Abdu Murray
Love is defined by giving. It is almost universally true that on birthdays, holidays, and anniversaries, we express our love to each other by giving gifts. in most cultures, the wedding ceremony is sealed when the bride and groom exchange gifts, usually rings. When we truly love someone, we give of our time, our treasure, and our strength. Amy Carmichael, who spent 53 years as a missionary in India without furlough, once wrote, “One can give without loving, but one cannot love without giving.” The point is clear. Love is only true when it impels us to give to another.
While exchanging gifts on special occasions is well and good, there remains a hint of “giving to get” in such exchanges. How often do we feel the guilt of having not given an expensive gift to a loved one after they have just given us a present whose cost far exceeds what we paid for their gift? That guilt comes from our desire for reciprocity in gift giving. Thus, giving, in and of itself, is not the hallmark of pure love. Rather, there is a special kind of giving that demonstrates pure, selfless love.
The greatest expression of love is self-sacrifice. When we consider God’s attributes, we consider all of these things. When we think of God, we think of a being who possesses infinitely positive attributes and who expresses them in the most ultimate ways. If we can think of a being with higher moral attributes or higher expressions of those moral attributes, that being would, by definition, be God. If love is one of those attributes, as the Bible says it is when it states that “God is love,” then no being could express that attribute in a form that is higher or more admirable than God is capable of.
Yet we see human beings providing the ultimate expression of love through self-sacrifice for the benefit of others. Indeed, people even give their very lives for the welfare of others. A parent gives to an infant when the child is practically nothing but a burden. There is, from a purely economical view, very little reciprocity of relationship. Yet a parent pours everything she has into her child, unconditionally. As I grew up, my parents and my Middle Eastern heritage, in which family was of the utmost importance, constantly reminded me of this fact. Just a five short years ago, those lectures and platitudes suddenly became very real as my world changed with the birth of our first child. In a moment of time, unconditional love changed from an abstract idea into a compelling force that drives me to pour into a young life no matter what the personal sacrifice will be. What father or mother reading these words would not gladly give their very life to save the life of their child? Those who believe that God could not or would not deign to save us through the Cross rob Him of the most ultimate expression of love. Would we have it that the very God who created us be incapable of or even unwilling to express love in this ultimate way? Are we capable of being more loving than He?
The very thought seems strange if such a being as God exists. The solution must be that God is fully capable of self-sacrifice in some sense. Only the Christian faith offers this solution in the Incarnation of Jesus and His work on the cross. When we give our own lives for those we love, we give up the physical part of existence. Our souls continue on, but our bodies do not. In an analogous fashion, God also gives something up. This brings the profundities of the Trinity, God existing in one essence with three distinct persons, and the incarnation, the person of Jesus shared by two distinct natures, into full view. God the Son must willingly choose to share the person of Jesus with humanity. Jesus must willingly choose to lay down his physical life. In His humanity, He must choose to allow the rupture in the relationship with God so that the penalty of sin could be paid for. In these ways, God gives self-sacrificially for those He loves, and Jesus tells us that He loves us all (John 3:16).
But God’s self-sacrificial love is not given as the world gives it. Some argue that even in seemingly altruistic self-sacrifice, the sacrificer gets something out of the sacrifice. Ayn Rand is famous for making this argument in her essays on the Virtue of Selfishness and other writings. She would say that when we inconvenience ourselves for friends or loved ones, we are getting something in return, which would either be a noble feeling or the strengthening of the relationship. Even in the parent-child relationship, a parent gives to an infant to prepare a relationship that will later serve the parent in old age. Thus, a seemingly altruistic act really is selfish in that it benefits us, while at the same time benefiting others. Thus, Rand would argue, there is no such thing as selfless altruism and if a person truly does value another’s welfare more highly than their own, then that person has a serious psychological problem. Rand’s argument actually proves more than she intended. It proves the reality of humanity’s self-centeredness and God’s pure altruism, which confirms Jesus’ description of reality.
At Golgotha, God gave His Son as a sacrifice for the sins of the entire world, so that we may be saved from the judgment we deserve. God, as the infinite being, having no needs and no deficiencies, does not lack in feelings of nobility. He offers the sacrifice of the cross for one purpose: to have communion with humanity, His creation. God does not do this to remedy a cosmic loneliness. As a triune being, a singular being who exists with internal relationship, He enjoys eternal, perfect community within Himself. The Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit love and interact with one another in an eternal sense. Thus, God does not need us for meaningful relationships. Rather, He desires communion with us for its own sake. More to the point, He desires communion with us for our sake. He offers that fellowship to us, first by creating us and then redeeming us, simply out of the boundlessness of His grace. We do not deserve existence, yet He created us. We do not deserve redemption, yet He redeems us. The gift of creation was gracious because it was free. We did not merit it, and it cost God nothing. But the gift of redemption was altruistically loving because it cost God His Son. Love is at its best and most pure when it costs. Jesus paid the infinite cost in securing our relationship with Him. God in Christ is the ultimate expression of the best kind of love—a love that is self-sacrificial.