Holy Love Wins

Thanks to Trevin Wax for this quote from Timothy Stoner’s The God Who Smokes: Scandalous Meditation on Faith (p. 30):

The love that wins is a holy love.
The love that won on the cross and wins the world is a love that is driven, determined, and defined by holiness.
It is a love that flows out of the heart of a God who is transcendent, majestic, infinite in righteousness, who loves justice as much as he does mercy; who hates wickedness as much as he loves goodness; who blazes with a fiery, passionate love for himself above all things.
He is Creator, Sustainer, Beginning and End.
He is robed in a splendor and eternal purity that is blinding.
He rules, he reigns, he rages and roars, then bends down to whisper love songs to his creatures.
His love is vast and irresistible.
It is also terrifying, and it will spare no expense to give everything away in order to free us from the bondage of sin, purifying for himself a people who are devoted to his glory, a people who have “no ambition except to do good”.
So he crushes his precious Son in order to rescue and restore mankind along with his entire creation.
He unleashes perfect judgment on the perfectly obedient sacrifice and then pulls him up out of the grave in a smashing and utter victory.
He is a God who triumphs . . .
He is a burning cyclone of passionate love.
Holy love wins.

Justin Taylor