The Extravagance of God’s Love
Passage: Romans 5:6-11
Last week Paul spoke of the love of God that has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us (5:5). Now he shows us the extravagance of this love, how over the top lavish it is. There has never been a display of this kind of love, and this much love in the history of the universe.
Paul starts by creating a contrast by speaking in human terms. Would you be willing to give your life for someone else? Have you ever thought about whether you could lay down your life for someone else?
Maybe a husband might lay down his life for his wife or children. Maybe a sibling might die for a sibling, a grandparent for a grandchild. Maybe.
There are people who have died for the sake of others, firemen, policemen, rescue workers, soldiers, secret service agents. But that’s their job, in the line of duty, they signed up for it. The men on the Titanic who said women and children first, a sense of duty or moral obligation. Maybe a soldier who throws himself on a grenade for the sake of his fellow soldiers.
What’s Paul’s point? Maybe, perhaps, on a rare occasion you might find a person willing to die for a good person, but never will you find a person willing to die for an enemy.
Fathers, mothers, would you die for the sake of your child? Yes. But would you die for the person who kidnapped and murdered your child? No.
We can find things, events, in human history to illustrate concepts in the Bible. I can’t think of any example in human history of someone willingly laying down their life for someone who hated them. No one dies for someone who hates them and does terrible things to them. No one dies for an enemy.
What Paul is describing here is utterly outside of the range of human experience. There is no historical, human analogy for this. Nowhere in the history of mankind is there an example of love like this.
It is one kind of love when someone lays down their life for a good person. It is a completely different kind of love when someone lays down their life for their enemies. How would you measure the difference between those two kinds of love? It is infinitely greater. It is beyond comparison.
Why didn’t God strike Adam and Eve dead, wipe the slate clean and start over. There was certainly nothing in them to convince God to keep them around.
God chose to use this to reveal His infinite love, grace and mercy. God bound Himself to us in the most extravagant love.
This is a massive truth that needs to get our attention and change the way we live and act and worship and treat others.