The wrath of God is simply the shadow side of the love of God for his wonderful creation and his amazing human creatures. Like a great artist appalled at the way his paintings

For the death of Jesus to be an expression—the ultimate expression—of the divine love, that covenant love that as we saw lay at the heart of so many ancient Israelite expressions of hope for covenant rescue and renewal, we would need to say, and Paul does say, that in the sending of the son the creator and covenant God is sending his own very self.

God and his love, and of multiple layers of human folly, which rings true at all kinds of levels of human knowledge and experience.

It is because God loves the world he has made, and especially his human creatures, that he hates everything that spoils, wrecks, or defaces it.

God loves the world so much that he will not allow it forever to wallow in the corruption and decay into which the rebellious human race has plunged it.

But if the "servant" is indeed the "arm of YHWH" under the guise of a suffering, bruised, and unrecognizable Israelite, then a new possibility emerges at the heart of Romans 3:21—26. The primary fault of the human race, according to Romans 1, is idolatry. The primary response, from the one God himself, is to "put forth" the Messiah as the place of meeting, the ultimate revelation of the divine righteousness and love.

Love and grief are very close, especially in warm, passionate hearts. Saul shrank from neither. He wrote constantly of love—divine love, human love, "the Messiah's love." And he constantly suffered the grief that went with

Disaster occurs in your life when you lack the mental composure that comes from establishing yourself on the eternal truth that God is holy love.

His Spirit, and it works on this principle—God is my Father, He loves me, I shall never think of anything He will forget, why should I worry? There

God is my Father, He loves me, and I will never think of anything that He will forget, so why should I worry?

Spiritual adultery occurs when I give the love that belongs to God alone to something or someone else.

God loves too much to be willing to forsake his glorious kingdom of grace for your self-absorbed little kingdom of one.