Is God’s love unconditionally unconditional?

You heard it right, you read it right.  Is God’s love unconditionally unconditional?  I know, it sounds repetitively redundant.  How often have I said, “God loves you unconditionally”?   I may be upsetting the apple cart for a lot of folks, but let’s stop and talk about that.  These words that many of us often share can be misleading.

It largely depends on what we put the emphasis on.  His love is unconditional for sure in that anyone, absolutely anyone, who genuinely calls on the name of the Lord will be saved (John 3:16; Romans 10:13).  Further, there is no sin that is unforgiveable other than willfully rejecting God (Matthew 12:31).   Perhaps the blending of these two truths may be where we formulate this phrase/concept, “God loves you unconditionally.”   

That’s not the big picture though.  Sin does have a role in introducing the conditional aspect of His love in that God is demanding one thing of us: He is looking for the truly repentant sinner.  He wants us to come to Him with a broken contrite heart, aware of sin in our life, aware of being hopeless in terms of saving ourselves, and desperately in need of and wanting a cure.  This is clearly exemplified in the parable of the searching father with the prodigal son. (Luke 15)

God does love everyone but his gift of mercy and grace is conditional to our acknowledgement that we have sinned against a most holy God, and we no longer want to be in that state, AND that Jesus is the only cure for that condition.  it’s imperative to understand that we can do nothing on our own to address these shortcomings and that it has been all taken care of by Jesus as He died on the cross for us.

And yet . . . there is also a sense that he loves us unconditionally because He does not require us to change into a holy and perfect person first before we are lavished with His love.  Again, a lesson from Luke 15, the prodigal son was all ready to go through earning His father’s love expecting to spend a lifetime of servitude to achieve reconciliation and restitution.   Instead, the father smothered his son with scandalous love making things right between them.  Why?  Because there had been a change, a change of condition.  The father intuitively knew the state of the son’s heart.  The son was seeking the father’s forgiveness knowing full well he had sinned against him and against God.  The father immediately demonstrated unmerited mercy (forgiveness) and unmerited grace (placement in an undeserved reconciled position of honor).

So, it may seem ambiguous at first, but God’s love is unconditional in some aspects and conditional in others as we view all that is contained in the message of the Gospel. 

Are we the church teaching this today?  Or, are we leading people to a false gospel by painting a picture of God loving them unconditionally without acknowledging that sin is what separates them from God to begin with?

If we ignore sin, it WILL run rampant in the church.  If the church is not teaching what sin is, then the church is also not teaching repentance, therefore, it is not teaching a true gospel.  The grace and mercy of a false gospel conveys an unconditional love that requires no responsibility on the part of the individual.  It teaches that the law does not matter.  It seduces us into believing that there is nothing about us that needs to change.  It ignores the truth of Isaiah 64:6 that even the good that we do is turned into filthy rags by the sinfulness of the rest of our lives.  Moral law ends up having no role in the process of conversion to being a follower of Jesus because it is subtly taken out of the picture.  

This convoluted perception of unconditional love leads to no distinction between the church and the world.  It is the promotion of an individualism that rejects any notion that God wants to see transformation in our hearts.  As long as the church does not teach what sin is, the church has no power to preach about true unconditional love. 

Without awareness, acknowledgement, and acceptance of what God’s word says in regards to what sin is, people within the church turn to accepting what is popular in culture rather than answering the call of scripture to live a holy life.  That lines up well with the entirety of Proverbs 29:18.

To ignore the role that sin plays in the bigger picture of receiving God’s unconditional love (borrowing a phrase I’ve used before), leaves Jesus rotting in a ditch somewhere on the outskirts of Jerusalem. If it continues, eventually no one will understand why He died.

 Know who you are, whose you are, where you have come from and what your destiny is.