The love of God is an enclosed love. It
is a jealous love. It is a guarded and protected
love. It
is a love with boundaries. The boundaries of that
love are the Father-Son Union.
This means there are two sides to divine
love. On the inside, divine love is everything we
think of when we think of love. It is intensely
all giving and filled with deepest communion.
But there is an outside to this love. As
a guarded love it is a wall of opposition to and
intolerant of all and everything outside of that
communion. It is not love at all as we think of
love.
This is better understood by the two
natures of fire. The Bible says "our
God is a consuming fire." Internally, God is
a God of love, and His fire is the fire of love.
It is the fire of desire and fellowship and
intimacy. It is the fire that warms heart and body
and gives light to the eyes and empowers all
things productive and beautiful to use.
But externally, God's fire is not a fire
of love. It is a fire of wrath, judgment and
destruction against everything outside that
internal boundary.
Thus we are either on the inside or the
outside of the love of God. If we are on the
inside, we are able to experience in God all those
fiery qualities of desire, passion, communion and
oneness. But if we are on the outside of that
love, there remains only a fearful looking for of
wrath, judgment and condemnation.
The Holy Jealousy of Love
The idea of jealousy captures the two
sided nature of God's love. God is jealous for
everyone on the inside of His union. And He is
jealous against
everyone and everything outside of that internal
union.
The love of God is a holy
love. This means it is a separated
love. Holiness means separation. That is a boundary.
The fact that God is holy above and beyond all
else that He has made tells us that His love is a
bounded one. It is a love with definition and
parameter. God cannot manifest the fusionary love
within the Father-Son Union to anyone or anything
outside that union.
Relation of love's fire to anything
outside of it is fissionary
in result, not fusionary. It is divisive, not
unifying. It divides as it must do, because it is
holy and separated.
Can Love Hate?
Does this mean God is both love and hate?
No, not at all. Rather, hate is to love what
darkness is to light.
Light stands on its own. Darkness is only
the absence of light. Similarly, love stands on
its own. Hatred is the absence of love.
But does that mean God cannot hate
because He is love (as so many teach)? No. Does
God hate? Yes. He hates
though He is
love the same way he dwells inside thick
darkness though He is light.
God hates, but is
not hate. He is
love. But if one is absent His love because
He is on the outside of His internal Union, such
an one can only experience the consequential hate
of God.
This is understood where Jesus said that
all men outside the faith are already under
condemnation by default. God does not actively
have to condemn them. He did not come to condemn
but to save.
Likewise, men are already under the hate
of God by default because they are outside
His internal love. He did not come to express
hatred toward them, but to save from the hatred
they were already under being outside that love.
This brings us to the love of God beyond
love. We are talking about the love of God
expressed to make a way for those outside His
internal love and under sentence of His external
fire to be reconciled to Him so as to be brought
through the destructive protective barrier into
His inner love union. This out-reaching love is
one of determination and kind intent. It is not a
love of fellowship, communion or intimacy.
Internal love cannot be shown to those on the
outside of it.
To do so is prostitution.
Thus a bridging love was expressed
through Christ to reach out and reconcile those on
the outside of the Father-Son Union. This bridging
love brought tension into the Divine Union. It was
the expression of the conflict between God's holy,
closed internal passion for His Son and His
passion for what He had made which was now outside
that Union.
And this is the tension the Son had to
outwork and out-live right up to the cross. He had
to reach out to what He had made while remaining
true at all points to the holy demands and
parameters of His internal love union with the
Father. The proving of the outworking of conflicted
Divine Love was the entire purpose of His mission,
out of which our salvation was the undeserved,
un-entitled byproduct.
Thus we see Christ expressing both the
Father's internal love to those on His inside and
the Father's hatred toward those on the outside,
while undertaking to express that risky bridging
love outside of Him. He had to hate and reach out
at the same time.
This tension played right up into the
Garden of Gethsemane. At the end, He was still
questioning whether it was worth it to do this?
Indeed, He did not want to do it. ("Father,
if it be possible, let this cup pass from me.")
Yet He had always been committed to do it. ("The
cup that my Father has given me, shall I not
drink of it?") Thus was His obedience
between these two loves perfected, healing the
Divine Love Conflict.
The mysterious tension between the
internal Father-Son Union and the bridging love
outside Union borders to reconcile outsiders to it
by His sovereign kind intent is responsible for
the misunderstanding and corruption of Divine Love
in our own midst today.
God's people don't get the difference
between the exclusionary love of God within the
Father-Son Union wherein no condition exists
because all condition has already been met, and
the conditional extensionary love of God outside
that Union to bring men back inside the Divine
Union. The
extensionary love of God is conditional because it
requires the meeting of the holy demands of closed
internal love for anyone outside it to be able to
enter it. Christ
met those conditions for the people. Thus
entrance into the Divine union is conditioned on
Christ's death and its application by the Father's
sovereign intent.
But today, no such distinctions are
recognized. Terms are used without definition.
What on earth is this unconditional love so touted
today like a mantra--and no one even knows what
they are talking about? The term has come to deny
love's separational fiery nature outside the
internal Union:
It
has come to be believed that God's love is
displayed by prostituting the secrets of the
fellowship of internal Union before all men, that
there is no jealously separating fire
characterized by judgment, condemnation and hatred
toward all by default outside the Union.
It
is believed that the Father's extensionary love
expressed through Christ is an entitlement, that
God had no choice but to reach out to men just
because of Who He Is.
And
there are even those who believe that the lake of
fire--the ultimate back side of God toward those
failing of Christ's bridging love--must absolutely
be converted into the internal love of God. God
just has to do it, or else He is not love after
all.
All these fallacious teachings and
beliefs about God's love are a travesty within a
very deceived church. Those who teach these things
after warning and correction and who continue to
debase the sovereign holy character of God's love
will bear their punishment at the judgment. It is
time for a fresh baptism into the jealously fiery
nature of God's internal love. The
zeal of your house has eaten me up.
Here is a worthy study. I challenge
anyone reading this with doubts to go study out
every word and act of Christ in which He told
someone off, insulted someone, rebuked someone,
told someone no, called them an animal, brought
division, demonstrated perplexity, frustration,
anger and even violence toward somebody without
respect of persons, including family, friends,
followers, leadership and political authorities,
and made separations between haves and have nots
in His ministry--and then
start crafting your definition of unconditional
love and of the love of God.
You don't have any way to explain the
love of God if you don't know how to account for
all of this. You will quickly see that the love of
God is anything but unconditional. Every one of
these negatives proves the bounded and jealously
guarded nature of the internal love Union.
Read the if clauses of John 14-15. IF
a man loves me He will keep my commandments, and
[then] we will come to him and make our abode.....
IF you keep
my commandments, you will abide in my love.....
Friend, how
did you get in here without a wedding garment?
(Throw the bum out of here!)
No obedience? No abode. No entrance into
the intimacy of the divine union. No entrance into
the kingdom. No inheritance. Sorry. No exceptions.
And these final determinations are
without appeal.
If
the righteous be scarcely saved, where
shall the sinner and ungodly appear?
That question is asking, If
we who are saved by God's extensionary love are
just barely making it into His inner love Union,
on which side of that fiery internal love will
the rest appear? No entitlement here. The
implication is clear. They will all remain to
appear on the externally facing wrath side of that
jealous love. No
man can see My Face and live..Without
holiness, no man shall see the Lord.
It is absolutely critical we discern
between the bounded internal love of the Father
and the qualified extensionary love of the Father.
As Christ's followers, we have been charged with
the same outworking of the divine tension with
which He was first charged. This is the core
reality to be negotiated in coming into conformity
to His image. It means we have to know how to
protect the jealous love of God within us,
rebuking all that would challenge it, while
extending the bridging love to those on the
outside as the Father would display it, without
compromising the value and purity of that inside
Union.
I know this is not easy for any of us. We
are beset on every side by false evaluations of
love and condemnations galore for failing to
affirm the popular humanist teachings on this
subject. No truth is more polluted or assaulted
than that of the meaning of divine love. But I
write to encourage each of you on this Circle.
Don't be bullied under the charges of "if
you really loved me you would..." or "if
you really loved God you wouldn't..." (you
just fill in the blank).
All you need to make sure of is that you
have surrendered every word and act birthed from
your jealous fire to the scrutiny of His eyes and
ears in the fear of God Himself.
I commend this word to you all in the
truth and grace of His fire.
