“unlimited nature of God’s love”

George MacDonald, after a lifetime of pondering the unlimited nature of God’s love and the necessary fairness of divine justice, wrote: “I will accept no explanation of any way of God that involves what I should scorn as false and unfair in a man. … If it be said by any that God does a thing, and the thing seems unjust, then either we do not know what the thing is, or God does not do it” (Discovering the Character of God, Phillips, 249).
Hannah Whittal Smith struggled with this same doctrinal issue. She grew up with the idea that God was “selfish” and self-absorbed, with “no love or pity to spare for the poor sinners who have offended Him.” But later she wrote: “Whatever Christ was, that God is. All the unselfishness, all the tenderness, all the kindness, all the justice, all the goodness, that we see in Christ is simply a revelation of the unselfishness, the tenderness, the kindness, the justice, the goodness, of God” (The Unselfishness of God, 7, 9). (Drawn from Yielding to Wonder, chapter 7, ©️ 2009)