What the Bible says about the love of God cannot long survive in people’s thinking if it is abstracted [separated] from the sovereignty of God, the holiness of God, the wrath of God, and the providence of God, to mention only a few nonnegotiable elements of basic Christianity.
The result, of course, is that the love of God in our culture has been purged of anything the culture finds uncomfortable. The love of God has been sanitized, democratized, and above all sentimentalized. This process has been going on for some time. My generation was taught to sing, “What the world needs now is love, sweet love”, in which we robustly instructed the Almighty that we do not need another mountain (we have enough of them), but we could do with some more love. The hubris [arrogance] is staggering.
It has not always been so. In generations when almost everyone believed in the justice of God, people sometimes found it difficult to believe in His love. The preaching of the love ofGod came as wonderful good news. Nowadays if you tell people that God loves them, they are unlikely to be surprised. ‘Of course God loves me; He’s like that, isn’t He?’
The Origin of the Organic World – Part One