The love of God is no fitful, fluctuating thing, as human love is. It is a spontaneous determination of God's whole being, an attitude freely chosen and firmly fixed.
God loves creatures who have become unlovely and (one would have thought) unloveable. There was nothing whatever in the objects of his love to call it forth; nothing in us could attract or prompt it.
The love of God is free, spontaneous, unevoked, uncaused. God loves people because he has chosen to love them, and no reason for his love can be given save his own sovereign good pleasure.
Through setting his love on human beings God has voluntarily bound up his own final happiness with theirs. God's happiness will not be complete till all his beloved ones are finally out of trouble.
He has set his love upon particular sinners, and this means that, by his own free voluntary choice, he will not know perfect and unmixed happiness again till he has brought every one of them to heaven.
He has in effect resolved that henceforth for all eternity his happiness shall be conditional upon ours.
Thus God saves, not only for his glory, but also for his gladness.
JI Packer Knowing God 137, 140, 141
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