One thing I am intuitively sure of: God’s ways are higher than mine. Which means: if he reveals his ways of loving me through the Bible, they will certainly be shocking.
The ease with which mankind dares to tell God how it should love is impressive. There is only one way to know how God loves me: to listen to what He says and to believe in him.
- One of the things he tells me in the Bible is that he has loved Israel from eternity in a different way than he loves other nations.
- And then tells me that there is a true Israel made up of believers in the Messiah Jesus.
- Whom he has loved since eternity in a different way than he loves others.
- It’s shocking.
In the Old and New Testaments, God strives to tell us, like a prince who tells a dirty and disgusting orphan: you are mine, I love you like no one else, I will raise you, cleanse you, and marry you (Ezekiel 16:1-14).
God said to Israel in exile, “For I loved you with eternal love, do I draw you with kindness?”(Jeremiah 31:3). Behind all the divine acts of love in israel’s history was eternal love. loved before she existed.
“Was not the Lord pleased in you, nor did he choose you, for thy multitude was more than that of all other peoples?But why did the Lord love you (Deuteronomy 7:7-8)?He loved her differently from all nations, because he loved her. It wasn’t caused by that. That was before it existed.
He told her that this love was only for her, not for Sau and the Edomites. “I loved you, ” said the Lord, but you say, “How did you love us?””Wasn’t that Sau Jacob’s brother?” Said the Lord; However, did I love Jacob and aborrecí to Sau?(Malachi 1: 2-3). It’s shocking, will we hear it?He loved Israel, Eternity.
In the New Testament, does Paul make it clear that all the time there was a true Israel, a remnant in the nation of Israel?Those who truly trust in the Messiah Jesus. “But what is inside is Jewish, and circumcision is that of the heart, in the mind, not in the letter; Whose praise comes not from men, but from God?(Romans 2:29). In other words, are they not children of the flesh who are children of God, but are the children of promise considered descendants?(Romans 9: 8).
And are these “Sons of God,” he continues to say, not only among the Jews, but also among the Gentiles?(Romans 9:24). Anyone who believes in him will not be confused, why is there no distinction between Jew and Greek?(Romans 10: 11-12).
So does it clearly say that these true Jews, these children of God, these believers in the Messiah, have been loved by God since eternity, unlike all others?
“How did you also choose us before the foundation of the world?Did love predestined us to the children adopted by Jesus Christ?(Ephesians 1:4-5). Did he love us before we were created or adopted?Or married, like a prince looking at a kingdom of bad traitors and choosing his wife as the one who despises him.
That’s what he tells me in the Bible about how he loves me. Did you save me, according to your own purpose and the grace that was given to us [in me] in Christ Jesus before the times of the centuries?(2 Timothy 1 : 9). Before creation, he already loved me that way.
Paul calls it “great love. ” And what makes him great, he says, is that by him, God appeared to me, in my bloodied, dirty, treacherous, numb heart, and gave me life. “For the great love with which He loved us, God gave Life with Christ?(Ephesians 2: 4-5) A great love has given us life.
It’s shocking. It’s often more than I can handle. Did you find me dead, like the rest of humanity? (Ephesians 2: 3). But it didn’t leave me dead, though, what I deserved. He looked at my smelly grave and said, “Joo, get out? (John 11:43). He gave me the gift of faith. (Ephesians 2:8, Philippians 1:29) He adopted me, he included me in his village, his wife.
It’s a world of love different from everything we know among men. Understanding this love, feeling this love, is not natural. Knowing this love, feeling this love for what it is, requires the experience of this love, which is the action of that love in itself.
You want to be loved like that? Maybe not. Surely it would be natural to demand that God love more democratically, more universally, that he did not choose Israel among all nations, that he did not choose a wife among all peoples, you may not want to be loved like this.
But if you understand what he says, and you want to be loved in this way, then give yourself to that love that is already working in you, and embrace your full incarnation, Jesus, the Son of God and Messiah. Confess with your mouth that Jesus is the Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved (Romans 10:9), you will discover that you have been loved with great love for all eternity. I pray that he will.