Divine Love, Unconditional Grace
The theologian Karl Barth is famously reported to have been asked by a student if he could summarize his theology in a single sentence, to which he responded that it was as simple as the words of a song he learned as a child: “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”1 The talk was unrecorded, and there isn’t even direct evidence that Barth actually said this. However, there still is an amazingly profound truth in the statement.
I’ve been a Christian for over 13 years. My faith has massively informed my life; it has seen me through my lowest moments and my highest highs, becoming the lens, or worldview, through which I view almost everything in life. Looking back, I often find that the majority of my walk in Christ has been about living for God. My vision of the ideal relationship with God has been one where everything I do is for Him. After all, Paul writes, “whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God” (1 Cor. 10:31). Even now, that is the ultimate goal of how I want to live my life. However, across the span of my life the reason why I try to “do everything for God” has changed.
I got saved when I was five years old. I was in an apartment building in Amman, Jordan and my mom was cutting strawberries in the kitchen. I had heard the gospel all my life from my parents, but up until that point, I hadn’t fully grasped the concept. But for whatever reason, I suddenly understood it then. I told my mom I was going to accept Jesus. Then, insisting I do it without any guidance, my five-year-old self asked God to forgive me of my sins and come into my life. At the time, I didn’t make this decision out of a desire to know God, or even a fear of death. If anything, I prayed that prayer out of a sense of rational duty. I had no reason to doubt the God of my parents. If this is how God worked, I might as well do what he tells me and surrender to him.
I don’t say this to discredit my salvation at that moment. I strongly believe that I gave my life to Christ, and everyone comes to God in different ways. However, the story of how I came to Christ demonstrates the type of relationship I had with him for many years afterwards. For a long time, my relationship with God was one that was purely rational. I knew I needed forgiveness; God offered forgiveness; therefore I accepted it. Now that I had surrendered to God, I should do what he said. To be honest, this mindset made me a really good kid. I rarely got into trouble, I was always helpful, and I never said no to a request. Even when I was only eight years old, I read my Bible with religious fervor.
As I got older though, something began to bother me. No matter where I turned, I was confronted with the necessity of loving God. Not just obeying Him, loving Him. For a while I comforted myself with platitudes like “love is an action.” If love is an action, then I certainly seemed to love God. But in honesty, deep down it still troubled me. I knew when people said “love is action,” they weren’t trying to negate the internal side of love, they were just trying to show that one had to act on their feelings. My problem wasn’t action, it was feeling in the first place.
At the time, I was missing the simple point from Karl Barth that I shared above. The “summary of theology” isn’t “accept God’s forgiveness and then be a good person.” In fact, Barth would argue that it isn’t even to “love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.”2 That might be the sum of the law and prophets like Jesus said, but it isn’t the keystone to our relationship with God. Before we can love God, we have to know the simple words of the song: “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.” After all, God is the perfect source of love, and “we love because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). In other words, we can’t truly love God until we accept the fact that he loves us.
My problem was exactly this. Somehow, I had missed a piece of the gospel. Of course I knew, on a rational level, that God loved us. I even knew that we loved God “because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). However, I wasn’t able to accept and internalize the fact that God loved me, individually and unconditionally. I knew it, but I didn’t truly believe it. Somewhere, in the back of my mind, I had gone on for years believing that I was only given salvation because God offered it to everyone, and that somehow my undeserving self was just lucky enough to hop on the bandwagon. From the time I was five until high school I somehow had internalized not a sense of unconditional love for me, but a need to live up to grace that had been shown to me.
What’s amazing is that this truth has become the keystone to my faith, the sum of my theology (which, I suppose, isn’t surprising since it is the fundamental truth of the gospel). When I accepted the fact that God truly loved me, I found myself loving him. In fact, God’s love filled my cup and it ran over. The sense of God’s abounding endless love in me flowed out of me and into my interactions with others in a way that I had never been capable of before. “God is love” and “love is from God” (1 John 4:7). The realization of God’s love for me allowed me to love him and love like him. All I had to do was accept that “Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so.”
1 https://www.reformation21.org/blogs/jesus-loves-me-this-i-know.php
2 Matthew 22:35
Silas is a sophomore at Columbia College and the Treasurer for the Witness. He enjoys playing piano and reading philosophy.