God's Demanding Love

But does not God do man an injustice by requiring in His law what man cannot do? 

• The reference here is to the demand of love. 
• For the thought from which we proceed in this post is really the right or the just claim of God’s love. 
• It is His love that demands everything.

Already that demand of His love is denied from many sides.

• Apparently the thought is in the minds of many that love only gives 
• and that its nature in the highest sense is opposed to demanding. 
• Immediately we think of the love of Christ, Who having loved His own who were in the world, He now showed them the full extent of His love (John 13: 1). 
• These words about Christ also intend to say that He in His love gave everything without even placing any condition on those who were His own. 

The fact of the matter is, however, that in itself man’s love does not have a single right or claim to love in response. 

• When human love also can assert the right and claim of love in response, 
• then it exists only because God has given it that right. 

Using human love as a pattern, we tend to judge God’s love as if His love also has no rights in itself to make demands. 

• The result is that many think of God’s love only as an all-giving love, 
• and they will essentially have nothing to do with its demanding claim. 
• By faith, we must again begin to realize clearly the rightful demands of God’s love. 

God has indeed given us all things in His love, and in this He has given Himself to us. 

• However, in the measure He has given, in that measure He also demands; 
• and thus He exacts of us all things – our entire heart. 

This affects us even more when the Scriptures reveal to us that God’s love is in the first place a self-love. 

• He loves us because of Himself, 
• and because of Himself He gives us all things, 
• in order that we should give Him all things. 

God’s sovereignty determined this relationship of giving and demanding, 

• and He established that entire relationship in His covenant. 

Even the giving of a responding love was a stipulation for maintaining the covenant in which God had given Himself. 

• This demand was made of Adam, and was fulfilled in completely different circumstances by Christ. 
• Christ did give a love without condition to His own, 
• but He did this so that He would fulfill the demand that God once made to man in His covenant. 
• In this way He gave to God the obedience and the love that were once demanded of man. 

The Heidelberg Catechism Lord's Day 4

Adapted Excerpt from THE TRUE FAITH S. G. De Graaf Translation by Richard Stienstra