The Evangelical Universalist Forum

Does This Mean God's Love Is Not Eternal

John 14:21- “He who has My commandments and keeps them is the one who loves Me; and he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and will disclose Myself to him.”

If one does not love Christ the Father will not love him. Does that mean God’s love is conditional on the love for Christ? Food for thought!

The universalist (like me) will typically answer that everyone will eventually come to love Jesus and keep His commandments. There’s this hurdle that traditional believers can’t seem to realize doesn’t exist for God. We’ve put a time limit on salvation, and that time limit is physical death. It’s not scriptural. God doesn’t honor our time limits. Given unlimited “time,” God cannot ultimately fail to win the hearts of all those He loves (which is everyone).

Incidentally, who is this person who keeps Jesus’ commandments? I mean, a lot of us want to and try to, but who has done this perfectly? If the answer is (so far at least) no one, then who can be saved?

This is referring to a subjective love experienced by believers in their daily walking by the Spirit of Christ, not the general love God has for all, whether they know of it or not:

Jn.3:16 For God so loved/loves the world…

But Jesus didn’t affix “He who keeps my commandments” with “perfectly” did He?
He said, “He who has My commandments and keeps them is the one who loves Me.” (John 14:21)

If He had meant “keeps them perfectly,” He was speaking of an empty set, and the implication would have been that no one loved Him.
I think He meant those whose general lifestyle is to keep Christ’s commandments as being the ones who love Him.

When you put it that way, Don, I think you’re right. At least in the context of that passage. It may be theoretically possible to do a “good enough” job of it without God’s enabling grace, but probably not, in practice, possible for me–but I guess that depends on where the line between “good enough” and “nope–go back and try harder” gets drawn. :confused: :laughing:

Paul did say something to the effect that if you only partially keep the law and don’t keep other parts of it, you’ve broken the whole thing, but I think (if I remember right) that was in Romans and he was pointing out that the Jewish members of the Roman church weren’t especially righteous just because their race had been given the law and they customarily kept what they considered the more important bits.

That wasn’t Pual that was James:

James 2:10-For whoever keeps the whole law, and yet stumbles in one point, he has become guilty of all.

Paul does kind of say in-kind here…

To be fair, I probably remembered it from James–I’m more familiar with that epistle because I memorized it once, long long ago. After a while, they can all get tangled together. :laughing: