The Love of God for Sinners

In his book Agape and Eros Anders Nygren does a marvelous job of bringing out God's love for us:

"'I came not to call the righteous, but sinners,' says Jesus (Mark ii. 17); and with these words He turns the entire scale of Jewish values upside down. He could hardly have expressed in stronger terms what was bound to be felt as an assault on the traditional outlook. It is only necessary to remember the associations of the term 'the righteous' in the Jewish mind. There is a universal feeling that the difference between the righteous and the sinner, the godly and the ungodly, implies a difference of value; and in Judaism this natural feeling was immensely strengthened by religious considerations. The righteous man loved God's Law, and God's Law ennobled him. Old Testament piety with its devotion to the Law was by no means the external legalism it is often assumed to have been. There was an inward bond that held the godly man to the Law. The righteous felt no sense of external compulsion when confronted by the Law, but a sense of inner solidarity with it. He delighted in the Law of the Lord. Its observance gave him value and made him acceptable to God. His prevailing mood was that expressed in Ps. i . . . .

"It is thus between the righteous and the sinners that the decisive distinction is drawn--in the sight both of God and of men.

"But now Jesus comes and throws all this to the winds. He eats and drinks with publicans and sinners, and says: 'I came not to call the righteous, but sinners.' We can see at once that those who had grown up in religious devotion to the Law were bound to see in this a violent assault on the very foundations of their inherited religion and morality. It was not merely an isolated point of doctrine that was attacked, but the very substance of legal piety and the deepest susceptibilities of the traditional religion. And it was the more serious because Jesus did not put forward this revaluation simply as His private, subjective judgment, but claimed an objective, religious basis for it. Not only He, but God Himself judges thus. When Jesus calls sinners, He is not acting on His own initiative, but in fulfilment of the mission on which He has been sent, the very purpose for which He has 'come'. By thus linking the revaluation with His sense of vocation He attributes it to God Himself. It is a commission by God that He acts as He does; and His mode of action, as He sees it, is a reproduction of God's own. God seeks the sinner and wills to take him into fellowship with Himself. Fellowship with God is not governed by law but by love. God's attitude to men is not characterised by justitia distributiva, but by agape, not by retributive righteousness, but by freely giving and forgiving love.

"Two different kinds of fellowship with God confronted one another here, and a conflict was inevitable. The more those on either side were in earnest about fellowship with God, the less the clash could be avoided. When, therefore, we find Jesus in the Gospels engaged in ceaseless controversy with the Pharisees, this is not fundamentally, either on His side or on theirs, a commonplace struggle for power. Just because the Pharisees were in earnest about their religion they were bound to resist what seemed to them to be a violation, not merely of the human, but above all of the Divine, order of justice, and therefore of God's majesty. The struggle of the Pharisees against Jesus is the protest of the religion of law against the religion of love.

"The contrast between the two kinds of religion must not of course, be understood to imply that the Old Testament scheme of law had no place at all for the Divine love. On the contrary, Judaism had a good deal to say about God's love. God was the God of love because He was the God of the Covenant; the very fact that He had established His Covenant and given the Law, was the supreme expression of His love. But this meant that His love was bound by the limits of the Law and the Covenant (Ps. ciii. 17 f.).

"God's love is shown, be it noted, to them that fear Him; it is shown to the righteous, not to the sinner. It signifies at most that God is faithful to His Covenant despite man's unfaithfulness, provided that man returns to the Covenant. But it is a far cry from this to that Divine love which comes to call sinners. For such love has no place within a legal scheme, and to those who think of fellowship with God in terms of law and justice it is bound to seem nothing less than blasphemy.

"But in order to understand the meaning of Agape we must look rather more closely at this new kind of fellowship with God; and we may begin by asking what is the cause of the revaluation, this transformation of the religious relationship. Why is it sinners that are called? The old idea that it is in virtue of a righteous life that we gain God's approval and are received into fellowship with Him, is so natural that it seems not to need any explanation. But when Jesus completely reverses this natural order, so that fellowship with God is offered to sinners, while the righteous go empty away, we cannot but ask the reason for such a startling change. Is it merely an inversion of values due to emotional reaction, an unreasoning repudiation of a previously accepted scale of values? Or is there perhaps something in the nature of the sinner that makes him of more value than the righteous in God's sight?

". . . We only obscure the real nature of the fellowship with God, and make the relation between God and man less truly a relation of love, if we seek a basis for it in the idea that the sinner is better than the righteous. To ask in this sense for an explanation of God's love is the same as to deny His love. Such an explanation would imply that the religious relationship was still of the old legal type, and that God loved those whose qualities of character made them more worthy of His love than other men. But then not even the great change made by Jesus would embody any really new principle. He would simply have discovered a hidden value in those who least of all seemed to possess any value, and would have accepted the implications of this discovery in respect of the religious relationship. He would have brought no new fellowship with God, but God's love, still confined within the limits of legality, would simply have been directed to a more worthy object.

"There is scarcely a more insidious way of emptying the Christian idea of love and Christian fellowship with God of their vital content than to treat God's love for sinners--that clearest of all expressions of the new way of fellowship with God--as merely a special case of the old legalistic religious relationship. Christian fellowship with God is distinguished from all other kinds by the fact that it depends exclusively on God's Agape. We have therefore no longer any reason to ask about either the better or worse qualities of those who are the objects of Divine love. To the question, Why does God love? there is only one right answer: Because it is His nature to love.

". . . Agape is spontaneous and 'unmotivated'. This is the most striking feature of God's love as Jesus represents it. We look in vain for an explanation of God's love in the character of man who is the object of His love. God's love is 'groundless'--though not, of course, in the sense that there is no ground at all, or that it is arbitrary and fortuitous. On the contrary, it is just in order to bring out the element of necessity in it that we describe it as 'groundless'; our purpose is to emphasise that there are no extrinsic grounds for it. The only ground for it is to be found in God Himself. God's love is altogether spontaneous. It does not look for anything in man that could be adduced as motivation for it. In relation to man, Divine love is 'unmotivated'. When it is said that God loves man, this is not a judgment on what man is like, but on what God is like.

". . . This being so, we can see why Jesus was bound to attack a religious relationship conceived in legal terms. Had He been concerned only to claim a place for the idea of love in the most general sense within the religious relationship, He could have secured it even within the legal scheme. There was no need to smash the legal scheme in order to do that. The love for which there is no room in this scheme, however, is the 'motivated' love that is directed to the righteous, to those who deserve it. But Jesus is not concerned with love in this ordinary sense, but with the spontaneous, unmotivated love that is Agape; and for this there is fundamentally no place within the framework of legal order. To go back once more to the words of Jesus in Matt. ix. 17, we may say that Agape is the new wine which inevitably bursts the old wineskins. Now we see also why there had to be a revolutionary change of attitude towards the righteous and the sinner. If God's love were restricted to the righteous it would be evoked by its object and not spontaneous; but just by the fact that it seeks sinners, who do not deserve it and can lay no claim to it, it manifests most clearly its spontaneous and unmotivated nature.

". . . Agape is 'indifferent to value'. . . . When Jesus makes the righteous and sinners change places, it might at first sight appear as if this were a matter of simple transvaluation, or inversion of values; but we have already said enough to show that it is a question of something far deeper. It is not that Jesus simply reverses the generally accepted standard of values and holds that the sinner is 'better' than the righteous . . . Actually, something of far deeper import than any 'transvaluation' is involved here--namely, the principle that any thought of valuation whatsoever is out of place in connection with fellowship with God. When God's love is directed to the sinner, then the position is clear; all thought of valuation is excluded in advance; for if God, the Holy One, loves the sinner, it cannot be because of his sin, but in spite of his sin. But when God's love is shown to the righteous and the godly, there is always the risk of our thinking that God loves the man on account of his righteousness and godliness. But this is a denial of Agape--as if God's love for the 'righteous' were not just as unmotivated and spontaneous as His love for the sinner! As if there were any other Divine love than spontaneous and unmotivated Agape! It is only when all thought of the worthiness of the object is abandoned that we can understand what Agape is. God's love allows no limits to be set for it by the character or conduct of man. The distinction between the worthy and the unworthy, the righteous and the sinner, sets no bounds to His love. 'He maketh His sun to rise on the evil and the good and sendeth rain on the just and unjust' (Matt. v. 45).

". . . Agape is creative. . . . Agape has nothing to do with the kind of love that depends on the recognition of a valuable quality in its object; Agape does not recognise value, but creates it. Agape loves, and imparts value by loving. The man who is loved by God has no value in himself; what gives him value is precisely the fact that God loves him. Agape is a value-creating principle.

". . . When He says, 'Thy sins are forgiven thee', this is no merely formal attestation of the presence of a value which justifies the overlooking of faults; it is the bestowal of a gift. Something really new is introduced, something new is taking place. The forgiveness of sins is a creative work of Divine power . . . which Jesus knows Himself called to carry out on earth, and which can be put on a level with other Divine miracles, such as His healing of the paralytic (Mark ii. 5-12).

". . . Agape is the initiator of fellowship with God. . . . If we consider the implications of the idea of Agape, it becomes very plain that all other ways by which man seeks to enter into fellowship with God are futile. This is above all true of the righteous man's meritorious conduct, but it is no less true of the sinner's way of repentance and amendment. Repentance and amendment are no more able than righteousness to move God to love.

"In this connection also the advent of Agape is completely revolutionary. Hitherto the question of fellowship with God had always been understood as a question of the way by which man could come to God. But now, when not only the way of righteousness but also that of self-abasement and amendment is rejected as incapable of leading to the goal, it follows that there is from man's side no way at all that leads to God. If such a thing as fellowship between God and man nevertheless exists, this can only be due to God's own action; God must Himself come to meet man and offer him His fellowship. There is thus no way for man to come to God, but only a way for God to come to man: the way of Divine forgiveness, Divine love.

"Agape is God's way to man."