(b) Since God's love is rational, it involves a subordination of the emotional element to a higher law than itself, namely, that of truth and holiness.
Phil. 1:9—“And this I pray, that your love may abound yet more and more in knowledge and all discernment.” True love among men illustrates God's love. It merges self in another instead of making that other an appendage to self. It seeks the other's true good, not merely his present enjoyment or advantage. Its aim is to realize the divine idea in that other, and therefore it is exercised for God's sake and in the strength which God supplies. Hence it is a love for holiness, and is under law to holiness. So God's love takes into account the highest interests, and makes infinite sacrifice to secure them. For the sake of saving a world of sinners, God “spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all” (Rom. 8:32), and “Jehovah hath laid on him the iniquity of us all” (Is. 53:6). Love requires a rule or standard for its regulation. This rule or standard is the holiness of God. So once more we see that love cannot include holiness, because it is subject to the law of holiness. Love desires only the best for its object, and the best is God. The golden rule does not bid us give what others desire, but what they need: Rom. 15:2—“Let each one of us please his neighbor for that which is good, unto edifying.”
(c) The immanent love of God therefore requires and finds a perfect standard in his own holiness, and a personal object in the image of his own infinite perfections. It is to be understood only in the light of the doctrine of the Trinity.
As there is a higher Mind than our mind, so there is a greater Heart than our heart. God is not simply the loving One—he is also the Love that is loved. There is an infinite life of sensibility and affection in God. God has feeling, and in an infinite degree. But feeling alone is not love. Love implies not merely receiving but giving, not merely emotion but impartation. So the love of God is shown in his eternal giving. James 1:5—“God, who giveth,” or “the giving God” (τοῦ διδόντος Θεοῦ) = giving is not an episode in his being—it is his nature to give. And not only to give, but to give himself. This he does eternally in the self-communications of the Trinity; this he does transitively and temporally in his giving of himself for us in Christ, and to us in the Holy Spirit.
Jonathan Edwards, Essay on Trinity (ed. G. P. Fisher), 79—“That in John God is love shows that there are more persons than one in the Deity, for it shows love to be essential and necessary to the Deity, so that his nature consists in it, and this supposes that there is an eternal and necessary object, because all love respects another that is the beloved. By love here the apostle certainly means something beside that which is commonly called self-love: that is very improperly called love, and is a thing of an exceeding diverse nature from the affection or virtue of love the apostle is speaking of.” When Newman Smyth, Christian Ethics, 226-239, makes the first characteristic of love to be self-affirmation, and when Dorner, Christian Ethics, 73, makes self-assertion an essential part of love, they violate linguistic usage by including under love what properly belongs to holiness.
(d) The immanent love of God constitutes a ground of the divine blessedness. Since there is an infinite and perfect object of love, as well as of knowledge and will, in God's own nature, the existence of the universe is not necessary to his serenity and joy.
Blessedness is not itself a divine attribute; it is rather a result of the exercise of the divine attributes. It is a subjective result of this exercise, as glory is an objective result. Perfect faculties, with perfect objects for their exercise, ensure God's blessedness. But love is especially its source. Acts 20:35—“It is more blessed to give than to receive.”Happiness (hap, happen) is grounded in circumstances; blessedness, in character. [pg 266]Love precedes creation and is the ground of creation. Its object therefore cannot be the universe, for that does not exist, and, if it did exist, could not be a proper object of love for the infinite God. The only sufficient object of his love is the image of his own perfections, for that alone is equal to himself. Upton, Hibbert Lectures, 264—“Man most truly realizes his own nature, when he is ruled by rational, self-forgetful love. He cannot help inferring that the highest thing in the individual consciousness is the dominant thing in the universe at large.” Here we may assent, if we remember that not the love itself but that which is loved must be the dominant thing, and we shall see that to be not love but holiness.
Jones, Robert Browning, 219—“Love is for Browning the highest, richest conception man can form. It is our idea of that which is perfect; we cannot even imagine anything better. And the idea of evolution necessarily explains the world as the return of the highest to itself. The universe is homeward bound.... All things are potentially spirit, and all the phenomena of the world are manifestations of love.... Man's reason is not, but man's love is, a direct emanation from the inmost being of God”(345). Browning should have applied to truth and holiness the same principle which he recognized with regard to love. But we gratefully accept his dicta: “He that created love, shall not he love?... God! thou art Love! I build my faith on that.”
(e) The love of God involves also the possibility of divine suffering, and the suffering on account of sin which holiness necessitates on the part of God is itself the atonement.
Christ is “the Lamb that hath been slain from the foundation of the world” (Rev. 13:8); 1 Pet. 1:19, 20—“precious blood, as of a lamb without blemish and without spot, even the blood of Christ: who was foreknown indeed before the foundation of the world.” While holiness requires atonement, love provides it. The blessedness of God is consistent with sorrow for human misery and sin. God is passible, or capable of suffering. The permission of moral evil in the decree of creation was at cost to God. Scripture attributes to him emotions of grief and anger at human sin (Gen. 6:6—“it grieved him at his heart”; Rom. 1:18—“wrath of God”; Eph. 4:30—“grieve not the Holy Spirit of God”); painful sacrifice in the gift of Christ (Rom. 8:32—“spared not his own son”; cf. Gen. 22:16—“hast not withheld thy son”) and participation in the suffering of his people (Is. 63:9—“in all their affliction he was afflicted”); Jesus Christ in his sorrow and sympathy, his tears and agony, is the revealer of God's feelings toward the race, and we are urged to follow in his steps, that we may be perfect, as our Father in heaven is perfect. We cannot, indeed, conceive of love without self-sacrifice, nor of self-sacrifice without suffering. It would seem, then, that as immutability is consistent with imperative volitions in human history, so the blessedness of God may be consistent with emotions of sorrow.