“The work of redemption which the gospel makes known, above all things, affords motives to love. For that work was the most glorious and wonderful exhibition of love that ever was seen or heard of.

Love is the principal thing that the gospel dwells on when speaking of God and of Christ. It brings to light the love eternally existing between the Father and the Son, and declares how that same love has been manifested in many things.

The gospel manifests how Christ is God’s well-beloved Son, in whom He is ever well pleased and how He so loved Him, that He has raised Him to the throne of the mediatorial kingdom, and appointed Him to be the judge of the world, and ordained that all mankind should stand before Him in judgment.

In the gospel, too, is revealed the love that Christ has to the Father, and the wonderful fruits of that love, particularly in His doing such great things, and suffering such great things in obedience to the Father’s will, and for the honour of His justice, and law, and authority, as the great moral governor.

In the gospel there is revealed how the Father and Son are one in love, that we might be induced, in the like spirit, to be one with them, and with one another, agreeably to Christ’s prayer (John 17:21-23).

The gospel also declares to us that the love of God was from everlasting, and reminds us that He loved those that are redeemed by Christ, before the foundation of the world and that He gave them to the Son and that the Son loved them as His own.

The gospel reveals, too, the wonderful love of both the Father and the Son to the saints now in glory– that Christ not only loved them while in the world, but that He loved them to the end.

And all this love is spoken of as bestowed on us while we were wanderers, outcasts, worthless, guilty, and even enemies. This is love, such as was never elsewhere known or conceived.”

–Jonathan Edwards, Charity and Its Fruits (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 1852/2000), 19-20.