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It Is Written

Sabbath School 1st Quarter 2025: God's Love and Justice

Eric Flickinger

John Peckham

01 God Loves Freely

Welcome to Sabbath School brought to you by It Is Written.

We're glad that you are joining us today.

We are beginning a brand new quarter of Sabbath School.

13 weeks, 13 episodes delving into the subject of God's love and justice.

And are our concepts of love and justice really biblical?

We're going to be delving into that over the course of the next 13 lessons and we're glad that you are here with us.

Father, we thank you for giving us an opportunity to delve into your Word, to delve into your love and your justice and we ask that as we do so you will open our hearts and minds to a clearer picture of who you are and your character of love.

Well, we're grateful to have with us this quarter the author of this quarter's Sabbath school lesson.

John is an associate editor of the Adventist Review and he is also a research professor at the Theological Seminary at Andrews University.

It's a pleasure to be with you, thanks for having me.

This is something that you've been studying, you've been interested in for quite some time.

Give us a little bit of background into what, where did this birth from?

Why are you, why is this something that you are passionate about?

Yeah, I've been studying divine love for many, many years now.

My PhD dissertation was actually on the concept of divine love.

And that dissertation turned into a massive project, 800 pages.

So I've been studying these things for quite some time.

I wrote a few books on love and the problem of evil.

How does God's love coexist with the fact that there is so much evil in the world?

And so when the opportunity came to write the lesson a few years ago, I jumped at the chance.

It's a great opportunity to speak about God's love.

So this has been a long time in coming and now we get to glean some of this.

And it's unfortunately we only have 13 lessons, a book about that thick, to dig into it.

But we're gonna get the most of it that we can in our time together.

We take a look at the interaction between Jesus and Peter after the resurrection.

How do we get, how do we understand the concepts of divine forgiveness and restoration in that relationship and the interactions that we see there.

Yeah, you have this amazing scene after the resurrection when Jesus eats with the disciples and then he has this conversation with Peter where he asks him 3 times, Peter do you love me?

And 3 times Peter answers, Lord you know all things, You know that I love you.

And Peter is grieved, the text says in John 21, that Jesus asks him 3 times, do you love me?

And 3 times he gives the commission to feed my sheep or tend my lambs.

Now what's going on here needs to be understood in the background of what had happened before the crucifixion.

Jesus had told Peter, predicted, Peter you're going to deny me 3 times before the rooster crows." Now, of course, knowing Peter, he's like, no, of course not, I'll never deny you, Lord.

But sure enough, just as Jesus predicts, this takes place.

And even according to Luke, Right after Peter denies him a third time, their eyes meet.

And I can only imagine the way Peter feels at that moment.

And now here we are, after the resurrection, and Jesus has risen, but Peter is probably still deeply ashamed of himself, right?

But now Jesus asked him 3 times, do you love me?

And of course Peter answers, you know, you know all things, right?

You know, why are you asking me if I love you?

And so this is actually an episode of restoration where Jesus is actually restoring Peter after that episode, providing him forgiveness, reconciling him to himself, and amazingly, if you know the story of Peter, this this wasn't the only time that Peter messed up, so to speak.

But Peter's made a leader in the church and a wonderful champion for Christ.

And that's the most important question we can answer as well, that Jesus asks us, do you love me?

So it's a beautiful picture of that restoration.

Peter messed up, but Jesus brought him back and restored him.

And that gives us some encouragement as well.

And I think that's, honestly, that's all of us.

You cover a lot of things in this first chapter.

In the book of Hosea chapter 14 and verse 4, you find this passage, I will heal their backsliding, I will love them freely.

What does this tell us about God's, his attitude toward our repentance, our failure?

What insights do we get into God and his character?

Yeah, this whole lesson, this first lesson is based on God loving us freely, and the emphasis that we don't deserve God's love, right?

And yet God, in His love, freely decides to bestow mercy and love and compassion on us anyways.

And the book of Hosea is a wonderful example of this.

In Hosea, God's people have broken covenant relationship with him.

They have egregiously sinned to the point where they should be cut off, at least according to the way the covenants are described earlier.

God's blessing should have been removed from them.

God himself even wrestles in the book of Hosea, how can I give you up?

And finally in Hosea 4 you have this statement, I will heal their backsliding, I will love them freely.

Now initially when someone reads that text they might think that it's saying I will love them without any cost, And that would be theologically correct.

God's love is without cost, but that's not the kind of freely given love that is being discussed in this passage.

The word for freely there, the Hebrew word nedavah, It's the same term that's used, for instance, of the free will offerings in the sanctuary system.

So it's literally saying, I will love you of my own free will.

And that is very significant because they have no claim on the covenant blessings.

They have no claim on God's love anymore.

But God is saying, despite what you've done, despite how far you have gone, I will continue to love you freely as my covenant people.

02 Covenantal Love

We are taking a journey through a fascinating subject.

We are looking at God's love and justice.

What does God's love really look like and how does that interact with His justice?

This is lesson number 2 out of 13 and today we are looking at covenantal love.

We're going to find out in just a moment.

Father, we want to thank you for bringing us together again and as we study this week's lesson, we ask that you will bless us with a deeper understanding of not just the subject, but of you.

But we're grateful to have with us again this week, the author of this quarter's Sabbath school lesson, John Peckham.

He is an associate editor of the Adventist Review and also a research professor at the Adventist Theological Seminary at Andrews University.

So we're looking at covenantal love and I wanna kind of begin our dive into this with 2 words, words that I think many Christians are at least somewhat familiar with, they've at least heard before.

They may or may not have a correct understanding of these words for love.

1 of them is agape and the other 1 is phileo.

Help us to understand what these 2 words mean, and maybe some common misconceptions surrounding these words.

Yeah, yeah, most people have probably been taught something like this.

You've probably been taught that agape is a special kind of love that only God has, and all other kinds of love are deficient in some way, or merely human loves.

So often there's a dichotomy put forth between agape, that's God's love for us, which only gives and never receives, according to some conceptions.

And phileo is like a friendship love, it's a back-and-forth love, relational love that humans can engage in.

But actually, the Bible tells a somewhat different story, and I want us to look at the Bible itself so we can see this for ourselves.

So I want to invite you to read from John 14, and in that verse you'll see God's love mentioned in that verse, and the verb that's used throughout there is the verb form of agape in John 14.

All right, so we're going to look at John 14 verses 21 and 23.

Verse 21 says, He who has my commandments and keeps them, it is he who loves me, and he who loves me will be loved by my father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him.

Jesus answered and said to him, if anyone loves me he will keep my word and my father will love him and we will come to him and make our home with him." So I want us to notice a few things in those verses, right?

So first of all if somebody would think that agape is only a divine love and never a human love, you're already running into problems in this passage, right?

Because we're talking about a love that is reciprocal love relationship, right?

He who keeps my commandments, it is he who loves me, and he who loves me will be loved by my Father." And so you have not only humans engaging in this love, which again is that verb form of agape, but also God responding, that this is a back-and-forth, that God actually somehow evaluatively loves in response, already in John 14 verses 21 and 23.

And so you have this condition in verse 23, If anyone loves me, he will keep my word and my father will love him.

So this is a back-and-forth love relationship using agape all throughout.

So already there we see a misconception that would be cleared up.

Then if we go to John 16 verse 27, we'll see another issue here.

Because as I mentioned before, it's common for people to say that the Greek verb phileo refers to a lesser kind of love.

Sometimes spoken of as brotherly love, but actually that's from a compound term Philadelphia.

That means brotherly love, but it's the the latter part of that compound term that is the brotherly part.

But some say, oh this is a lesser kind of love, it's deficient.

In John 16, verse 27, the verb that's used here of love is phileo, and just notice what it says, for the father himself loves you because you have loved me and have believed that I came forth from God.

Now that sounds almost identical in teaching to what we read in John 14, right?

But here we have the phileo verb that is used.

And so immediately from this verse you should know that whatever else phileo means, it is not necessarily a deficient kind of love.

Because God himself loves us with that kind of love according to this text and God's love is never deficient.

And actually what we find throughout the Bible is that there is no unique term for God's love.

God's love is the greatest and most generous and perfect love, not because of the word that's used, but because God, who is the 1 who gives it.

In fact, the root of agape can refer to anything from the most generous, noble, wonderful kind of love, to something that we wouldn't even describe as love itself.

To give an example of this, kind of a sad example, in the Old Testament translation into the Greek known as the Septuagint, you have the common word for love used in the story of Amnon and Tamar.

And if anyone's not familiar with that story, you have this horrible story of 1 of David's sons, Amnon, who claims to be in love with his half-sister, Tamar.

And he says over and over again, I love her.

But actually in the story, it's really nothing more than a rapacious lust.

And then in the story, he actually takes her by force in a horrible, horrible example.

Obviously, this is nothing close to love.

But the Greek word that's used there throughout that story to translate the term for love is agape.

And the Hebrew term in the original Hebrew is the main term for love in the Old Testament.

And it just shows you there's a broad range of these terms.

And it's not the term itself that is describing a special kind of love.

The special kind of love is actually because the agent, who is God himself, and it's his kind of love.

But there again, there's all kinds of misconceptions that come from a number of theologians in past ages who had a particular view of God who can't enter into back-and-forth relationship.

And so they thought of God's love as just unilateral.

When they thought of agape love, they thought of love that only gives and never receives because God isn't supposed to receive anything.

But in the Bible there's actually a back and forth.

It's always asymmetrical because God is always the great lover, the source of love.

We don't deserve love, we can never merit it, but we can respond to it.

We can enter into real relationship with God and that's what God calls us into and draws us into throughout the biblical story.

You know that's actually where I want to go with my next question.

This idea of God being a relational God and not just a unilaterally loving God.

What does that help us to understand, or how does that help us to understand our responsibility to reflect God's love back to Him?

So whenever we talk about the back-and-forth relationship, and even when we talk about that there's even some conditionality in relationship, which we'll talk about more, more extensively later.

We need to first emphasize the fact that all love starts with God, right?

So Jeremiah 31.3, God says, I have loved you with an everlasting love.

Therefore, with loving kindness, I have drawn you." Right?

And so it's God who is drawing us into love relationship before we ever love Him in the first place.

And 1 John 4, 19 just says, we love because He first loved us.

We cannot just originate it in ourselves.

And so this is a universal love that is given to everyone.

But I refer to it as a universally relational love because it's love that calls everyone into relationship because God will never force his love on anyone.

In fact, love itself by nature requires it to be freely given and freely received.

Like even if I could control someone else's mind, I wouldn't be able to make them love me.

I might be able to make them think they love me.

I might be able to make them respond in all the ways, external ways, that love typically responds.

No, because love must be freely given and freely received.

And so God pours out this love prior to any conditions, unmerited, on all people to draw us all into relationship with Him.

But we have a choice whether to respond to that, whether to enter into that relationship with Him.

He's looking for that back and forth between Him and us, for it to be genuine, for it to be authentic.

I'm going to read a passage here in Deuteronomy, Deuteronomy 7, verses 6 through 9, and help us to understand this relational aspect, this covenantal love from this passage.

It says, for you are a holy people to the Lord your God.

03 To Be Pleasing to God

♪ Welcome to Sabbath school brought to you by It Is Written.

We are taking a journey through an interesting subject, a fascinating subject.

We are taking a look at how to be pleasing to God.

What does that mean to be pleasing to God?

Father, we ask that you will bless us again today as you have in the past as we continue to study more, to learn more about your character of love and to see how you are also a God of justice.

We ask that you will bless our time together today and we thank you in Jesus' name.

Well, our guest this week once again is the author of this quarter's Sabbath school lesson, John Peckham.

He is an associate editor of the Adventist Review and also a research professor at the Theological Seminary at Andrews University.

So we're looking at how to be pleasing to God.

There's an interesting story that you share, an analogy of a father and a son in the introduction to this week's lesson.

I invite you to imagine a father of a five-year-old son, and that five-year-old comes to him with a poorly wrapped gift.

And imagine the father says to him, you know what, I don't want that gift, I don't need it, it's worthless to me, and you probably bought it with my own money.

So you can keep your gift, but I love you.

What do we think of that kind of a father?

Words like heartless, cold, come to mind, right?

But some people when they think of God, they think God is like this, that God can never receive anything from us, that God cannot take delight in us, and even if he could there would be nothing in us worthy of delight.

And here, this story that I expand upon in some places, I imagine that same story.

Imagine that son comes, and the father, instead of reacting that way, he opens up this package.

And now he finds in this package the ugliest tie that he's ever seen.

Does he say to his son, son this is the ugliest tie I've ever seen?

Even if the tie in and of itself is worthless to him, The tie is still of value to him.

Because his beloved son brought it to him as a gift of love and it's because of that relationship that it is valuable to him even when the offering itself isn't that great.

In a similar way, when we bring offerings to God, when we try to serve Him, when we try to please Him, even that intention is received through His grace as valuable and beloved.

And not just because He loves us, although he does deeply love us as his children, but also through his beloved Son Jesus Christ who always lives to make intercession for us.

And this is taught in 1 Peter 2, if you'd be willing to read that for us.

We're gonna look at 1 Peter chapter 2 verses 4 through 6.

Coming to him as to a living stone rejected indeed by men but chosen by God and precious.

You also as living stones are being built up a spiritual house, a holy priesthood, to offer up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.

Therefore it is also contained in the Scripture, Behold, I lay in Zion a chief cornerstone, elect, precious, and he who believes on him will by no means be put to shame." So here in this passage we have this emphasis on Christ as our mediator, Christ as our great High Priest, and it says among other things that He is chosen and through Him we can also be chosen, right?

He's the Beloved, if you think of it as a capital B, we can be Beloved through Him, And we can actually bring acceptable offerings to God through Him.

Through Him, even when we bring an offering that is soiled in and of itself, Christ's mediation actually makes it acceptable to God that He actually mediates so that we can actually be pleasing and delightful to God by faith.

And this is wonderful news, and this is how we can actually be pleasing to God.

The Book of Hebrews says, without faith, it is impossible to please Him.

But with faith, we can be pleasing to Him.

And there are so many people who figure, I don't have anything to make God happy.

And really, they're kind of missing the point.

And for so many people in their walk with God, so many people get discouraged, so many people wonder, how can I possibly be good enough or make it?

And the answer is the mediation of Christ.

And if He always lives to make intercession for you and for me, All we have to do is remain in relationship with Him, and He, as the author and finisher of our faith, will carry us through.

Let's talk about the parable of the prodigal son.

This young man is high on the list of people who blew it, if you will.

Yeah, you have this well-known story where you have this young man who decides he wants his inheritance early.

So he goes to his father and requests it early, which is effectively like saying, I'd be better off if you were dead, dad.

And his father reluctantly decides that he will give him this inheritance.

And the son goes off, and he squanders it in short order and he's left in a situation where he is basically lower than pigs.

He has nothing and as he is in this situation he remembers that it's even being a servant in his father's house is far better than this.

And so he thinks, maybe I can go back and not no longer as a son because I forfeited that, but now maybe I can go back and I could be 1 of my father's servants.

Even that would be so much better than the situation I'm in now." So he decides to go home, but as he's going home, his father is looking for him.

Series

Sabbath School 1st Quarter 2025: God's Love and Justice

04 God is Passionate and Compassionate

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