His Love Endures For Ever

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Description

Garry Williams teaches at London Theological Seminary and Westminster Theological Seminary, Philadelphia. In his latest book he provides a doctrinal and devotional exploration of the love of God. Williams alerts us to the danger of repeating the words ‘God is love’ as a formula without thinking what we are saying, for it can be (and often has been) seriously misunderstood. What is needed is that we understand this statement in its wider biblical context and in co-ordination with other great Bible truths (eg ‘God is light’).

The twelve chapters of this book each consist of a doctrinal explanation of some aspect of God’s love, followed by a meditation on its spiritual significance and a closing prayer. Williams is serious in his aim of addressing both head and heart. We discover that God’s love is immeasurably greater and more wonderful than our own poor version, so that his love is not to be judged by human standards.

As fragile and fallen creatures we cannot know God and his love unaided. We are bound to have wrong ideas about his love that need to be corrected by the light of Scripture, and this calls for humility and repentance. We need the saving work of God the Son and the renewing work of God the Spirit, with the Christ-focussed Scriptures as our infallible guide to the truth about God. The Bible is a rich mosaic of images that together show us what God is really like.

The fact of the Trinity means that God did not need to create the world to have someone to love. God’s love is anterior to all other loves, and so it is the definition and test of all other loves. The Father eternally loves the Son and his Spirit, and they respond in love to him. Williams gives a moving description of this eternal divine love-community. God is not selfish to love himself and his glory first of all and above all, and our love is disordered and misplaced if we do not love God before all other objects. There are, of course, other legitimate lesser loves (eg., spouse, family) that find their proper proportion in relation to our chief love for God, otherwise they will turn into forms of enslavement and abuse and lead to the loss and death of the thing or one we love.