Book Recommendation: The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God by D.A. Carson

Read this book online in PDF (this is a link I found -I did not post it)

Go to this book's Amazon page (Kindle version also available)

The title of this book is catchy. As Carson explains, we could all understand if it were about "The difficult doctrine of the Trinity" or "predestination" or some other age old mystery of the faith that we believe in and heartily affirm yet fail to wrap our finite minds around.

But what makes the love of God so difficult? I will summarize the reasons Carson lists:

1. People's idea of the love of God is usually based on their own presuppositions as influenced by and shaped by an ungodly worldly culture. 
2. Many complementary truths about the Person and attributes of God are disbelieved in our culture (i.e. the holiness of God, the sovereignty of God, the wrath of God, the providence of God, etc.).
3. The postmodern mentality which has saturated modern thinking. To quote: "In short, the most energetic cultural tide, postmodernism, powerfully reinforces the most sentimental, syncretistic, and often pluralistic views of the love of God, with no other authority base than the postmodern epistemology itself."
4. Even apart from modern worldly trends and pluralistic thinking, "within Christian confessionalism" itself the understanding that the professing church has of the love of God has been distorted into becoming some kind of sentimentalized version of warm, fuzzy emotions. Therefore it is difficult to maintain a biblical and balanced view of the love of God.
5. In many Christian circles, the love of God is pretty much taken for granted and presented as something as much more simple than it really is, and the result is a failure to understand, or even a denial of, the distinctions the Bible teaches about the love of God.

Carson then continues in chapter one to outline the different ways in which Scripture speaks about the love of God. As he says, it is absolutely vital to understand and maintain these distinctions because if not, we will end up with a phony, distorted, twisted and unbiblical notion of the love of God which is more akin to postmodern thinking than to the infallible Word of God. If you are not familiar with the distinctions God's Word makes within the love of God, you must at least read chapter one. The chapters are based on sermons he preached and are edited to be read. Here are their titles:

1. On Distorting the Love of God.
2. God is Love.
3. God's Love and God's Sovereignty.
4. God's Love and God's Wrath.

The book is short (just 77 pages of actual text), but it is not without substance. Carson is a profound thinker who is deeply rooted in exegetical theology, and as such, almost everything he writes is full of biblical truth. Of course he is a man and is fallible, so this is by no means an endorsement of everything he says. Yet in having read this book, and other material by him, in addition to listening to numerous of his sermons, I must say that his precision and insight into the Scriptures has very much blessed my soul to the glory of God.

A warning though: not everyone will like this book. It may be considered somewhat "dry" or "scholarly" by some. The vocabulary is above-average in terms of its difficulty. It may be too profound or even seem hard to understand for the average reader. So I'm not recommending this book for everyone. Yet if you're a preacher or teacher, or a missionary, or someone who likes to read and grapple with profound theology, this short little book will be a blessing to you, and you can easily fly through it in a couple of nights. Also, one final warning: if you are a staunch Arminian, it may challenge you, annoy you, or even make you angry.

Soli Deo Gloria.