God loves me, but does He like me?
At Christmastime, my friend Paul wrote a two-part blog series entitled “God loves me, but does he like me?” I enjoyed them a lot–they raised great questions about how we think about our relationship with God and the theological basis for it. The problem they proposed is this:
- Premise 1: There is a distinction between God’s legal acceptance of us (“love”) and his emotional inclination toward us (“like” or “pleased”). God accepts us based on Christ’s sacrifice, but he is inclined toward us on the basis of our sanctification or behavior.
- Premise 2: Our sanctification or behavior consists in Christ acting through us, not in us acting ourselves.
- Conclusion: God’s inclination toward us (“like” or “pleasure”) is really an inclination toward Christ acting through us, and not really an inclination toward me myself at all.
This conclusion is definitely emotionally troubling. Paul made some good points to solve this problem, and I had some additional thoughts on both premises.
On premise 1, as an Augustinian/Edwardsian/Christian hedonist, I tend to have a deep suspicion of any distinction between “loving” and “liking.” If love for God and man is the highest virtue, then perfect love must include feeling what is appropriate to feel for God and man, not just a dry sense of duty for things that are glorious and should be satisfying. If “love” does include feeling, then when does scripture say God’s love for us starts? Not after our sanctification, not after our justification, and not even after our election. God’s love for the elect is given as the grounds for election itself: “…even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will…” (Ephesians 1:4-5). God freely chose to love a group of people before they had done good or evil, and not on the basis of foreseen actions (Romans 9), but simply out of his free choice to love. That’s the root reason that scripture doesn’t go behind: love. So it’s no surprise that scripture says that when Christ dies for those who are still sinners, he already loves them before dying for them (Rom 5:8). And when God disciplines his children to sanctify them, he already loves them before discipline has its effect (Heb 12:6).
This means that God has felt love for his elect from eternity past. This love humbles us because it’s not based on anything we’ve done or anything in us, rejecting the pride that says I will only accept love that is based on my merit. Now, there is still a place for us to want to please God with our lives. Someone you love can please you or displease you; think of the father of the prodigal son, who was heartbroken over his son’s sin and longed for his return. But to please God with our lives, we need to first accept that God has already not only justified us but also loved us. Otherwise we’re working for acceptance.
So if there’s still a place to want to please God with our lives, then part of the problem still remains: do *we* ever please God with our lives, or is it only Christ who pleases God by living through us (premise 2)? Most theologians in my circles would agree that, while justification is monergistic, caused entirely by God, sanctification is synergistic, involving a cooperation between God and the person. I find the most helpful passage on this to be Philippians 2:12-13—”work out your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you, both to will and to work for his good pleasure.” God works in us, changing our hearts in ways we never could, and then we act or work out here on the basis of that changed heart. God gets all the credit for the sanctification, but it is still us who is working. Otherwise, we’re just puppets being controlled by God and being punished for things that God is causing us to do. It’s only hypercalvinists who hold to that kind of view; all credible Calvinists I’ve read assert that we act in accordance with our desires, and therefore we really are responsible for our actions.
One of the problems with that puppet view is that it makes God the one who is doing evil through his puppets, and therefore he is the one who is guilty of evil. Theodore Beza, Calvin’s successor, solved this problem by asserting that God uses evil people as instruments for good. They intend the evil, but God uses them for good ends (which is practically a quote from Joseph in Genesis 50:20). But to be able to argue this, it has to be true that the evil people have intentionality that is rightly ascribed to them. If that’s true, then our intentionality as believers is rightly ascribed to us as well. And if all that is true, then I think it’s right to say that, as God sanctifies us, we ourselves act more and more righteously. If our actions please God, then, it’s really *us* who is pleasing him, not just Christ in us. This doesn’t conflict with Calvinism at all, because God gets the credit for both the justification and the sanctification. And Calvinism in particular argues that our actions after we’re saved can’t be marked by sin just as much as before we were saved. There’s something different about the life itself, and that difference is pleasing to God.
One more objection remains: it may be us who are acting, but if sanctification is making us less like ourselves and more like Christ, then God is only pleased with us when we become less of ourselves. I had never thought about that before, and that’s the problem that Paul’s blog posts addressed excellently, so I have nothing to add to it.
Faith Alone, And… Growing in Intimacy with God: Psalm 63 and Philippians 3