Deep Dive: God’s Love Isn’t Niceness; It’s Sovereign, Glorious, And Transforming

This teaching by Elder Michael Tolliver explores the divine attributes of God's love, defining it as a sovereign and eternal reality rather than a fleeting human emotion. The text asserts that love is God’s very essence, inseparable from His holiness and glory, and remains entirely uninfluenced by human merit. By examining scriptural truths, the author illustrates how this love is immutable and infinite, providing a secure foundation for those within the Christian covenant. The discourse emphasizes that understanding this transcendent affection naturally leads to a life of obedience and transformation. Ultimately, the source presents sacrificial love as the essential trademark of a true believer and the primary evidence of a relationship with the Creator.

Each month, Elder Tolliver offers a spiritually encouraging book to help you in your walk with Christ for any size donation. Please go to biblicaltalks.com website to take advantage of this opportunity. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:01

Let's deep dive and conversate about the scriptures.

Why “Love” Has Lost Its Meaning

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You know, I was walking through the grocery store the other day, just uh standing in the checkout line.

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Yeah.

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And I was staring at the magazine rack. Right there, next to the gum and the batteries, I see this greeting card with big looping cursive letters. It just says, Love is all you need.

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Right. A classic.

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Exactly. And then right next to it, on a magazine cover, there's a headline about some celebrity, you know, loving their new keto diet.

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Oh, wow.

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And then I check my phone. I got a text from my spouse saying, love you.

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The word definitely gets a workout, doesn't it?

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It is exhausted. I mean, we have stretched this one four-letter word until it's practically transparent.

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Yeah.

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We use the exact same linguistic container to describe a lifelong sacrificial commitment to another human being and a mild preference for pepperoni pizza over cheese. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

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It's the linguistic equivalent of spreading too little butter over too much toast.

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That is exactly it.

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When a word means everything, it eventually starts to mean nothing at all. And when we talk about God, that dilution becomes really dangerous.

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And that is exactly the cliff edge we are standing on today for this deep dive.

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Yes.

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We're looking at a stack of notes and a really profound teaching by Elder Michael Colliver. And I don't say this lightly, but this source material completely dismantled my understanding of the word love.

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It's a very heavy teaching. I've gone through the source material multiple times now, and I'll tell you right off the bat, Tolliver isn't interested in the hallmark card version of divine love.

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Not at all.

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He's arguing that we have essentially domesticated God. We've projected our modern pop culture definition of love.

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Which is usually just being nice.

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Exactly, just being nice or affirming. We project that onto the creator of the universe.

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Domesticated is the perfect word there. We want a God who is essentially a golden retriever.

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Yeah, happy to see us.

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Uncritical, just there for emotional support. But the mission of this deep dive is to completely shatter that image.

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That's the goal.

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Because the source material argues that God's love isn't a reaction to humans being inherently lovable.

Domesticated God vs Holy Love

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It's a joyful, sovereign decision rooted entirely in who he is.

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That's the core thesis of Tolliver's teaching. And the stakes are incredibly high here.

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How so?

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Well, this isn't just theological hair splitting. Tolliver warns that if you view God's love as just this sort of heavenly niceness, your own spirituality becomes incredibly shallow.

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Right.

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If God loves you just because you're you, there's no awe in that. It's just expected. But if God loves you despite you, that's where the actual power lies.

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There was one specific idea in the source material that just stopped me cold. It was the timeline.

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You mean the pre-creation timeline?

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Right. The idea that God didn't become love when he created humans.

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Yes. This is absolutely crucial to grasp before we go any further.

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Walk us through that.

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Okay. Imagine God in eternity past, before the universe, before angels, before the first Adam was even formed.

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Nothing exists but God.

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Right. He wasn't lonely. He wasn't sitting there tapping

Love As God’s Nature, Not Action

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his fingers, waiting to create something so he could finally express his nature.

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He didn't need us to complete him.

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Not at all. The Father loved the Son in the fellowship of the Spirit eternally. God is love.

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He didn't learn how to love.

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Exactly. He was fully love before the sun shone or the moon glowed. If you strip away all of creation, God is still 100% love. He doesn't derive his identity from his relationship to us.

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You know, that actually makes it a bit more intimidating to realize he doesn't need me.

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He doesn't need you at all, which is what makes the fact that he loves you infinitely more significant.

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Because it's entirely voluntary.

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Yes, it's a voluntary sovereign movement of his heart. It's not a requirement.

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So let's get into the mechanics of this. Tolliver breaks this down into what we might call the physics of God.

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Right, the nature and attributes.

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The nature of the being we were talking about. And he starts with what feels like a grammatical bomb. He says, quote, love is not something God does, it is something God is.

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It sounds like a distinction without a difference at first, but it's vital.

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Unpack that for us.

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Think about it. If love were just an action, something God did, then conceivably he could stop doing it.

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Right. I do things, but I also stop doing them.

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Exactly. Or he could do it differently tomorrow. Actions change based on circumstances. Natures do not.

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So because it's his nature, it's immutable. It's fixed.

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Completely fixed. And Tolliver links this directly to God's glory. This was the part of the notes that I found myself rereading three times just to make sure I got it.

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Yeah, that part was dense.

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He says you cannot pull God's love and God's glory apart. They are intrinsically linked.

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Which is interesting because I usually think of those as competing interests.

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Oh, so.

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Like God is either glorifying himself, which sounds egocentric

Spirit, Light, And Love: The Order

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to our modern years, or he's loving me, which sounds altruistic. It feels like he has to choose one or the other.

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But the source argues that in the divine economy, they are the exact same motion.

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Wow.

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When God loves you, a broken, finite creature, he is displaying the magnificence of his character. He is glorifying himself by loving you.

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Oh, I see.

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And when he glorifies himself, the overflow of that glory is goodness toward his creatures.

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So it's not a zero-sum game where one loses and the other wins.

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Never. His love is the overflow of his eternal goodness breaking into time.

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Okay, so to really grasp this, Tolliver lays out a triad. Three foundational truths that the Bible says God is, not has, but is.

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Yes, the three statements of identity.

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And the order of these three is, well, it's the key to the whole puzzle.

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It really is. You can't shuffle the deck here or the theology falls apart.

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Let's go through them. Yeah. The first one's from John 4.24. God is spirit.

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Right. This is the metaphysical foundation. When the text says God is spirit, it's distinguishing him from literally everything else we know.

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How so?

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Well, he isn't a spirit like a ghost in a haunted house floating around a specific room. Right. He is spirit in the absolute highest sense.

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He has no body, no physical limitations at all.

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Exactly. He is incorporeal. And the terrifying or comforting, depending on where you stand, implication of that is his presence.

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Meaning he is everywhere.

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Yes. If God had a body, even a body the size of an entire galaxy, he would still be limited to a location. If he's in the Andromeda galaxy, he's not here on Earth. But because he is spirit, he fills heaven and earth entirely.

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He's the atmosphere we walk through.

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He is closer to you than your own skin. You cannot hide from him and you cannot be far from him. That's step one. Identity number one.

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Okay, step two. And I think this is where the modern definition of love usually starts to fall apart. First John 1.5, God is light.

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Light. We usually think of this symbolically as knowledge or truth.

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Yeah, shedding light on a subject.

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And it is that. But Tolliver argues that in this specific theological context, light equals holiness. It equals purity.

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The source defines it as the sum of all moral excellency.

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Right. Imagine a being with absolutely no shadow, no secret motive, no hidden agendas. No bad days, no little white lies, just blinding, radioactive moral perfection. That is what it means that God is light.

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And honestly, that's scary.

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It should be terrifying to a flawed creature.

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I mean, if I'm standing in a dark room, I feel perfectly okay about wearing dirty clothes. I can't see the stains. Right? But if you turn on a 10,000 watt spotlight.

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Exactly. Light exposes everything.

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Every flaw.

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If God is light, then everything about us is completely visible to him. Every passing thought, every selfish motive. And because he is light, he cannot have fellowship with darkness.

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And this is exactly why the source says the order matters so much. Yes. Because we want to skip straight to number three, which is 1 John 4.8. God is love. We want the hugs before the holiness.

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Of course we do. But Tolliver is adamant about this. You must have light before love, holiness before affection.

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Why is it so rigid? What happens if you flip them and put love first?

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If you have love without light, you just get sentimentality.

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Like the greeting card.

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Exactly. You get a permissive parent who lets their kid play with a chainsaw because they love them too much to make them cry by taking it away.

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Oh wow.

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That isn't love. That's indulgent weakness.

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It's basically winking at sin.

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Right. But God's love is governed by his light. It is a holy love.

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So it has standards.

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Yes. This means he loves you too much to let you stay as you are. His love has a backbone.

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You know, that actually explains the hard side of Christianity that so many people struggle with.

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The discipline aspect.

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Yeah, the discipline, the call to repentance. If God were just universally nice, he wouldn't care if I was ruining my life with selfishness. He'd just affirm me in whatever I was doing.

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Precisely. A doctor who truly loves you doesn't just give you a lollipop when you have a disease. He cuts out the tumor.

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Even if it hurts.

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That's the light aspect of love. It burns, but it heals. Tolliver says you cannot truly understand the love of God until you have bowed before the light of God.

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Okay, so we have the being defined: spirit, light, and love. Now Tolliver moves into the breakdown of this: the seven attributes of divine love.

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This is where it gets very detailed.

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And I'll be honest, the first one feels almost like a personal attack when you first read it.

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It usually does for most people.

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Attribute number one: God's love is uninfluenced.

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This is the ultimate blow to the human ego.

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Break that down for us. Because uninfluence sounds distant, like he's indifferent to us.

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It's not indifferent at all. It means the cause of the love is not found in the object being loved.

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Okay.

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Think about how human love works. Why do you love your favorite band?

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Because their music is good. It resonates with me.

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Right. They did something, they made good music that extracted a reaction of love from you. Yeah. Why do you love your spouse? Because they are beautiful or funny or kind. There is something in them that draws that love out of you.

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So human love is always a response to value. I see value, so I love.

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Exactly. It is entirely reactive. But Tolliver argues that God's love creates value, it doesn't

Love With Standards: Discipline And Healing

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respond to it.

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That's a huge shift.

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He points to Deuteronomy 7.7. God is telling Israel, I didn't set my love on you because you were the biggest or the best nation.

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In fact, historically, they were kind of the worst. They were notoriously stubborn.

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They were the fewest of all people, the text says. He essentially says, I loved you simply because I loved you.

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But that's circular logic.

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It's sovereign logic. That's the philosophical shift we have to make. We love him because he first loved us. Tolliver puts it bluntly in the notes. He says, If God waited for us to be lovable, he would still be waiting.

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That's a pretty grim view of humanity, though, isn't it?

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It is realistic according to the text.

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The source uses words like loveless, lifeless, and spiritually dead. Are we really that bad?

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Yeah.

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I mean, I held the door for someone today. I consider myself a decent person.

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Sure, we have civic virtue, we do nice things for each other, but in terms of holiness, in terms of that God is light standard we just talked about.

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Ah, the 10,000 watt spotlight.

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Exactly. Look at the timeline again. Romans chapter 5 says, While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.

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Not when we got our act together.

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Not when we showed potential or promise to do better, when we were actively enemies.

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So there was absolutely nothing in me that acted as a magnet for God's love.

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In fact, Tolliver says everything in us should have repelled him. We are the opposite of light. We are full of shadows, and yet he loved.

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Which means the engine of this love is entirely within God's own chest.

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Yes. It's entirely self-generated.

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You know, my initial reaction to that as I was reading the source was offense. Like, what do you mean I'm not lovable? That's the ego talking. Right. But when you sit with it and really think about it, it's actually incredibly secure.

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It is the only real security we have.

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Because if God loved me because I was good or faithful or promising.

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Then the very moment you stop being good, faithful, or promising, the love shuts off.

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Because the condition for the love is gone.

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Exactly. If the cause of the love is in you, then the love is as volatile as you are. And let's be honest, we are all highly volatile.

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But if the cause is entirely in him, and he doesn't change, then the love is safe. It's locked in.

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Yes. Which connects perfectly to attribute number two God's love is eternal.

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Okay, we're going back to the timeline here.

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Yes. Jeremiah 31.3. I have loved thee with an everlasting love.

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Everlasting. That's one of those words we throw around in church, but try to actually conceptualize it. No beginning.

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That's the really hard part. We can sort of imagine no end. We can imagine living forever, but try to imagine something that never started.

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It completely breaks your brain.

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Talber points to Ephesians chapter one for this. It says, He chose his people before the foundation of the world.

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Before the foundation.

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So before you existed, before your parents existed, before the planet was even cooling magma in space, this

Seven Attributes: Uninfluenced To Immutable

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love was already actively fixed on you.

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That implies that God's love isn't a reaction to my birth. I stepped into a stream of love that was already flowing.

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Exactly. You didn't start it. And the implication Tolliver draws from this is just beautiful. He says if it started in eternity, it carries us into eternity.

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Wow.

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Nothing that happens in time, no tragedy, no failure, no sin can stop something that started outside of time.

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Because it's invincible. It's pretemporal. It's older than my sin.

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It's older than your very existence.

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Okay, so we have uninfluenced, we have eternal. Now we get to the one that probably causes the most fights at the theological dinner table.

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Oh, definitely.

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Attribute number three. God's love is sovereign.

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The S-word. Sovereignty simply means God is under obligation to no one. He answers to absolutely no one. He doesn't have a boss.

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And the example Tolliver brings up is the classic theological heavy hitter, Jacob and Esau.

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Romans 9.13.

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Right. Jacob have I loved, but Esau have I hated.

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It's a shocking statement.

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It's deeply offensive. I mean, let's be real. If I said that about my two kids, you'd call child protective services on me.

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You would. And Paul, the writer of Romans, completely anticipates that reaction. He knows his readers are going to scream, that's unfair.

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So why does God say it? They were twins, they had the same DNA, same environment.

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Tolliver highlights that specific point. Same parent, same womb. And before they were born, before they had done anything good or bad.

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So before Jacob could earn the love or Esau could earn the hate.

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Exactly. God made a choice.

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But Jacob wasn't even a good guy. If you read his story, he was a liar. He was a manipulator. He tricked his dad. He swindled his brother out of his birthright.

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That is exactly the point Tolliver is making. Jacob did not deserve the love, but God loved one and passed over the other. Why? Tolliver's answer from the source material is simply because it pleased him.

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That you have to admit, that is not a satisfying answer to a modern democratic ear. No, it is We want fairness. We want equal opportunity for everyone.

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It isn't satisfying to us because we think we are entitled to God's love. We default to this idea that God owes us love just for existing. Right. But the whole point of sovereignty is that God loves based on the good pleasure of his will. If he was obligated to love everyone equally, he wouldn't be sovereign. He'd be a servant to some cosmic rule of fairness.

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So you're saying that if God had to love everyone, he wouldn't be God?

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He would be a mechanism, a divine vending machine. You put in a human, you get out love. But he is a person, he is a king, he dispenses his favors exactly as he chooses.

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But doesn't that make it arbitrary? Like playing any meeny many mo with humanity.

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It's not arbitrary because it's rooted in his infinite wisdom, which we cannot fully see or comprehend, but it is entirely free. And here is the flip side, the part we always miss when we are

Holy And Gracious Love Through The Cross

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getting angry about Esau. If God loved based purely on merit, Jacob wouldn't have made the cut either. Exactly. If God was strictly fair, Esau goes to hell and Jacob goes to hell. The miracle in the text isn't that Esau was hated, the shocking miracle is that Jacob was loved.

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That's a massive perspective shift. Sovereignty means God has the right to save people who completely don't deserve saving.

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And if you understand the physics of God we just talked about, that is the only reason any of us have a prayer.

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Well, that's a heavy meal to digest.

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It really is.

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So we've looked at the source of love, it's uninfluenced, eternal, and sovereign. Now the source pivots to the nature of the love itself. What does it actually look like? Right. God's love is infinite.

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So we move from the sort of legal courtroom of sovereignty over to the poetic here. Tolliver uses the analogy of an ocean without a bottom or a shore.

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He says it has dimensions no creature can fathom.

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He references Ephesians 2.4, great love, and the famous John 3.16, so loved. The argument here is basically mathematical.

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A math mate.

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Yes. God is infinite. He has no edges, no boundaries, therefore, all of his attributes must be infinite as well.

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You can't have a finite attribute inside an infinite God.

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Right. You can't have a God who is endless, but a love that runs out after 50 years or after you commit fifty sins. If he is infinite, his love is a resource that simply cannot run dry.

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The text says it passes knowledge.

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It supplies every need. It overwhelms all opposition. It's just impossibly vast.

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Okay. Attribute number five.

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Immutable just means unchanging. It does not fluctuate.

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And Tolliver gives us two case studies here from the notes that I find really, really comforting. Because let's be honest, I fluctuate constantly.

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We all do.

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My love for God is red hot on Sunday morning during worship, and it's pretty cold by Tuesday morning when I'm stuck in traffic.

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We are totally immutable creatures.

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So case study one, Jacob again.

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Jacob is such a perfect example for this because his life was a mess.

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Total chaos.

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He was a deceiver. He literally wrestled with God. He wasn't a hero of faith in the moral sense, at least not initially. He had deep seasons of doubt, seasons of intense fear.

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Yeah.

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Yet Tolliver notes that God never stopped loving him. The love wasn't a sine wave going up and down, matching Jacob's behavior. It was a flat line, high, steady, and unbroken.

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And the second case study the source provides, the disciples.

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Yeah. Just look at them in the Gospels. They argued about who was the greatest among them. They replied full. When Jesus was arrested, they all fled.

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Peter, the rock of the church, denied him three times to a servant girl.

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They were cowardly. And yet, John 13.1 says he loved them unto the end.

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Unto the end.

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That is the very definition of immutability. Many waters cannot quench this love. Toler points out that if our behavior could change God's love, it would have burned out a very long time ago.

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That is such an anchor. Because I can look at my own life and see a thousand completely valid reasons for God to walk away.

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But he doesn't look at your reasons.

Particular Love: Common Mercy vs Covenant

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He looks at his own nature. The scripture says, I am the Lord, I change not. Therefore, ye sons of Jacob are not consumed.

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Okay, moving on to attribute number six. We touched on this slightly with the God is light discussion, but the source drills down here. God's love is holy.

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This is the necessary corrective because when we hear words like infinite and immutable, human nature might start to think, great, I can do whatever I want.

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Right. God loves me, he'll never change, he's got infinite patience, party time.

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Exactly. That leads to cheap grace. But God's love is holy. It is not driven by a sentimental mood or a desire just to make us feel good. It is driven by a desire for your ultimate perfection.

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And the proof of this holiness, according to the source, is pain.

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Yes. Hebrews 12.6. Whom the Lord loveth, he chasteneth.

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This is a very hard truth for us to swallow. We instinctively interpret pain as God not loving us.

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We do.

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We lose a job, or we get a terrible medical diagnosis, and we immediately think, God, why are you mad at me? If you love me, you'd fix this right now.

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Because we equate love entirely with comfort.

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But Tolliver argues the exact opposite. He says, God loves his children too much to let them destroy themselves.

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It's like a parent who disciplines a toddler who keeps trying to touch a hot stove.

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You smack their hand.

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Exactly. Or think of a surgeon having to break a bone that healed wrong so they can reset it properly.

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The pain isn't malice.

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No, it's restoration. If God just let us run wild into destruction, if he let us be arrogant, selfish, and sinful without any consequence, that would be hate.

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Or at least total apathy.

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Right. But because he loves us, he brings the rod of discipline.

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So when you are going through a season of correction or what feels like intense divine discipline, you shouldn't view it as abandonment.

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You should view it as severe mercy. It's the holiness of his love at work, actively burning away the dross to leave the gold behind.

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Finally, attribute number seven: God's love is gracious.

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And here we go, straight to the cross, Romans 8.32.

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Tolliver makes a causal distinction here in the notes that I really want to make sure I understand. He says, God didn't send Christ so that he could love us. He sent Christ because he already loved us.

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It's a vital distinction for how we view God. Sometimes we have this weird, almost pagan mental image of the Trinity.

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How so?

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We think of God the Father. As this angry, lightning bolt throwing deity, just furious at humanity. And Jesus is the nice, soft-hearted one who jumps in front of the bullets and convinces the father to calm down.

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Right, like dad, don't hit him, I'll take it.

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Exactly. As if Jesus purchases the Father's love for us on the cross. But Tolliver says, no, absolutely not. The cross wasn't the cause of God's love, it was the result of it.

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Love was already there.

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The love was already burning in the father's heart. That is exactly why he sent the son.

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Like it says, For God so loved the world that he gave.

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Exactly. The giving came from the loving, not the other way around.

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And speaking of the son, the source addresses the concept of suffering here too. And I think this is where the rubber meets the road for a lot of people listening to this deep dive who might be hurting right now.

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Yes. This is profound comfort for the sufferer. Think about Jesus for a moment. He was the beloved son. The father said, This is my beloved son in whom I am well pleased.

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No one in the universe was loved more than Jesus.

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And yet, what was his life like?

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Poverty, rejection, betrayal, torture, and eventually

Union With Christ Secures Love

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the cross. Yeah. The absolute worst suffering any human has ever endured.

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So if the beloved son suffered all of that, then my suffering doesn't mean I'm not beloved. That is the theological logic. Tolliver argues that suffering does not mean God's love has failed you. If God didn't spare his own perfect son from pain, we shouldn't expect to be spared from it either.

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But we can know that in the midst of it, we are deeply loved.

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Exactly. That takes the volatility out of our relationship with God. We stop reading the tea leaves of our circumstances every time we have a bad day.

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It anchors us in history, in the event of the cross, rather than in our current fluctuating circumstances.

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Precisely.

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Now we're arriving at what might be the most challenging part of this entire deep dive. We've done the attributes. Now we have to look at the target of that love, section four. The scandal of particularity.

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Or as the theologians call it, covenant love.

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Tolliver draws a very sharp line here between what he calls common mercy and covenant love. What is the difference, according to the source?

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Common mercy is God's general goodness to all of creation. The scripture says the rain falls on the just and the unjust.

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Right.

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The atheist gets sunshine, food, laughter, the beauty of a sunset. God is kind to the unthankful and the evil. He sustains the entire universe. That is mercy.

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It's a sort of generic benevolence.

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Right. But covenant love, that is entirely different. Tolliver argues that saving love is exclusively reserved for his people, the elect.

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This circles right back to the attributes we just discussed.

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It does. Think about the logical flow here. If God's love is eternal, meaning it never ends, and sovereign, meaning it can't be stopped, and immutable, meaning it never changes, then it logically cannot be given to those who end up perishing in the end.

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Because if God loves someone with an eternal love, and that person ended up in hell, then God's love would be a failure. Wow.

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It would be temporary, not eternal, it would be mutable, it would have been overcome by human sin. Tolliver argues that for these attributes to actually hold true, this specific saving love must be particular. It must be strictly for those who are actually saved.

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But I can literally

Timeline Of Love: From Election To Calling

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hear you listening right now, screaming at your phone. I mean, that's the most famous verse in the entire book.

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And Tolliver fully anticipates that objection. He argues that we have to define the term a world the way the author, John, used it in his specific context.

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Which is what?

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In that historical context, the prevailing Jewish mindset was that the Messiah is for the Jews only. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

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Right, an ethnic limitation.

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Exactly. So John is writing to blow that up and say, no, this is for the world, meaning Gentiles, Greeks, barbarians, everyone.

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Aaron Powell So the argument is that world means without ethnic distinction, not every single individual human without exception. Trevor Burrus, Jr.

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That's Tolliver's argument. Because he says you have to harmonize John 3.16 with other difficult passages, like Psalm 5.5, which explicitly says God hates workers of iniquity, or Romans 9.13, Esau I hated.

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You can't just take a theological Sharpie and cross those verses out of the text.

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You can't. So the conclusion the source reaches is that saving love is covenantal. It's specific to the bride of Christ.

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Yes. And the channel for this love is Christ Himself.

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As the notes say, all promises flow through him.

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Tolliver quotes Ralph Erskine here, which I thought was just absolute poetic gold. To show power God made a world, to show wisdom he framed the heavens, to manifest love he gave Christ.

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It's beautiful. And the key to understanding all of this is our union with Christ.

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Explain that.

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This is the only way the attribute of immutable makes any sense for us. If God looks at me purely as myself, apart from anything else, he sees sin. He sees a thousand reasons to stop loving me.

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Right.

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But if I am in Christ, if I am united to him by faith, God loves me as he loves Jesus.

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He loves me as he loves Jesus. That references John 17.23, doesn't it?

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It does. It's a staggering verse. Jesus is praying to the Father and says, that the world may know that thou hast loved them as thou hast loved me. He loves the body the exact same way. He loves the head.

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So my security isn't about my performance at all. It's entirely about Jesus. As long as the Father loves the Son and I am hidden in the Son, I'm totally safe.

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Exactly. The love is perfectly secure because the object of the love, Christ, is perfect.

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So let's talk about the timeline again, but this time, the personal timeline. We talked about eternity past. But when does this love actually hit us in real time? Section five of the source material covers the timeline and operations of love.

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This is where the high theology becomes very personal biography. Tolliver uses an image from Ezekiel chapter 16 that is, well, it's not for the faint of heart.

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No, it's incredibly graphic, Ezekiel 16.8.

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It's an extended metaphor of an abandoned infant. And to be clear, we aren't talking about a cute, clean baby wrapped in a swaddling blanket in a woven basket.

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Not at all.

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The text describes the infant as naked, polluted, and in its blood, cast out into an open field to die.

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It's a vivid picture of death.

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It's a picture of total helplessness and, frankly, revulsion. This is the condition of the human soul apart from God. We are spiritually dying, exposed, and honestly repulsive to a perfectly holy God.

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And what does God do in the metaphor?

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He passes by, he sees this pollution. Oh, yeah. And he says, Thy time was the time of love. He spreads his skirt over the infant, which is an ancient cultural symbol of protection and eventual marriage covenant, and he saves it.

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I think the real power of that image is the timing. He didn't wait until the baby was somehow cleaned up.

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No. He loved the baby while it was polluted. That is the timeline of grace. He didn't say, clean yourself up, show some promise, and then I'll adopt you. He adopted us right there in the blood and the filth.

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Coliver connects this directly to Saul of Tarsus, who obviously became the Apostle Paul.

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It's the perfect historical example. When was the time of love for Saul? Was it when he was writing the book of Romans? Was it when he was suffering in prison for the gospel?

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No.

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It was when he was actively breathing threats and murder against the church. It was when he was an active, violent enemy of God. That's when the light shone on him on the road to Damascus.

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So God loved him while he was a literal enemy.

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That is the key takeaway Tolliver drives home in this section. Regeneration, that moment we actually come alive spiritually, is not the cause of God's love. God's love is the cause of our regeneration.

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Let me repeat that.

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Correct. The love is the engine, the change is just the exhaust.

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Now Tolliver gets very practical

Love That Heals Backsliders

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here. He lists four operations of love.

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Yeah.

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This is how the love actually works in the day-to-day life of a believer.

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Right. Operation number one, election. We've touched on this with the Jacob and Esau discussion. It's love in motion before time began. Tolliver insists this isn't mechanical or arbitrary. It's the overflow of divine affection. He chose because he loved.

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Operation number two, redemption.

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This is love actually paying the price. If election is the blueprint plan, redemption is the purchase. Romans 8.32 again. If he gave his son, he will freely give all things necessary for salvation.

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What does that imply?

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This implies that the cross wasn't just a potential rescue. It wasn't like God throwing a life preserver into the water and just hoping someone decides to grab it.

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It was more like a SEAL team extraction.

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Exactly. It was an actual payment that permanently secures everything needed to get us home.

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Operation number three effectual calling.

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This is the wake-up call. The spirit drawing the elect out of darkness. That's the third operation of love.

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In operation number four. This one I think is really going to resonate with a lot of you listening who feel like you've completely blown it.

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Healing backsliders.4. I will heal their backsliding. I will love them freely.

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There is a quote here in the notes from Thomas Goodwin, an old Puritan writer that is just wow. He says, quote, God overcomes his own heart to conquer us even when we are dead in sins.

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And he uses the phrase, lo, he stinketh. It's from the story of Lazarus in the tomb.

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That's fairly graphic.

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It is. Goodwin is saying, even when we are spiritually decomposing, even when our behavior is deeply offensive, even when we are actively running away, God's love conquers us. It's the logical conclusion of everything we've discussed so far. If the love is eternal, sovereign, and completely uninfluenced by our goodness, then our badness cannot kill it.

unknown 32:01

Wow.

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Even when we run, he chases. Even when we fall, he holds on.

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That is a staggering thought. It literally means my sin is not stronger than God's love.

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It never could be.

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So we've laid out this massive theological vision today. God is spirit, light, and love. His love is uninfluenced, eternal, sovereign, infinite, immutable, holy, and gracious. It's particular, covenantal, and completely invincible. It's an absolute mountain of truth.

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It really is a mountain.

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But we can't just leave it up in the clouds of academia. What do we actually do with this information? The outro of the source material gives us some very clear application.

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Yes. Tolliver gives us three active verbs to apply this. First verb, meditate.

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He says to fix the mind on this love.

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He says to do this so we can be lifted above the wretched self. We spend so much of our time navel gazing. We look constantly at our failures, our anxieties, our inadequacies.

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And it's depressing. It's a downward spiral.

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Completely. This teaching invites

Meditate, Plead, Obey: The Application

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us to look up, to be completely swallowed up in the vastness of his love. When you are feeling low, don't look in the mirror. Look at the attributes of God. It puts all your problems into proper perspective.

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Okay, second verb, plead.

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Use God's love as an argument in prayer. This is a powerfully effective strategy. When you are feeling down or when you are heavily tempted, don't plead your own goodness to God. Don't say, God help me because I tried really hard today.

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Because that's an incredibly weak argument.

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It's a losing argument every time. Instead, say, God help me because you love me. Say, Lord, you love Jacob, so love me. You love Peter when he failed, so hold me.

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You appeal to his nature.

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Exactly. It's the strongest argument you have because it relies entirely on his nature, not your flawed performance.

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And the third verb, obedience.

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Let this wondrous love be the fuel for serving God. This brings us right back to the danger of cheap grace. This theology isn't saying, God loves me unconditionally so I can do whatever I want.

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It's the exact opposite reaction.

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It's God loves me so much, how could I not live for him? Gratitude is an infinitely higher motivation than fear. If you serve God just because you're afraid of hell, you're basically a mercenary. If you serve him because you are completely amazed by his love, you're a son or a daughter.

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And the teaching ends with one final, striking illustration: the birthmark.

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I really love this imagery. The analogy is that designers have trademarks. Nike has the swoosh, Apple has the Apple logo. You instantly know who made the product by the mark that's on it.

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And God has a mark for his children.

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Yes, the mark is love.

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Tolliver quotes the scripture: By this shall all men know that you are my disciples if you have love one to another.

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Tolliver makes a pretty chilling point here at the end. He says, You can preach like an angel, you can sing like a lark, you can quote scripture and flawlessly memorize all the deep theology we just spent this whole time discussing. But but without love, your identity is unclear. You are missing the designer logo.

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It's the ultimate proof. If you have genuinely received this deep, sovereign, self-giving love, you will inevitably become a conduit of it. You can't hoard an infinite resource. It has to flow out of you to others.

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That's the birthmark. If you are constantly harsh, unforgiving, and bitter towards others, you really have to ask yourself, have I actually met the God of love? Because interacting with his love softens you. It deeply humbles you.

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What an incredible way to close out the notes. We started with the metaphysical physics of God before time began and ended with the practical birthmark on our faces today.

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It's a complete journey from the eternal nature of God to the daily practical life of the believer right now.

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Well, that is our deep dive on the love of God based on the teaching of Elder Michael Tolliver. It's a it's a lot to chew on. I feel like I need to just sit in a quiet room for about an hour.

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Well, that's the meditate part of the application.

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Exactly. Take some time to really think about that ocean. Bottomless, shoreless. And if you're in Christ, you're swimming in it. But before we go, I want to leave you with one final thought to mull over, building on what we've discussed.

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Oh, I like this. What is it?

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If God's love is eternal and immutable, that means eternity itself, when we think about the afterlife, isn't just about a long duration of time. Right. It's about an ever-deepening exploration of a love that has no bottom. We won't just be existing forever. We will be continuously discovering new depths of this exact same love we've been talking about, and we will never ever reach the end of it.

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That changes everything about how you view the future.

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It really does. Thanks for joining us on this deep dive. Go look for that birthmark in your own life. We'll see you next time.

SPEAKER_00 36:42

Goodbye, everyone.

The Birthmark: Love As Our Proof

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