‘In this is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.'
This is the final definition and revelation of love. It is not found in any love that we have, but in God's great love in which He sent His own beloved Son to be the propitiation for our sins. It is a love that has provided a way back to Him. It is a love that provided a means of doing all that was necessary to remove the effects of sin from those who respond to Him. Propitiation might be too strong a word, because it might suggest unrighteous anger, and God's ‘anger' is holy and pure, and never unrighteous, but expiation is too weak a word because it does not take into account God's positive aversion to sin. What this propitiation achieves is that what Jesus has done through His sacrifice of Himself can make a man as though he had never sinned, because all the consequences of God's aversion to sin, and to man in his sin, were borne by Jesus Christ through His death on the cross. Through it He has redeemed man from sin, delivering him by the payment of a price, being made a ‘ransom in the place of many' (Mark 10:45). He Who knew no sin was, as it were, made sin for us, suffering in our place, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him (2 Corinthians 5:21). There can be no greater love than this. It is the love which expressed itself when God Himself humbled Himself and in Jesus Christ became man in order to bear in Himself the sin of the world (Philippians 2:5-11).