The One Word, Over and Over

Read the Bible end to end and one sentence keeps returning, almost word for word, across a thousand years and six writers: I will be their God, and they shall be my people. Not I will be their lawgiver. Not I will be their creditor. Their God, and they mine. Everything else in this letter follows from taking that sentence seriously, including the hard parts.

One promise, from end to end

It is in Exodus, before the law is given: "And I will take you to me for a people, and I will be to you a God: and ye shall know that I am the LORD your God, which bringeth you out from under the burdens of the Egyptians." (Exodus 6:7). It is repeated in Leviticus: "And I will walk among you, and will be your God, and ye shall be my people." (Leviticus 26:12). Jeremiah puts it inside the new covenant: "But this shall be the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel; After those days, saith the LORD, I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts; and will be their God, and they shall be my people." (Jeremiah 31:33). Ezekiel says it again to a people in exile: "And ye shall dwell in the land that I gave to your fathers; and ye shall be my people, and I will be your God." (Ezekiel 36:28). And John hears it at the end of everything: "And I heard a great voice out of heaven saying, Behold, the tabernacle of God is with men, and he will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself shall be with them, and be their God." (Revelation 21:3).

Five books, roughly a thousand years apart at the ends, and the promise does not develop or soften. It is the same sentence. Whatever else Scripture is doing, it is doing that.

A marriage, not a contract

When God wants a picture for it, He does not reach for a courtroom or a ledger. He reaches for a marriage, and then for the worst thing that can happen inside one.

He tells Hosea to marry a woman who will keep leaving, and to keep taking her back, as a living illustration. He says of Himself, "For thy Maker is thine husband; the LORD of hosts is his name; and thy Redeemer the Holy One of Israel; The God of the whole earth shall he be called." (Isaiah 54:5). Jesus calls Himself the bridegroom: "And Jesus said unto them, Can the children of the bridechamber mourn, as long as the bridegroom is with them? but the days will come, when the bridegroom shall be taken from them, and then shall they fast." (Matthew 9:15). Paul says he has espoused the church to one husband: "For I am jealous over you with godly jealousy: for I have espoused you to one husband, that I may present you as a chaste virgin to Christ." (2 Corinthians 11:2).

This is why the sharpest word Scripture uses against God's own people is not rebellion or disobedience. It is adultery. You cannot betray a contract; you can only default on one. You can betray a covenant, and only a covenant entered freely. When Israel strays, God grieves like a husband, not like a clerk closing an account.

Lovingkindness is the word He uses about Himself

Asked to describe His own character, God answers with it: "And the LORD passed by before him, and proclaimed, The LORD, The LORD God, merciful and gracious, longsuffering, and abundant in goodness and truth," (Exodus 34:6). Through Jeremiah He says why He ever drew anyone at all: "The LORD hath appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee." (Jeremiah 31:3). Jeremiah's own lament turns on it: "It is of the LORD’s mercies that we are not consumed, because his compassions fail not." (Lamentations 3:22) and "They are new every morning: great is thy faithfulness." (Lamentations 3:23).

And Psalm 136 makes the point by sheer repetition. Twenty-six verses, and every one of them ends the same way: for his mercy endureth for ever. Creation, the Exodus, the wilderness, the kings, the daily bread of ordinary life, each fact followed by the same refrain, twenty-six times. If Scripture had one word it wanted to hammer, that is what hammering looks like.

A stiffnecked people, and He stayed

None of this is sentiment, because the people in the story are not lovable. God says so out loud. "And the LORD said unto Moses, I have seen this people, and, behold, it is a stiffnecked people:" (Exodus 32:9). He says it again when they have worn Him down: "Unto a land flowing with milk and honey: for I will not go up in the midst of thee; for thou art a stiffnecked people: lest I consume thee in the way." (Exodus 33:3). Moses repeats it so they cannot mistake the land for a compliment: "Understand therefore, that the LORD thy God giveth thee not this good land to possess it for thy righteousness; for thou art a stiffnecked people." (Deuteronomy 9:6). Centuries later Stephen says it to the council and is killed for it: "Ye stiffnecked and uncircumcised in heart and ears, ye do always resist the Holy Ghost: as your fathers did, so do ye." (Acts 7:51).

God calls His people stiffnecked more often than they ever confess it, and He does not leave. Nehemiah's prayer says it plainly: they refused to obey, and hardened their necks, and "And refused to obey, neither were mindful of thy wonders that thou didst among them; but hardened their necks, and in their rebellion appointed a captain to return to their bondage: but thou art a God ready to pardon, gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and of great kindness, and forsookest them not." (Nehemiah 9:17). That is the shape of it. Not a God who found a worthy bride, but a God who kept one who was not.

Sin is the one word refused

If love is what the whole thing is for, then sin is not first a rule broken. It is the one word refused. Christ hangs the entire law on two commandments, "On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets." (Matthew 22:40), and Paul says the same thing from the other side: "Love worketh no ill to his neighbour: therefore love is the fulfilling of the law." (Romans 13:10).

So every sin is a failure to love: God, or a neighbour, or both. Which is why God's opposition to sin is not the opposite of His love but the expression of it. A father indifferent to what is eating his child is not kind. And it is why the cross is not God being talked out of anger by someone gentler, but God Himself absorbing what love costs when it will not let the beloved go: "But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." (Romans 5:8).

What He endured for it

Isaiah says what it looked like from outside: "He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him; he was despised, and we esteemed him not." (Isaiah 53:3). Hebrews says what carried Him through it: "Looking unto Jesus the author and finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set before him endured the cross, despising the shame, and is set down at the right hand of the throne of God." (Hebrews 12:2). The endurance is not incidental to the love. It is the proof of it, and it is the answer to anyone who thinks a relationship with God is a soft idea.

Love that could be compelled would not be love

Here is the reason the will has to be real. A God who determines the answer has not been loved; He has been echoed. He did not make puppets and call it love. He wanted a bride, not a signatory, and a bride who could not have said no has not said yes.

Irenaeus put it in one line in the second century: "there is no coercion with God, but a good will towards us is present with Him continually." (Against Heresies IV.37, a chapter our library does not carry, so this is quoted from the standard Ante-Nicene Fathers text and not verified against our own copy.) God does not force the outcome. He secures it, and securing without forcing is the harder power, not the weaker one. (The fuller case is in Free Will and the Plan That Cannot Fail and TULIP, Tested.)

Abiding is how it is kept

A relationship is not kept by having once begun it. Christ says: "As the Father hath loved me, so have I loved you: continue ye in my love." (John 15:9) And: "If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love; even as I have kept my Father’s commandments, and abide in his love." (John 15:10) John says the same of us: "And we have known and believed the love that God hath to us. God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him." (1 John 4:16). And he names where it started, so no one mistakes the order: "We love him, because he first loved us." (1 John 4:19).

That is what The Vine is about at length, and it is why this site keeps using the word relationship where others would say transaction.

Where this lands

Eternal life is not defined in Scripture as a place or a length of time. It is defined as knowing Someone, present tense, beginning now: "And this is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent." (John 17:3)

If the Bible had one word it said over and over, it is love. Not love as a feeling, and not love as permission, but the kind that keeps a promise to a stiffnecked people for a thousand years, that grieves like a husband rather than a clerk, that refuses to call the wound health, and that would not compel the answer even though it could. Everything else on this site, the security that is real and conditional, the warnings, the water and the table, the arguing about Babylon, rests on that and is smaller than it.

Related: The Vine, What Is Love?, Marriage, Free Will and the Plan That Cannot Fail, What I Want You to Know, Covenant Theology vs. Dispensationalism. Scripture from the King James Version, linked to BibleHub; the words of Christ are marked in purple. Irenaeus, Against Heresies IV.37.