I have recently been thinking more about what it means for God to love me, and then for me to love God. That seems fairly important. Jesus summarized all of God’s law by saying that we should love God with all of who we are, and we are to love others. That seems straightforward. But I have been thinking more about what it means for God to love me, for me to be loved by God. There is a verse in the book of Jeremiah that is helping me.

In Jeremiah 31:3, God says this. “I have loved you with an everlasting love, therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you.” Let that truth sink in. God says that he loves us with an everlasting love. He loves us (love here is a verb; it is action) with an everlasting love (love here is a noun; it is what he has for us and feels towards us). He loves us with love. It is almost like God, as it were, can’t think of any other way to emphasize to us that he loves us, so he just says it over and again, first as a verb then as a noun. His love is loving. His love feels like love. We experience his love as love.

And the love that he has for us, the love with which he loves us, never ends. It is everlasting. There is nothing you can do to make God love you more than he does right now, and there is nothing you can do to make him love you less than he does right now. You can’t do more good things to make him love you more, and you can’t sin enough to make him love you less. God loves you as much when you lose your temper or when you promote yourself in a conversation as he does when you pray for someone in need or help someone who is hurting or when you share the truths of the gospel to someone who doesn’t know them.

I want you to hear the words from Geerhardus Vos. Vos was a Dutch-American theologian in the early 1900s. Vos comments on Jeremiah 31:3 and says this. “In the unlimitable round of his timeless existence, we have never been absent from nor uncared for by Him. The best proof that He will never cease to love us lies in that He never began. What we are for Him and what He is for us belongs to the realm of eternal values. Without this we are nothing, in it we have all” (italics mine). Did you see what Vos said? God never began to love us. Think about that. What that means is this. His love for us never had a starting point. Why? Because it has always been. There was never a time when God did not love us. It is an everlasting love, as God himself said in Jeremiah. And as Vos said, we have never been absent from him, from his love, from his attention, from delight in us. He never takes his eyes off of us. And we have never been uncared for by him. He always, always cares for us.

His love for us, his care for us, is there when we walk down the wedding aisle, when we hold our newborn, when we experience the restoration of a broken relationship. It is also there when we see flames engulfing our house, when we sin against wife and husband and children and experience their sins against us, when we get test results that show the cancer is malignant. All that God is to us He is through his love for us and out of his love for us. As Vos said, the best proof that God will never cease to love us is that he never began. He loved us before time began—an everlasting love—and so everything we experience from God is love and out of love. Our relationship with God, a relationship that is solely comprised of his love for us, belongs to eternity, as Vos said. His love for us can’t end because it never began.

I need to hear this. God’s love for me is everlasting. It has no end because it had no beginning. It can’t change because God doesn’t change. It can’t become greater nor can it be lessened. God’s love for me is eternal because God is eternal. And, again as Vos said, without the love of God we are nothing; but with it, we have all.