One question which has fascinated me for years is this: how could Jesus have loved me and died for me, when I was born thousands of years after he died and came back to life? He can love me now, since he’s still alive in heaven and with me by his Spirit (his invisible presence), but how is it that the Bible can also say he loved me and died for me back then? The rest of this blog post will begin to explore my unfolding understanding of the answer to this question. (Hover over the Bible references to read them for yourself, and take a look at the Appendix if you can).
Knowing that someone loved you enough to willingly die specifically for you can fill you with such a measure of joy, significance, and generosity that it completely transforms you, if you believe it, especially if that person created and sustains the entire Universe! But I struggle to believe it unless I understand a bit about how that works. Without knowing the how I find it hard to really start to understand how much Jesus loves me. Instead I end up thinking perhaps he just had warm fuzzies for “humanity” or “people in general” - maybe you’ve wondered the same. Thankfully, Galatians 2:20b makes it clear that he does (and did) love me specifically:
“the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.” (ESVUK)
Paul, who wrote this verse, was in a similar position to you and I. According to the Bible, Paul didn’t meet Jesus on the famous Damascus road until after he died and was raised from the dead. So how could Jesus have loved Paul and given himself for Paul in the past tense, by dying, when they hadn’t met each other at the point of Jesus’ crucifixion? Mysterious, no?
In Isaiah 46:9-10 it clearly says God knows the future. He knows “the end from the beginning” i.e. everything that will ever happen. In Psalm 139:16 it says that God knew about every day that we’d live before we’re born. In Romans 8:29, Jeremiah 1:5 and Ephesians 1:4-5 it says that God knew and loved those who do and will follow him, before he created the world i.e. he “foreknew” us! Of course Jesus is the Son of God, so perhaps he foreknew us too?
Jesus often accurately foretold the future (Matt 21:2, Luke 21:5-6) and knew personal details about people he’d only just met (John 1:48, 4:18). In John 16:12-16 he said that the Holy Spirit’s knowledge of the future comes from his own. Then in John 10:14-16 Jesus explained that he himself knows “his sheep” and that included those he had not yet invited to be his followers. Finally, I think the two of Jesus’ parables I explore in this post’s Appendix, explain in even more detail how Jesus, the Son of God, foreknew us too. The appendix is well worth the read, if it’s the only bit of Bible you look at in detail while reading this article.
So we can understand that Jesus was able to “love and give himself” (Gal 2:20) for those who were not yet born, because he knew those who do and those who will become his followers (i.e. Christians), in eternity, before the world began. “In his joy” (Matt 13:44) he sold all he had (i.e. his divine form and rights) by humbly being born as a human and even dying on a criminal’s cross (see Philippians 2:6-8), rising from the dead to inherit the whole world (Daniel 7:14), in order to save these people from eternal judgement for their wrongdoings, because he knew and loved them.
Knowing that Jesus knew and loved me when he decided to be born and give himself as a sacrifice to pay for my wrongdoing, has changed my life, partly by giving me a deeper, more solid foundation for my emotional health and healing from emotional wounds, but also by giving me a feeling of preciousness and significance that doesn’t rely on my own achievements. This inspires me to follow Jesus’ example of beautiful humility in service, because like the Apostle Paul in Galatians 2:20b, it gives me a way of comprehending the fathomlessness of his love for me. Not only does that help me when I’m feeling low, but it encourages me to sacrificially love others in my daily life. That’s why I love continuing to puzzle more and more over how Jesus’ love for me works!
Note: For other verses that corroborate this see verses like Ephesians 5:2,25b and 2 Thessalonians 2:16 where it talks about how God and Jesus loved us in the past tense i.e. he doesn’t just love us now, he loved us before he suffered because he knew us before he did. And here’s a good song whose chorus has relevant lyrics: “You Saw Me - Hillsong Worship”
Appendix
I find some of Jesus’ parables help me understand this further. The two I have in mind are in Matthew 13:44-46 which says:
“The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.
“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls, who, on finding one pearl of great value, went and sold all that he had and bought it.”
These are not immediately self-explanatory but thankfully Jesus gave us the keys to understand them in the same chapter.
Earlier in Matthew 13:24-30 he tells a parable about a man who sowed good seed in his field, but then an enemy came along and sowed weeds in it too. Both grew, until at harvest time the man’s servants separated the good wheat, from the bad weeds.
Then in Matthew 13:37-43 he explained the symbols in the parable. The field means the world, the seeds are the sons of the kingdom of God (i.e. those people who will follow Jesus), and the man is Jesus himself. The enemy is a picture of the devil, and the weeds are people who don’t (and won’t) follow Jesus. Jesus considers these people to be on the side of the devil, by rejecting him, either unknowingly or deliberately (e.g. Matt 15:13-14).
He then told the two parables we’re looking at in Matthew 13:44-46: one about treasure hidden in a field, and another one about a beautiful pearl, neither of which he seemed to explain.
Immediately afterward, Jesus told one more in Matthew 13:47-50 about different kinds of fish getting caught in a net and then, like with the wheat and the weeds, being sorted into good and bad fish, and explained that this is about angels sorting people into these two categories when he returns.
Personally, I think that the reason he doesn’t explain the treasure and the pearl is because they use almost exactly the same symbols as the parable of the weeds and the net. Each has a person (aka Jesus), a wide area like a field or the sea (aka the world), and a little thing in that wide area (seeds, fish, treasure, and a pearl - i.e. people who will follow Jesus). This is reinforced by the fact he introduces the parables in Matthew 13:45,47 with the word “again” to imply that these parables are all part of a sandwich structure which use equivalent symbols.
So substituting the meanings of the symbols into the same parables reads:
“The kingdom of heaven is like precious people hidden in the world, which I (Jesus) found and covered up. Then in my joy I go and sell all that I have and buy that world.
“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like me (Jesus) searching for precious people, who, on finding one set of people of great value, went and sold all that I had and bought them.”
Notice in both cases Jesus found all these precious people before he sold all he had to buy them (i.e. died on the cross) and because they were so valuable to him. So the answer to the original question, how could Jesus love us before we were even born, is that miraculously he saw, knew, treasured and delighted in all who would follow him, before he left Heaven to be born as a man!