William Cooper (fl.1653) on the Love of God

The Love of God is either natural or voluntary; thus divines distinguish, and that well.

1. The natural love of God is that wherewith God loves himself; that is, the reciprocal love whereby the three Persons love each other. (Matt. 3:17; John 3:35; John 5:20; John 17:24). This essential natural love of God is therefore necessary; God cannot but love himself.

2. The Love of God is voluntary: thus he loves his Creatures with a general love.

(1.) Because he made them, and made them good, (Gen. 1:31,) therefore he preserves them: for though sin be really evil, and none of God’s making, but contrary to God, and hated of God; yet God loves the creatures as his creatures, although sinful, with a general love. (Matt. 5:44, 45.)

(2.) He loves some creatures with a special love; and by this he loves Jesus Christ as Mediator.

(i.) This love of God to Christ as Mediator is the foundation of God’s love to his elect. (John 3:35; Eph. 1:6; 1 John 4:9; Rom. 8:39.)

(ii.) By a special love God loves his elect: (John 13:1:) of this love it is said that it is inseparable. Now this is the peculiar love which God bears to some above others; not because they were more lovely than others, nor because God foresaw they would believe and love him; but because God loved them first antecedently to all those things; (Eph. 1:3–5;) and because he loved them, therefore Christ shall come and die, and therefore they shall believe in him and love him. (Deut. 7:6–8.) The sum is this: our love to God is the effect, and not the cause, of God’s love to us; yea, Christ himself as Mediator is the effect of God’s eternal love. (Eph. 2:3–10.) This is primitive doctrine: “All that the Father hath given me shall come unto me. V. 44. No man can come unto me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him.” (John 6:37, 44.) “He hath loved us first. (1 John 4:19.) “I am found of them that sought me not.” (Rom. 10:20.) “God commended his love toward us, that while we were yet Sinners and Enemies, Christ died for us.” (Rom. 5:8, 10.) Upon which I would have old and new Donatists, which make God to love all alike, in order to their salvation; and that there is no special grace,—let them read St. Augustine, Tom. 9. Tract. 102. on John. Tom. 7. Lib. contra Donatistas post Collat. Carthag. p. 403. also p. 402. likewise in Breviculus Collat. cum Donatistis, p. 387. Collat. tertii diei; item, tom. 9. Tract. 87. on John; item, Tom. 2. Epist. 48. p. 118. and many more places. I have therefore named all these, because there is a sort of men risen up among us, corrupters and perverters of the word and ways of God, (Gal. 1:6, 7,) who raise up Donatism and Pelagianism from the death.

William Cooper, “Sermon VI: How a Child of God is to Keep Himself in the Love of God,” in Puritan Sermons 1659–1689: Being the Morning Exercises at Cripplegate, St. Giles in the Fields, and in Southwark by Seventy-Five Ministers of the Gospel In or Near London with Notes and Translations by James Nichols, 6 vols., ed. Samuel Annesley (London: James Nichols for Thomas Tegg, 1844; Wheaton, IL: Richard Owen Roberts Publishers, 1981), 3:131.

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