We often speak of God’s presence in vocation, of His providential “providing” for His creation, of His care for non-believers as well as believers, and other manifestations of God’s love for the world. But how is that possible? The world is fallen. God is holy. Holiness cannot abide sin. So how is it that God can love the world?
David Scaer gives a startling answer in his book Law and Gospel and the Means of Grace.
From David Scaer, Law and Gospel and the Means of Grace, Confessional Lutheran Dogmatics:
God can graciously continue to provide earthly benefits for all because He has accepted Christ’s death as atonement for man’s sin. Though salvation is temporally subsequent to the creation and secondary to it as act of restoration, God’s continued involvement in creation is dependent on Christ’s redemption. (p.30)
This answer presupposes the Lutheran doctrines of the universal atonement and objective justification. Christ died for the sins of the entire world. “He is the propitiation for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world” (1 John 2:2).
This differs from the Reformed notion of “limited atonement,” that Christ died only for the elect. But the Bible here says that He died “not for ours only” (that of Christians), but also “for the sins of the whole world.”
A related teaching is that of the “objective atonement.” The Son of God, the second person of the Trinity, took into Himself all the sins of the world and bore all of God the Father’s wrath against those sins. So His wrath is fully appeased.
Objectively, the world is saved, but there is also a “subjective atonement,” in which a person receives what Christ has done. This happens by faith, a faith that is created by means of the Word and the Sacraments.
That God’s wrath is satisfied means that we can embrace the world in all of its secularity, while battling its sin and proclaiming the Gospel of its salvation.
This carves out a space for God’s earthly, temporal kingdom, which He also rules, along with His spiritual, eternal kingdom. In the former, He is hidden. In the latter, He is revealed. But He reigns, is present, and provides for His whole creation.
Some Christians have trouble loving the physical world and its inhabitants because they feel something of God’s wrath against sin. All Christians should hate sin, but, because of Christ’s atonement, they too can love the world.
