You said you cannot prove love by the exercise of power. Is Hebrews 12:6 not an example of God exercising his power to prove his love?

This text is from a transcript of a talk by David Gooding, entitled ‘The Creator and the Creation Stories’ (2001).

Well yes, in a sense that is correct. So I stand corrected, or at least I will modify my absolute statement. When God chastises us, it isn’t pleasant at the time, says the writer to the Hebrews. But we are to believe that he does it in love, like our parents used to tell us when they chastised us. ‘It hurts me more than it hurts you’, they would say. (As a child I found that very difficult to believe, and I’m not quite sure it was true. Psychologically, it might have hurt them, but it hurt me physically! Anyway, they did it in love—of course they did.)

But if we talk about the ultimate question in the universe—who shall win in the battle for human allegiance?—how does God bring the rebel to repent and trust him? Is it by simply putting on a display of almighty power that frightens the wits out of us and gets us cowering like insects in the mud?

‘Well, no,’ you say, ‘God doesn’t convert us that way.’

It is through the cross of Christ that he wins us. Of course, the Holy Spirit comes and powerfully presents the message and pleads with us; but the evidence God gives that he is the true creator is his loyalty to his creatures and his love for them. It is not simply, ‘I beat Satan because I have more power’.

To put it crudely, if God had said to Satan after the fall, ‘I’m now going to destroy you’, though Satan knew that God is almighty and could do it, he may well have replied, ‘Yes, God, you can destroy me, but I’ve defeated you. You made the creature: you were powerful enough to create him; but you didn’t have the ability to retain his love and loyalty. So I have won, even if you destroy me.’

God’s answer to that is given in Revelation 5: ‘Who is worthy to open the scroll and break its seals?’ (v. 2). Breaking those seals will set loose the judgments of God upon the earth, but who has the worthiness to do it as well as the power? Who has the moral worth to set loose those judgments? And the answer comes: ‘The Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, has conquered, so that he can open the scroll and its seven seals’ (v. 5). How and why? Well, he is worthy to do it, for he was slain (see v. 9). God wins our hearts by his love in Christ at Cavalry and not by the exercise of tyrannical power.