God is Love

“The accomplishment of redemption is concerned with what has been generally called the atonement. No treatment of the atonement can be properly oriented that does not have its source in the free and sovereign love of God. It is with this perspective that the best known text in the Bible provides us: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3.16). Here we have an ultimate of divine revelation and therefore of human thought. Beyond this we cannot and dare not go…

...It is necessary to underline this concept of sovereign love. Truly God is love. Love is not something adventitious; it is not something that God may choose to be or choose not to be. He is love, and that necessarily, inherently and eternally. As God is spirit, as he is light, so he is love. Yet it belongs to the very essence of electing love to recognise that it is not inherently necessary to that love which God necessarily and eternally is that he should set such love as issues in redemption and adoption upon utterly undesirable and hell-deserving objects. It was of the free and sovereign good pleasure of his will, a good pleasure that emanated from the depths of his own goodness, that he chose a people to be heirs of God and joint-heirs with Christ. The reason resides wholly in himself and proceeds from determinations that are peculiarly his as the “I am that I am.” The atonement does not win or constrain the love of God. The love of God constrains to the atonement as the means accomplishing love’s determinate purpose.

It must be regarded, therefore, as a settled datum that the love of God is the cause and source of the atonement…”

John Murray, Redemption Accomplished and Applied, Ch.1, p.9-10