’s explanation for loving his people: that is, none. He says “I did not love you because . . . ,” and then, where we would expect him to say “but because you . . . ,” he skips to “but because I loved you, I . . .” In all of Scripture, God never describes his people as lovable in any way; yet he has chosen to love them. Is that not our model?
Romans 5:8 But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.
1 John 4:10 In this is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. 11 Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another.
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