How Do You Know God Loves You?

How do you know if someone really loves you? Some people may say they love you, but if they don’t show it, you may doubt their sincerity—and sometimes with good reason. Human love can be fickle. People can profess their love and a few years later change their minds.

However, God’s love is neither fickle nor temporary nor temperamental. He will love you forever. The book of Ecclesiastes counsels us to love God and build our lives around Him because, in the end, He is all that really matters. He won’t disappoint. Everything else is “vanity.”

King Solomon wrote Ecclesiastes during what has been called Israel’s golden age, when a magnificent Jewish Temple graced the top of Mount Moriah in the royal city of Jerusalem, and silver was as common as stones (1 Ki. 10:27). But a little more than 300 years later, everything changed. The prophet Jeremiah cried out to God as he watched the Babylonians destroy the Holy City and burn Solomon’s Temple to the ground.

Yet, in the midst of the chaos and suffering, Jeremiah still declared, “The steadfast love of the LORD never ceases; his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness” (Lam. 3:22–23, ESV).

How do we know God loves us? The answer can be summed up in a name: Jesus.

What True Love Looks Like
Scripture reveals God’s love for His people, especially as it is displayed in the person and work of Jesus Christ, telling us,

God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life. For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved (Jn. 3:16–17).

Spiritually, we all were dead in our sins, doomed to be separated from God forever. “But God, who is rich in mercy, because of His great love with which He loved us, . . . made us alive together with Christ (by grace you have been saved)” (Eph. 2:4–5). The book of 1 John tells us, “By this we know love, because He [Jesus] laid down His life for us” (3:16).

God Himself is the very definition of love, and He loves perfectly and rightly all the time. In fact, God’s love is at the very core of the Christian faith. It defines both who God is and the relationship we have with Him after we receive Jesus as Savior.

In the book of Romans, the apostle Paul taught about humanity’s sinfulness and how people suppress the truth about God and disobey Him. Consequently, God’s righteous wrath fell on humanity. Yet in His love, He provided Jesus as the propitiation for our sins.

Jesus stepped into our place, died on the cross for our sin, and satisfied (propitiated) God’s righteous wrath. Today we can have peace with God and new life through faith in Christ. The wonderful Good News of the gospel is that God loves us and through His Son has provided for us forgiveness from sin, peace with Him, and newness of life.

Five Questions
In one of the most beloved passages of the New Testament, Romans 8, Paul asked five rhetorical questions about God:

What then shall we say to these things? [1] If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, [2] how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things? [3] Who shall bring a charge against God’s elect? It is God who justifies. [4] Who is he who condemns? It is Christ who died, and furthermore is also risen, who is even at the right hand of God, who also makes intercession for us. [5] Who shall separate us from the love of Christ? Shall tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword? As it is written: “For Your sake we are killed all day long; we are accounted as sheep for the slaughter.” Yet in all these things we are more than conquerors through Him who loved us (vv. 31–37).

In considering all of the benefits we have in God through Jesus, Paul returned to the love of Jesus. God’s love is at the very center of who He is and our relationship to Him. Our hope and assurance lie in the fact of God’s love for us and the nature of that love—which is faithful, unchanging, steadfast, and true.

God is the almighty Creator of the universe. We see His sovereignty in the miraculously ordained circumstances that surrounded Jesus’ incarnation. We see God’s purposes in what Jesus accomplished for us and that we can be saved from paying the penalty of our sin and be made His children through Christ.

How do we know God loves us? The answer is Jesus.

So if God is for us, who can be against us? No one! Furthermore, if He did not spare His own Son but allowed Him to be sacrificed for us, why would He not give us everything we need (not want, but need) in this life on Earth? Surely, He will.

How do we know? Because He already has given us His Son.

Who can bring a charge against us? It is God who justifies us. He is the one who declares us righteous when we place our faith in His Son. God is both just and the justifier because Jesus came as the perfect sacrifice for sin. The prophet Isaiah described Jesus to the Jewish people more than 700 years before Christ was born. Jesus is the one who fulfills Isaiah 53:

He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised for our iniquities; the chastisement for our peace was upon Him, and by His stripes we are healed. All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned, every one, to his own way; and the LORD has laid on Him the iniquity of us all (vv. 5–6).

Jesus lived a perfect life because He is the second person of the triune Godhead. He is God. That is why, through His death and resurrection, He can be both just and the justifier.

So who can condemn us? No one because Jesus Christ is the one who died and who was raised from the dead and who sits today at the right hand of the Father, interceding for us as our great High Priest (Heb. 10:12–14; cf. 4:14).

The Greatest Calling
In fact, God loves us so much that nothing can ever separate us from Him:

For I am persuaded that neither death nor life, nor angels nor principalities nor powers, nor things present nor things to come, nor height nor depth, nor any other created thing, shall be able to separate us from the love of God which is in Christ Jesus our Lord (Rom. 8:38–39).

God’s love will never fade. We can count on it, no matter what we experience—whether it is COVID-19, other illnesses, persecution, economic hardship, broken relationships, or heartaches. He promises never to leave us: “For He Himself has said, ‘I will never leave you nor forsake you.’ So we may boldly say: ‘The Lord is my helper; I will not fear. What can man do to me?’” (Heb. 13:5–6).

How do we know God loves us? The answer is Jesus. And only when we hear the Good News of Jesus Christ and believe it, understanding that we are sinners under wrath who cannot save ourselves, can we find salvation in Jesus Christ. His love is forever—and serving the Lord, as Solomon said, is the greatest calling of our lives.