The Believer’s Assurance (pt. 2)
Romans 5:5
Anti-traditional family sociologists have discovered that in spite of their decades long project to dismiss the importance of the father and especially, a father’s love from the successful upbringing of children—they simply can’t. In spite of all their theories, which argue that dads are unimportant, unessential, and insignificant in the lives of their children so that there is no need to advocate the traditional family of a father, mother, and kids—they keep coming up against the cold-hard reality that history simply does not back up their theories.
One case in point is that the one thing most mass serial murderers such as Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Jeffery Dahmer, and Ted Bundy all have in common is that they either had fathers who were distant and wanted nothing to do with them, deserted the family when they were young, abused them, or disappeared before they were ever born. Now this is not to say that if your father was distant, abusive, or deserted you that you will become a mass murderer but it is to say that fathers are significantly important in the lives of their children and essential to their becoming healthy secure human beings.
Children that grow up either without good fathers or without the sense that their fathers love them do not grow up without experiencing some major challenges in life. And this principle holds true in the spiritual realm as well. Christians who do not know and understand the love of their Heavenly Father for them do not grow up and mature as believers without facing significant spiritual challenges and struggles that come as a result of their misunderstanding of God’s love for them and thus their security in Him. And this is why it is imperative that believers be taught and understand the nature of God the Father’s love for them. You see, insecure Christians do not make the best Christians and the only way to really help them is to help them understand and personally experience the strength of God’s love for them.
So, let’s turn to Romans 5:5.
Last Sunday, we spent our time talking about the love of God, which having been poured out within the believer’s heart guarantees the believer’s salvation. Today we will deal with the fact that Paul also tells us that this great love, which God has poured into the believer’s heart is experienced and enjoyed somehow through the Holy Spirit of God Who has also been given to the believer. And the question that comes to mind—at least my mind—is what is the role of the Holy Spirit in enabling the believer to experience the love of God so as to experience the assurance of his or her salvation. Is the Holy Spirit simply the conduit through whom the love of God is poured out within my heart or could it be that He is the actual source and substantive experience of that love, which is resident in my heart?
When I say God wants us to experience His love I do not mean that God is only wanting us to know that He loves us because we have read it in the Bible or because the preacher says so--rather God desires us to know that He loves us because we have and are experiencing His love as well. Look at Ephesians 3:14-19. Paul’s prayer for us is that we would not only comprehend in our minds the love of Christ but also experience that love which surpasses the knowledge and comprehension of it. In other words, he wants us to experience, feel and sense the great love of Christ because this surpasses simply knowing about it as “head knowledge”. And his purpose in wanting us to experience the love of Christ in our lives is because then we will be “filled with all the fullness of God”.
Now what does Paul mean by this phrase: “filled with all the fullness of God”? I believe it means that when we mentally and spiritually grow to know, understand, comprehend, and believe how much God in Christ really loves us and then begin to emotionally experience, sense, feel, enjoy, revel in, and delight in this love—our capacity for enjoying God and for enjoying our relationship with God will be overflowing so that we will be filled with the fullness of God—to the point where we have reached our capacity for experiencing God and if we are to experience any more He is going to have to give us a bigger cup. And that is exactly what God does when we finally come to figure out that this life is not about all that is swirling around us but rather about God and enjoying God and His love for us to the fullest capacity possible.
Our family has been reading a biography of Hudson Taylor the missionary whom God used to open up China to the Gospel. Hudson Taylor was a busy man—Not only was he a missionary but he recruited hundreds of other missionaries to go to China and was responsible for overseeing their work and making sure their needs were being met. He was involved in training, fund raising, recruiting, missions work, traveling back and forth between China and England, raising a family, and keeping up with his medical work—did I fail to mention that he was also a doctor?! But in the midst of this very busy and productive life listen to what consumed him through most of his adult life. Shortly before his death he told a bunch of new missionaries: "Forty years I have made it the chief business of my life to cultivate a personal acquaintance with the Lord Jesus Christ . . . so as to enjoy Him to the fullest everyday."
So if we are to be filled with the fullness of God, so as, to be as much as we have the capacity to be, fully experiencing God and His love and His joy and His power—we must understand, comprehend, grasp, and experience the love of God, which has been poured out within our hearts—and to do this we also need to understand the Holy Spirit’s role with us in this experience. And as I have consumed myself with this verse this week I have been forced to consider and try to answer a very intriguing question:
Is it possible that what Paul is saying here in Romans 5:5 is that the love of God for us and the Holy Spirit are synonymous?
In other words, could it be that God’s saving, assuring, glorifying love for believers is not so much a feeling to be experienced but a person to know and to experience? Thus, could it be that, the love of God for us as believers is best understood and experienced in the person of God the Holy Spirit so that when Paul says that the love of God has been poured out within our hearts—we can understand this to mean that the love of God has been poured out within our hearts because the God of love has been poured out within our hearts?
An analogy may help. It is a good thing to know a person loves you but a better thing to experience the person who loves you actually loving you. In fact, to only know that the person loves you without ever experiencing the person and the person loving you would be rather frustrating. It is only in experiencing the person loving you that the person’s love is truly experienced.
Thus, in flooding our hearts with His love through the Holy Spirit Who is also given to us—God has in effect allowed us to experience His love as well as He, Himself loving us in the Holy Spirit Who has been given to us. You see, the love of God which proceeds from God and the Holy Spirit of God are connected inseparably here in Romans 5:5 by use of the Greek word dia, which is translated in most English translations by the word through. The word dia is a preposition, which if you remember your high school English is a word which links and relates nouns or pronouns to other words in a sentence. And typically, a preposition usually indicates the relationship of its object to the rest of the sentence.
Well, in verse 5, the object of the preposition through is the Holy Spirit.
And what the Holy Spirit is being linked back to and related to is the love of God.
In other words, there is a direct inseparable relationship in this sentence between the love of God and the Holy Spirit. In fact, the Greek grammar indicates that the Holy Spirit is the One through Whom the love of God is being experienced and in fact the One Who is the substantive experience of God’s love in the believer’s life.
In other words, upon our salvation, God flooded our hearts with His love by giving us His Holy Spirit Who is the perfect embodiment, full expression, and most comprehensive representation of His love.
Therefore, in being given the Holy Spirit of God we have been given not only the love of God but the God Who loves us and is in fact love at the very same time.
Now, Scripture speaks often of the Holy Spirit as being poured out within our hearts and as “proceeding” from both the Father and the Son. In John 15:26, we see that the Holy Spirit Who is sent to us by Jesus comes from the Father and actually proceeds from the Father. The word “proceeds” comes from the Greek word, ekporeuomai and means “to come out of or to come forth from”. And then in Luke 24:49 and John 16:7 we see that the Holy Spirit is sent out by Jesus—God the Son.
Thus, the Scriptural evidence indicates that the Holy Spirit of God proceeds and is sent into the believer’s heart by both the Father and the Son, which is why the Westminster Confession of 1647 and the London Baptist Confession of 1689 state:
“The Father is of none, neither begotten nor proceeding; the Son is eternally begotten of the Father; the Holy Spirit eternally proceeding from the Father and the Son.”
But the interesting thing is that they did not mean that the Father and the Son separately sent forth the Spirit but that in their eternal union together as Father and Son—the Spirit eternally proceeded and is still proceeding from that union as the very divine expression, representation, manifestation, and image of that union’s spirit of love.
Look at Galatians 4:4-7. In this passage, we are told that because we who are believers are the adopted sons of God that God has sent forth the Spirit of Christ, Who by the way is the Holy Spirit, into our hearts. And note that this Spirit of Christ or the Holy Spirit is crying out “Abba! Father!” Now to understand this passage you must see who is crying out “Abba! Father!”. It is not us. It is the Holy Spirit of God—Who as the Spirit of Christ is manifesting and even embodying Christ’s expression of love and desire for His Father as seen in the cry, “Abba! Father!” And this Holy Spirit of God who is the very embodiment of Christ’s love and desire for God the Father is Who has been sent forth into our hearts for the purpose of confirming the fact that we who believe in Christ really are the Sons of God because we have living within us the very Spirit of Christ’s love for His Father in the Person of the Holy Spirit.
Now this is really important because what Paul is saying in this Galatian’s passage is that the primary confirmation of our having been saved and thus adopted into God’s family as Sons is not that we cry out “Abba Father”—but that the Holy Spirit Who has now indwelt us—is crying out “Abba Father” so as to confirm that the love of Christ for His Father has been imparted to us through the Person of the Holy Spirit of God. And what I don’t want you to miss is that the Spirit of Christ or the Holy Spirit Who proceeds from God and is sent into the believers’ hearts by God is expressing the very love of God the Son for God the Father, which is what the Spirit of God does because this glorifies the Son and the Father.
This is important because it shows us that when the Holy Spirit indwells the believer—He indwells the believer as the third member of the Trinity Who is God the Holy Spirit and Who is the manifestation and expression of God the Father’s love for the Son and God the Son’s love for the Father. Therefore, by virtue of His presence in our lives as the indwelling Spirit of God—the very love that God has for God is also indwelling our lives. And this is evident because that love translates into us calling out “Abba Father” as well, which confirms our salvation according to Romans 8:15-17
Now go back to Romans 5:5.
Note that the verse does not specifically say that “the love of God for us has been poured out within our hearts.” Rather it says, “the love of God has been poured out within our hearts”. You see, what has really been poured out within your hearts so as to give you the greatest certainty and assurance of your salvation is not the fact that the love God has for you has been poured out within your heart but rather the very love which God the Father has for God the Son has been poured out within your heart—And since as we will see in the rest of Romans 5 in the weeks to come—that we are in union with Christ—we also are the recipients of and experience this great love God has for the Son because we are in the Son—so that God’s love for you is equal to, as great as, and as eternal as His love for His Son.
There are few theologians who have plumbed the depths of Who the Holy Spirit really is. Oh, all of your good solid conservative theologians believe that the Holy Spirit is a real person within the Triune Godhead and that He is co-eternal and co-equal to and with God—thus He is God. But few have actually dived into the theological depths of what does it mean when the Scriptures teach as the Westminster Confession puts it that the Holy Spirit proceeded and still proceeds from the union between God the Father and God the Son? One of the few who has is none other than Jonathan Edwards who basically made the point that the Holy Spirit is, in the form of a divine Person and third member of the Trinity, the essence and manifestation of the love which is shared and proceeds from the union between the Father and the Son. In other words, the third member of the Trinity Who is the Holy Spirit of God is the very and exact divine image, representation, and substance of the very love God the Father and God the Son have for each other. Therefore, the love union between the Father and the Son is such a living concrete thing that this union itself is a Person—the third person of the Trinity Whom we know as the Holy Spirit of God.
Thus, when you come to Romans 5:5, Paul’s point becomes very clear. When the Holy Spirit of God comes to live within us after we have placed faith in Christ Jesus for salvation, the very love that the Father and the Son have for each other is poured out within our hearts so that we are loved with the very same love that God the Father has for God the Son. And, the Holy Spirit, Who is the perfect expression, manifestation, and substance of this love is the guarantee that God does indeed love us with the very same love with which He loves Jesus.
Isn’t this exactly what Jesus said in John 17:24-26? In verse 26, Jesus says to the Father, “I have made your Name known to them, and will make it known, so that the love with which You loved Me may be in them and I in them.” In other words, we were saved and then indwelt by the Spirit of Christ Who is the Holy Spirit so as to be able to experience the very love of God the Father for God the Son Who is in us by virtue of the fact that the Holy Spirit is in us.
Therefore, since God loves you, the believer, with the very exact same love He has for God the Son anything that He does in regard to you He can also do in regard to Jesus. So that, if it is possible for God to no longer love you then it would only seem possible for Him to no longer love Jesus as well—and if this is possible then the love between God the Father and God the Son is not perfect thus the Holy Spirit of God Who is the substantive manifestation of this love is not perfect either and therefore cannot be God thus the Trinity is not perfect and therefore the integrity of Who God is—is compromised and therefore God no longer exists. Thus for God to ever quit loving the believer—would be to compromise the Godhead—which is impossible.
Therefore, because God loves the believer with the very same perfect love which He loves the Son as manifested by the Holy Spirit of God our salvation is guaranteed forever—or God simply cannot be God! Thus, our final salvation as those who have been justified by faith is guaranteed by the fact that God loves us as much as He loves Himself and if He were to condemn us in the end—He would be making the choice to condemn Himself—which is as utterly impossible as us losing our salvation. And since this is impossible-so is the losing of our salvation.
Therefore, if you are taking refuge in God as the object of your salvation—your salvation is completely secure because there is nothing including yourself that has the ability to successfully challenge Him and His love for you. Psalm 34:22 says: “The Lord redeems the soul of His servants and none who take refuge in Him will be condemned.” You see, to be condemned after taking refuge in God would mean that at some point God ceased to be God and that is impossible, therefore the security of your salvation rests in the very nature, character, integrity, and existence of God Himself.
Such is your heavenly Father’s love for you—that His love for you the believer is bound up in His very integrity and existence as God.
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