Scripture Reference: Malachi 1:2-5
III. God’s Love Defined – Continued
4. A Permanent Love
The force of the Hebrew construction in the words, “I have loved you,” are “I have loved you and I still love you.” These people Malachi was addressing dishonored God, cheated Him out of His tithe, disobeyed Him by marrying foreign women and hurled angry words His way. But one thing they never did was stop Him from loving them. When God came to earth we drove nails through His hands and feet, but we could not drive love from His heart.
5. A Punishing Love
If we reject God’s love we are promised to experience His wrath. Malachi began his book emphasizing the love of God and certainly his main motive was to woo the children of Israel back to God, but in his strong words about Edom’s fall, there could be a warning. God’s people have the strange habit of developing a “sense of complacency from their misinformed theology of love.” When anyone feels comfortable in sin because God is love, he is in grave danger. He is blind to what Godly love truly is. God’s love will never let us go; and it will never let us off the “hook.” Jesus said, “For everyone to whom much is given, from him much will be required” (Luke 12:48). God said to Israel through Amos, “You only have I known of all the families of the earth; Therefore I will punish you for all your iniquities” (Amos 3:2). Malachi could essentially be saying, “What happened to Edom can happen to you.”
6. A Purifying Love
We close where we started, looking at the love of God and hopefully responding with love and service. All that was said of Israel can be said of us. They met God at their bloody altars which foreshadowed the great sacrifice of God that was coming. We meet God at the altar of the cross on Calvary and from this point of reference Jesus asks us to accept Him and to live for Him.
Brothers and sisters, just like the Israelites, there have been times when I have become bewildered by the will of God and wanted to go back to Egypt (Numbers 11:5). Like Jeremiah there was a time when I questioned God about leaving the gospel ministry and spending my full-time pursuing my secular career (Jeremiah 9:2). Someone said Jeremiah wrote his resignation hundreds of times; he just never turned it in. Why? Why haven’t so many of us who have dedicated our lives in service to the Lord? Why haven’t you? I imagine and surmise it is the same reason Simon Peter didn’t. Jesus stood before him with the marks of Calvary on His head, His hands, His feet and His side. He said, “ ‘Simon, son of Jonah, do you love Me more than these?’ He [Simon Peter] said to Him, ‘Yes, Lord; You know that I love You.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Feed My sheep’ “ (John 21:15-17). Service was the fruit and proof of love. To leave our Lord or His service we would have to walk by the cross and say, “You died for me, but it’s too hard, I don’t care enough. I am going to live for myself.” That is the one thing we cannot, we must not, do. This love compels us to faith. We will say with Job, “Though He slay me, yet will I trust Him” (Job 13:15). It strongly moves and compels us to faithfulness. It causes all of us who has undertaken to serve to say, “I’ll live for Him who died for me.” Does God care for me? Yes. Most assuredly, and that is why we can’t help but love Him.
FOR THE LOVE OF GOD 
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