The Dial that Controls His Love for Us
The dial that controls God's love for us is in God's hand not ours. Moreover, it is set to the highest degree and is locked in place. God does not delegate control of the dial to us. Moreover, he is neither fickle nor arbitrary and capricious with regard to its setting.
The Miracle is that His Love for Us Survived the Crucifixion
His love for us ought to have faded as we tortured him and died when we killed him. But it did not. His love for us survived the evil we did to him.
Our Failure to Piss Him Off
The evil we did to him ought to have, at the very least, pissed him off. It ought to have antagonized him. It ought to have earned us a place on his shit list. It ought to have provoked his natural instinct for justice. It ought to have triggered his reflex for revenge, retaliation and retribution. It ought to have transformed him into our enemy - into a misanthropic monster - into the God who hates us. It ought to have shifted God from the pro-human team to the anti-human team with the serpent and his minions. When the fuse is lit, the bomb ordinarily explodes. But, remarkably, it did not. The fuse worked but the bomb was a dud . The evil we did to him did not extinguish his love for us or reduce it by even the slightest degree
. He clung to his love for us, held tight and refused to let go. God let us get away with murder - with deicide . Such is the nature of God! Wow! Our God is a beneficent philanthropist not a misanthropic monster. This is the good news of great joy - very good news for us indeed.
Inextinguishable is His Love for Us
The evil we did to him during the Crucifixion did not extinguish the bonfire of love that burns for us in his most sacred heart nor reduce its intensity by even the slightest degree. He refused to let go of his love for us even though we baptized him in a boiling cauldron of torture and death (Matthew 3:13-15). His love for us ought to have faded as we tortured him and died when we killed him. But it did not. His love survived our evil. The intransigency of his love for sinners is the rock on which we build our understanding of God. His passion, death and resurrection are the source of our confidence in him. We are dearly loved by Omnipotence. Our God is our omnipotent lover. Whom shall we fear? Of whom shall we be afraid? He will never disappoint us. He will never let us down. Trust in him (Psalm 27).
The temperature of his love for us does not vacillate. It does not rise or fall in accordance with our saintliness and sinfullness. The bloody wounds we opened in the body of Christ proved to us that there is nothing - nothing - we can do to extinguish his love for us or reduce it by even the slightest degree. That the evil baptism into which we immersed him while he was human, alive, tender, vulnerable and our guest upon the earth did not drain his heart of his love for us tells us in no uncertain terms that nothing can. His love for us is immune to our wickedness. His love for us is intransigent. It is independent.
Calvary was God's Declaration of Indepence. At Calvary, the Son of God proved that His love for us is independent of the evil we do to him.