I read somewhere that Eleanor Rigby is the most covered song. I find that hard to believe, but it won’t matter in a couple years. I’m confident the most covered song is going to be Cody Asbury’s Reckless Love. It seems that every week on my Spotify Release Radar a new cover version of the song is available.
It’s a catchy song. And it has a tremendous message about the love of God for us. But there is one little line in the song that has brought up some questions.
“… Oh, the overwhelming, never-ending, reckless love of God”
Wait…what?
Reckless?
Can you use a word like reckless to describe an omnipotent and omniscient God? Consider some of the synonyms for reckless: “rash, careless, thoughtless, hasty, impulsive, fool-hardy, unwise, kamikaze.” Put those words in that lyric and see why we might have a problem. The “unwise” love of God? That doesn’t fly with Scripture, does it?
A Fair Hearing
But maybe we’re not giving a fair hearing to this song by using synonyms. Maybe the word choice of reckless wasn’t so reckless. Perhaps it’s an intentional use of a specific word in a specific context. In fact Cory Asbury has defended his song by saying this:
What I mean is this: He is utterly unconcerned with the consequences of His actions with regards to His own safety, comfort, and well-being. … His love doesn’t consider Himself first. His love isn’t selfish or self-serving. He doesn’t wonder what He’ll gain or lose by putting Himself out there. He simply gives Himself away on the off-chance that one of us might look back at Him and offer ourselves in return. … The recklessness of His love is seen most clearly in this – it gets Him hurt over and over.
So what he means by reckless love is that God is not selfish with his love. He loves us without concern for himself. Sam Storms has defended the song with a similar definition:
“God’s love defies all human categories of how love ought to operate and express itself. God loves sinners in the most unconventional and seemingly unsophisticated manner possible. His love is contrary to how we typically love one another.
And Tim Keller has said things like, “God’s reckless grace is our greatest hope.” Or in his book on the prodigal son, Keller says the welcome the father gives the unrepentant son was “literally reckless, because he refused to ‘reckon’ or count his sin against him or demand repayment.”
But words have meaning. When most people hear the word “reckless” they do not think of the definition Asbury has given. Or it is under-girded by a terrible man-centered theology which views ourselves as the center of all God’s actions. That might sound like love—that God is making much of us—but it isn’t truly the mind-blowing, relentless, sacrificial, self-giving, intentional love of God.
So part of me doesn’t want to dog on the song. One, because I don’t want to be that guy. And secondly, because I think many within my little tribe of evangelicalism could grow from some of these uncomfortable adjectives about the love of God. And lastly, because there is so much truth within the song and given the proper context I could sing it whole-heartedly. I don’t want to nitpick a song which God uses to cause someone’s heart to be transformed by this unfathomable love of God.
Here are my two cautions:
God’s love isn’t reckless in an open theism sense. I doubt Asbury intends to affirm a type of open-theism but he essentially does this in his defense of the song. When he says, “[God] simply gives Himself away on the off-chance that one of us might look back at Him and offer ourselves in return” he is making it as if God does not know, and has not known, from the foundation of the world those who will respond in repentance and belief. If what we mean by reckless it that God doesn’t know the outcome, then we cannot affirm this from the Scriptures.
God’s love isn’t reckless in this sense. It is purposeful. And that is really great news. I know in our romanticized culture we like to think that the truest form of love is that which is an uncontrollable and wild emotion. But biblically speaking the most beautiful type of love is the one that is intentional. It’s the type of covenantal love which we see in Hosea where God refuses to not love.
Secondly, God isn’t entirely unconcerned for His glory of for the fame of His name. In fact, the Scriptures teach that what motivates God’s love is actually a love for His own honor and glory. It’s fidelity to this truth which keeps us from falling into universalism or any such theology which dismisses the justice of God. If God would recklessly put something else higher than His own glory that wouldn’t be loving, it’d be idolatry. And if our God bows to an idol then He’s not fit to be our redeemer.
Conclusion:
So, is God’s love reckless? If you mean by that something similar to what Sam Storms said above (and you keep it there), then maybe it’s a non-issue. But words have meaning. And using a word in a carless way tends to take a life on of itself. So I’m not comfortable saying that God’s love is reckless—not in the way most people will take that word.
I’m not saying don’t sing the song. It’d be great if they would change the lyric to something like relentless. But even if it stays as reckless, if I we can keep from singing it recklessly, then perhaps it’s fine.
But what I really want to convey is that God’s love really is so unfathomable, so contrary to the way that we think, that it causes us to at times use words which might not be the most polished—words like reckless. And God’s love really does chase us down like it says in the song. Don’t strain out gnats. But be blown away that God’s love is actually a million times better than reckless. It’s purposeful. It’s intentional. It’s relentless.
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