HIS LOVE ENDURES FOREVER
Reflections on the Love of God
By Garry J. Williams
IVP. 191 pages. £11.99
ISBN 978 1 783 592 838
I found this book a very helpful, thought-provoking and enriching read.
Everyone affirms ‘God is love’, but the language of love has become so threadbare today it can mean almost anything. His Love Endures Forever aims to tackle this by an exploration of the real biblical meaning of ‘the love of God’, and in particular to show how differently we need to think about divine love and human love, so as to define and explain the latter by the former, not vice versa.
By revelation
Two chapters deal with method, laying out why we need revelation from God in order to know him at all (our two-fold problem of being objectively ruined as images of God through sin, and subjectively darkened by spiritual blindness) and how God does reveal himself to us (by speaking ‘creaturely’ to us in our own language, which points us to him truly, but by analogy). A further ten short chapters explain different aspects of God’s love as it is described in Scripture, with particular emphasis on how it flows from who he is – the triune God. This emphasis was one of the most helpful and enriching aspects of the book. Each chapter ends with questions and thoughts on which to meditate , encouraging theology to become a matter of the heart and will, not just the intellect.
The style of the book is accessible, and though the substance is weighty, it is far from being heavy; you read about God’s omnipresence, aseity, impassibility, etc. without realising it, since Dr Williams also speaks ‘creaturely’, eschewing technical language and making deep theological truth lucid, engaging and attractive. A stretching and rewarding read for an intelligent teenager and a book I would recommend for students, church members and, very much also, to preachers as a rich source of help and inspiration for preaching. I am thankful to have read it and will return to it often.
