Ware:

Objection 2

The universal, impartial, and equal love of God for all people demonstrates that unconditional election cannot be true. Since God is love, and since God’s love is the same for all people whom he has made, it cannot be the case that the reason some are not saved is owing to God’s choice, ultimately. Rather, some are not saved because they choose not to be saved, yet God would gladly (in love) have saved them, too, had they but come. Therefore, the election spoken of in Scripture simply cannot be unconditional election.

Reply. While Scripture clearly teaches God’s universal, impartial, and equal love for all people, this is certainly not the only, or the most central, meaning of the love of God. As D. A. Carson has explained so helpfully, the Bible actually speaks of the love of God in five different senses.³⁸ One of those five senses is God’s universal love for all (e.g., as seen in John 3:16). But another sense, one more prominent in Scripture, is God’s particular, selective, and discriminate love for his own people. Consider two representative passages, both of which reflect God’s special love for his own people, a love that moves him to save them and benefit them in a manner that distinguishes them from all others.

First, Isaiah 43 begins in a manner that believers have often found greatly comforting. “Do not fear,” God tells his people, “for I have redeemed you; I have called you by name; you are Mine” (lsa. 43:1 HCSB). Further, God promises, “I will be with you when you pass through the waters, and when you pass through the rivers, they will not overwhelm you” (lsa. 43:2 HCSB). So God establishes the fact that he is the God of his people, and he will be with them to provide for them and to protect them, for as he says to them, “you are Mine.”

The true significance of God’s special claim upon this people, his people, is about to be seen more clearly, however. We read on: “For I the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel, and your Savior, give Egypt as a ransom for you, Cush and Seba in your place. Because you are precious in My sight and honored, and I love [from aheb, “to love”] you, I will give human beings in your place, and peoples in place of your life” (Isa. 43:3-4 HCSB). Here, then, is the particular, selective, and discriminate love of God for his own. He loves his people Israel by saving them at the expense of (“in the place of”) many lives of Egyptians. Clearly this is a reference to the favor shown the Jews at the time of their exodus from Egypt. For, although God could have given the same warning and instruction in Egypt regarding the upcoming angel of death as he did among the Israelites prior to the exodus, he did not. Nor did he intend to do So.³⁹

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Valdés:

CONSIDERATION XXIV.

That they who are governed by the Holy Spirit, aspire, in serving God, to increase in the love of God.

God loves all men generally, and He loves with a particular love all those for whom He has executed the rigor of His justice upon His only begotten Son, Jesus Christ our Lord. Men generally hate God, and those hate Him with peculiar hatred who know that they have added other acts of depravity to their natural depravity.

The love which God bears to man proceeds from the great things which He has done for him; so that it stands to reason, He loves those most who are interested in the justification which is through Christ. Man’s hatred to God proceeds from the depravity, with which he offends Him, because, as the adage runs, ‘He who injures, never forgives;’ so that it stands to reason that they hate God most who have offended Him most. It appears to be reasonable, that as God is consummate perfection. He should be loved by man in the highest degree; and that man being in the highest degree imperfect, he should be in the highest degree hateful to God. It seems, likewise, that man, having received many benefits from God’s bounty, ought to love God much; and that God, not having received from man anything save insults and injuries, man should be hated by God. But, on the other hand, the obligation God has to love man, on account of the great things He has done and is doing for him, is so strong, that although He knows the highest imperfection to be in him, and that He is offended by him, He does not cease to love him; that being in this instance true of God, in relation with men, which takes place in the case of a good father with a disobedient and vicious son, who is more drawn to love him by the strength of what he has done for his son, than he is to hate

him by his disobedience and depravity. And the hatred and enmity which man has towards God, through natural depravity, and through the offenses which he has added to depravity, draw him likewise as much the other way; so that, although he recognizes in Him consummate perfection, and, beyond that, finds and feels himself benefited by God, not only is he unable to bring himself to love God, but, indeed, neither can he cease to hate Him. That occurs to man in this instance, with relation to God, which happens to a vicious and malignant son with his good father, in whom baseness and malignity have greater influence in exciting hatred to him than the knowledge of the father’s goodness, and the great obligations under which he is to his father, prompt him to love him.

Juan de Valdés, Divine Considerations, (London: William Clowes and Sons, [1906]), 269-271. [Some spelling modernized and underlining mine.]

Berkhof:

b. The love of God. When the goodness of God is exercised towards His rational creatures, it assumes the higher character of love, and this love may again be distinguished according to the objects on which it terminates. In distinction from the goodness of God in general, it may be defined as that perfection of God by which He is eternally moved to self-communication. Since God is absolutely good in Himself, His love cannot find complete satisfaction in any object that falls short of absolute perfection. He loves His rational creatures for His own sake, or, to express it otherwise, He loves in them Himself, His virtues, His work, and His gifts. He does not even withdraw His love completely from the sinner in his present sinful state, though the latter’s sin is an abomination to Him, since He recognizes even in the sinner His image-bearer. John 3:16; Matt. 5:44,45. At the same time He loves believers with a special love, since He contemplates them as His spiritual children in Christ. It is to them that He communicates Himself in the fullest and richest sense, with all the fullness of His grace and mercy. John 16:27; Rom. 5:8 ; I John 3:1 .

Louis Berkhof, Systematic Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1969), 71. [Italics original; and underlining mine.]

Brown:

Now, what are the elements of this love of Christians towards all men? They are obviously not the same as in the case of brotherly kindness. This is not the love of approbation or of  complacential esteem; for a Christian cannot approve of, cannot delight in, worldly and wicked men. Its leading element is good-will–a sincere and ardent wish for their true happiness, especially in the form of cordial commiseration–deep pity, for the hazardous and miserable condition in which their guilt and depravity have placed them.

As to the appropriate manifestations of this love, I begin with remarking, that it must be manifested in abstaining from everything like injury to any man. “Love works no ill to his neighbor.” It cannot work ill to him. He who loves his neighbor cannot injure him, either in his person, or in his property, or in his relatives, or in his reputation.

But this love is not a mere negation–the absence of hatred producing the absence of injury. It is positive good-will–kind regard producing benefits. This love is manifested in thinking of, and feeling towards, all men, as kindly as possible, even though obviously not belonging to the Christian brotherhood. In human nature unchanged by divine influence, there is indeed no spiritual good; but there may be much that is amiable, much that is morally estimable in unrenewed men. Some of these qualities are perhaps, in all men. It were absurd to deny that there are candor and truthfulness, and honor, and kindness, in some men plainly irreligious; and an enlightened Christian loves these men for such qualities just as his Lord loved the  young man who had not yet entered, and would not enter, into the kingdom of God. The love which Christians should cherish to unconverted men ought to be manifested chiefly in earnest, persevering endeavors to relieve their wants and miseries, and bring them into the possession of true happiness. Their endeavors to relieve the miseries of poverty and disease are not to be confined to the brotherhood. It is enough that the victim of poverty and disease be a man, to give him a resistless claim on the kind regard of a Christian, who has added charity to brotherly kindness and godliness.

“Not to the good alone we owe good-will: In good or bad, distress demands it still.”¹

The wants and miseries of men, as guilty, depraved, wretched already, and in danger of becoming much more and irreparably wretched, are those which chiefly bulk in the eye of an enlightened Christian man, and call out his love, in the form of pity, to active exertions in order to their removal. It is love that makes him desire and endeavor to save souls from death. To provide for the ignorant the means of instruction, especially religious instruction; to seek the prevention or cure of humoral habits; to send the blessed Bible and the glorious gospel to benighted nations, that they may be turned “from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God, that they may receive forgiveness of sins, and inheritance among them which are sanctified by faith that is in Christ:” these are the appropriate manifestations of Christian love. For these and similar objects Christian love labors; and, sensible how little human labor can do, love prays fur all men “that they may be saved, and come to the acknowledgment of the truth.”

As to the characteristic qualities of this love, they may all be described in one word. This love to the world of mankind, should resemble God’s. It should be sincere and universal. God does not, cannot love the world, as He loves His own. Christians do not, cannot, love the world as they love the brotherhood. But God does love the world; He loves man as man; His love is philanthropy–the love of man; and so should be the Christian’s. That a man is wicked, is no reason that I should not love him: when men were sinners, Christ, God’s Son, died for them. He makes His sun to shine, and His rain to fall, on the unthankful and evil. It is no reason why I should not love a man, that he is my enemy: when men were enemies, they were reconciled to God through the death of His Son. God’s love to the world is an active love. What human being does not enjoy innumerable fruits of His love? And this is the most remarkable fruit of His love–He gave His only-begotten Son to suffer and die, that any man–every man, however guilty and depraved, believing in Him, “might not perish but have everlasting life.” Our love to man should be fruitful love, and one of its chief fruits should be the carrying to all men the soul-saving truth–that God loves the world, and that whosoever believes in His Son who died, the just in the room of the unjust, shall not perish. God’s love to the world is patient, long-suffering love. Had it been otherwise, where would our guilty race have been?–Not in the land of the living, not in the place of hope. “It is of the Lord’s mercies that we are not consumed, because His compassions fail not.” Our love to a perishing world should “suffer long and be kind;” our compassions should not fail. No obstinacy nor ingratitude should induce us to relinquish, or even to abate, our labors of love among our guilty, depraved, perishing brethren. They never can try us as we have tried God–we never can bear with them as He has borne with us.

John Brown, Parting Counsels: An Exposition of the First Chapter of the Second Epistle of the Apostle Peter, (Edinburgh: William Oliphant and Sons, 1861), 116-118.

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¹Armstrong.