What if God had taken a fearful approach to loving Israel? Or David, Moses, Abraham, Noah, or Adam and Eve? What if God had said, “I think I’ll back off from creating the world because if I fill it with creatures after My likeness—creatures with the freedom to choose—they may choose not to love Me.”

God made an incredible decision to instill freedom into His children. And sure enough, it brought Him the grief endured by any parent who has had a rebellious child. But for God it has been worse: That grief has come repeatedly and in every variation in every corner of the world. Every human child but One has dishonored Him.

Since the Garden, we have chosen to break laws as fast as He could give them to us. We have chosen to greet the incomparable, everlasting love of our Creator with insult and derision. In doing so, we injure ourselves and cause Him sorrow. And somehow, through it all, God’s love continues, never responding in kind, never giving up hope and folding up shop, never reacting, but always reaching out to rescue, to restore. The deeper our insult, the deeper His resolve to bring us home.

Yes, love can be painful, and that’s the very reason it can overcome the world. God shows us that miracles come to pass when the one who loves receives bad for good yet keeps offering the good, keeps loving without return. The doorway between heaven and earth is cracked open and the light of God’s love shines through.

We could strike back when we’re hit, or we could simply go hide in a cave. But we are the children of an eternal God, and we were made for something better. We were made to experience and dispense the miracle of selfless, patient, stubborn, love—a love that does not quit; a love that does not demand return; a love that does not avoid pain but is compassionate beyond measure.

The Consummation of God’s Love

I will not execute the fierceness of My anger;

I will not again destroy Ephraim.

For I am God, and not man,

The Holy One in your midst;

And I will not come with terror.

—HOSEA 11:9

How can God possibly spare Israel when they obviously deserve the ultimate punishment? If He is a righteous God, how can He justify allowing them to rebel without bringing down annihilation? Or, as the apostle Paul put it, how can God simultaneously be both “just and the justifier” (Romans 3:26)?