Why Should He Love Me So?

What does the God’s law require of us? 

• Christ teaches us this in a summary in Matthew 22. 
• You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, 
• and with all your soul, 
• and with all your mind. 
• This is the great and first commandment.

The law as it is confessed here is the law of the LORD, the God of the covenant. 

• The preface of the law states, I am the LORD your God, 
• and in the summary of the law we read, You shall love the LORD your God. 
• The law is the covenant law. 

We need to enter more fully yet into the idea that the law is the law of the covenant, since that is also decisive for the knowledge of sin.

• Everyone has at least some notion of the law when in certain actions one’s conscience bothers him. 
• Yet, what meaning does this twinge of conscience have for the true knowledge of sin, as it is meant here? 
• Again, we cannot draw a straight line from one to the other, when the accusation of the conscience does not, of its own accord, bring us to God with a broken spirit… and a contrite heart (Ps.51:17). 
• Of course, God can use His Spirit and through the accusation of the conscience take hold of us, and by the power of His grace make us feel guilty before Him. 

However, that is an intervening deed of His grace, which happens when God makes us see the law as the law of the covenant. 

• Then we see sin as the breaking of the covenant of faithfulness.
• Yet, how long can we at times walk around with an accusing conscience before we are crushed and broken by God!
• Nevertheless, we must come to that, because in God’s covenant we see the law of love as an expression of God’s own love, 
• and as a means by which He intends to normalize our relationship with Him.

The law of the so-called covenant of works was not the rule do this and you shall live (Luke 10:28) in the sense of “obey this commandment and in doing so you will earn eternal life.” 

• In the covenant of God, also in the so-called covenant of works, there is never a mention of earning and wages. 
• In His covenant, God is always the first who gives His love.
• Through His love He teaches us to love, and our love is never anything other than a response to His love. 

Through the law, He has again regulated our love relationship with Him, as this relationship does not have a norm in itself but God Himself has established a norm for it. 

• Moreover, it is true that in obedience to that norm we grow in the fellowship of God’s love. 
• In this way the law is the ‘covenant-law.’ 
• Instead of speaking about the “covenant of works,” it would be better to designate it the “covenant of God’s favor.”

The commandment do this and you shall live, applies to the person who has left the covenant. 

• For him there could never be a different rule than that by fulfilling the law he again would work himself up and into the covenant, which is entirely impossible. 
• The old covenant was actually a covenant of grace yet came in a legal formulation, because in it and by it the conviction of the curse and the need for the cross of Christ would be created.

Moreover, that regulation needed to come to Israel to convince them of their own impossibility of fulfilling its requirements. 

• It was not until Christ, Who for our sake was put under the curse and outside of the covenant and forsaken by God, that such regulation came to its full significance. 
• He fulfilled the covenant of God by being obedient until death, and He atoned for all sinful deeds. He could do that because He was not only man, but also God. 

Even to Israel the law came not exclusively in that form – it would only drive the people away from God in fear – 

• the law was also the law of the covenant wherein God in His love again being first, gave Himself to His people. 
• Notwithstanding its legal format, the covenant with Israel was also the covenant of grace. 

The relationship between God and Israel was twofold: 

• He gave Himself and held Himself back; 
• He revealed Himself yet was hidden behind the veil. 

The law now comes to us as the law of the covenant. 

• God gives Himself to us and intends to regulate the entire relationship with Him and with all that He has created by means of the demand to love. 
• Only when we have seen the law in the light of God’s own love, will it shame and shatter us. 

An entire life under God’s Word, demonstrating to us God’s love and the demand of that love, is necessary to bring us to that brokenness more and more, and even then it is still only in part. 

• How ashamed we should therefore be of our irresponsible and unresponsive life! 
• God’s love and the demand of that love – the law as covenant law – must awaken in us and continuously prod us into that sense of responsibility. 

When we see our love as a responding love, as answer to God’s love for us, then the guideline and rule for our love will lie in God’s love.

• The law as covenant law really cannot be anything but an actual expression of God’s love. 
• The law has been derived from God’s love. 

This love-law is not an eternal norm that is above God and to which He must submit, nor is it arbitrary so that God could have commanded something else, but it finds its origin in God’s love. 

• Thus, the law is from, and through, and to God. 
• This confession that the law is not above God nor arbitrary may not be considered as a theological issue on which scholasticism has idly wasted its efforts, 
• but even today it is of great value. 
• This is contained in the confession of the law as law of the covenant.

Adapted Excerpt from The True Faith by Simon Gerrit De Graaf (1889-1955)