To What Shall We Compare God’s Love?
June 26, 2026
June 26, 2026
Abstract: Sam Koo reviews Vermon Pierre’s Dearly Beloved, a book that emphasizes the analogy of God’s marital love for his people as the kind of love that ought to characterize the love God’s people have for one another. While Pierre helpfully communicates the reality and depth of God’s love, Scripture does not emphasize God’s marital love as the basis for our love for other believers. We need to be reminded of the many ways Scripture speaks of God’s incomparable love without always feeling the need to draw a one-to-one analogy to our own love.
Vermon Pierre, Dearly Beloved: How God’s Love for His Church Deepens Our Love for Each Other. Moody Publishers, 2024. 176 pages.
Jonathan Edwards writes, “Love to God, love to Christ, and love to saints for God and Christ’s sake, and the enjoyment of the fruits of God’s love in holy communion with God, Christ, and holy persons—this is what [Christians] have a relish for; and such is their renewed nature.”
According to Edwards, love to God and Christ marks the Christian’s “renewed nature,” but Christian love is not only vertical. It’s also horizontal, for love is integral to the corporate identity of God’s people. We become children in God’s household by the free and infinite love of the Father given through the Son and applied by the Spirit. Christian community, then, is not ultimately built upon shared affinity but upon the Triune love of God.
As such, Vermon Pierre’s thesis in Dearly Beloved is absolutely right: “If we are united to God most especially in love, so also we are united to one another in love. God’s love for us in Christ is the only force strong enough to bring us together to God. And God’s love in Christ is the only force strong enough to keep us together with God as one community in Christ” (11).
So how does the Bible describe the love of God’s people for one another? After all, if we want our church members to be united in a polarizing world, we need a love that’s both different and compelling.
According to Pierre, the Bible emphasizes marital love as the kind of love that should be displayed in a local church (12, 14). This is the book’s main thread, and it’s woven throughout. Since God’s love for us is compared to the love of a husband for his wife, we ought to show the same kind of (marital) love to one another in the church. Pierre uses the word “beloved” to describe this marital love of God.
Pierre reminds us that God’s covenant with Israel was sustained by his exclusive love for them, much like a husband’s love for his wife. More importantly, the new covenant inaugurated by Jesus at the cross broadens God’s loving commitment to include the Gentiles. So how does God’s love affect his people—both Jew and Gentile—today? “[God’s] love, and specifically the beloved love of God, unites people to God and unites them to one another. Because we are beloved to God, we become beloved to one another. And as we are beloved to one another, we will be united to one another” (36–37).
After focusing on how we are “beloved” in Part 1, Pierre explores in Part 2 how we are to live “beloved” toward one another in a variety of areas: initiative, words, delight, intimacy, presence, commitment, passion, conflict, and perseverance.
Pierre makes God’s love for his people come alive. God really loves them, and he’s committed to them despite their wandering and betrayals. And Pierre rightly points out that we ought to love one another despite our differences in personalities, cultures, and backgrounds. As God offers us grace, Pierre encourages us to “jump on the chance to be favorable and do good to each other, knowing such chances steadily chip away at whatever concrete blocks of conflict are dragging down our relationships” (149).
One practical example of how our love for one another should show itself is in the way we speak to one another. “Instead of the trends of harmful, divisive words, we want to speak words that commit us to each other, to nurture and sustain each other. . . . In Jesus, we see people as Jesus does, which leads us to speak to people as Jesus does” (63). We need this exhortation injected into our own churches today.
Despite the book’s strengths, it seems that Pierre has wrongly emphasized God’s marital love as the primary analogy for our love for one another. The logic of the book goes like this: Christ loves the church like a husband loves his wife. Therefore, we should imitate Christ by showing that same kind of love to fellow church members. We love one another, Pierre says, “not only out of [God’s] familial love; we love one another also out of his spousal, beloved love” (40). This is the “strongest way to love one another” (39).11 .Here is Pierre’s full statement: “To be united together like the Bible calls us to, we must love one another. And the strongest way for us to love one another is to see and treat others as being beloved to us” (39). A couple additional examples of similar statements by Pierre: “The same marital love that bound us to the Lord binds us to one another and fuels our ability to be united together as one people, as His beloved bride” (41); “For long one another, we have available to us, necessary to us, the most passionate, fervent, committed dimension of God’s love–His marital, ‘beloved’ love” (43).
Most Christians would likely agree that marital love best pictures God’s love for the church. But the Bible rarely speaks of our love and unity for one another using the analogy of a marital relationship. Instead, it emphasizes other relational themes, namely, friendship and family. For example, the new covenant love that Jesus establishes and then commands of his disciples is likened to the love that friends have for each other (John 15:12–15). Our Lord himself said, “No one has greater love than this: to lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13, emphasis added).
The New Testament is also brimming with commands to love one another as brothers and sisters, which is how Paul commonly addresses the readers of his letters (e.g. Rom. 1:13; 1 Cor. 1:10). Herman Bavinck notes that “fraternal love” is the “hallmark and proof that believers are Jesus’s disciples.”22 .Bavinck says that Christians “are bound to each other through intimate love, like children of one family. . . That fraternal love is therefore also the hallmark and proof that believers are Jesus’s disciples. . . . It is proof that we have passed from death into life, obligating us to give our life for the brothers and sisters, a love that is rooted in God’s love for us.” Herman Bavinck, Reformed Ethics, Vol. 2 (Baker Academic: 2021), 447–448.
More broadly, we should be careful about elevating certain analogies of God’s love over others. Nowhere does the Bible teach that God’s spousal love triumphs over his love as a father, a brother, a friend, a Savior, etc. Nor should different pictures of God’s love be pitted against each other. Rather, we should be in awe that God loves—yes, loves—sinners like us and that this love can be expressed in many different ways.
Pastors, this is yet another reason to preach from various parts of Scripture, as it allows your members to see God’s love in different ways. Hosea compares God’s love for his covenant people to a faithful husband who compassionately pursues an unfaithful wife. Revelation teaches that God loves his people like a King who defeats evil in order to bring them back into his kingdom. Isaiah displays God’s love as redeeming and holy.
We don’t need to draw a one-to-one comparison between God’s love and ours. After all, we don’t and can’t love others in precisely the same way that Christ loves us. He alone is our Redeemer and King. Instead, we should preach the multi-faceted and incomparable nature of God’s love and then urge people to respond by loving him and loving others.