On writing up some quotes from this book I can only add that they are a weak portrayal of the book's substantial content and don't really give an idea of the flow of the book but are simply a few of the words that I would like to remember that I am less likely to without writing them here.
On Distorting The Love Of God
...when informed Christians talk about the love of God, they mean something very different from what is meant in the surrounding culture. Worse, neither side may perceive that that is the case.
I do not think that what the Bible says about the love of God can long survive at the forefront of our thinking, if it is abstracted from the sovereignty of God, the holiness of God, the wrath of God, the providence of God, or the personhood of God - to mention only a few non-negotiable 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.
One of the most dangerous results of the impact of contemporary sentimentalized versions of love on the church is our widespread inability to think through the fundamental questions that alone enable us to maintain a doctrine of God in biblical proportion and balance.
This chapter also briefly outlines five different ways the Bible speaks of the love of God: His intra-Trinitarian love, His providential love, His yearning and salvific love that pleads with sinners, His elective love, and His conditional love and indicates what could go wrong if any one of them is absolutized.
God Is Love
In this chapter he reflects upon a few texts that disclose the intra-Trinitarian love of God, and goes through a few of the implications. To begin to understand God's love for us this is important, that we understand important aspects of the love of the Father for the Son and the love of the Son for the Father and how they co-exist and grasp how each of them can be applied in understanding God's love for us.
God's Love And God's Sovereignty
He goes on to write on how God's love can be seen in respect to His sovereignty and immutability and how there is still room for compatibilism. That to espouse a form of impassibility that denies that God has an emotional life should not be done but rather the difficult work of grasping how He could have a love in a way that we understand the word and yet remain in absolute control.
There are thus two critical points. First, God exercises this love in conjunction with all his other perfections, but his love is no less love for all that. Second, His love emanates from His own character; it is not dependent on the loveliness of the loved, external to Himself.
God's Love And God's Wrath
...in itself, wrath, unlike love, is not one of the intrinsic perfections of God. Rather it is a function of God's holiness against sin. Where there is no sin, there is no wrath - but there will always be love in God. Where God in his holiness confronts his image-bearers in their rebellion, there must be wrath, or God is not the jelous God he claims to be, and his holiness is impugned. The price of diluting God's wrath is diminishing God's holiness.
...his love, as we saw in the last chapter, wells up amidst his perfections and is not generated by the loveliness of the loved. Thus there is nothing intrinsically impossible about wrath and love being directed toward the same individual or people at the same time.
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