God’s freedom can never be understood apart from his love. When he creates us, it is in love and for love; when he judges us and rejects us in our sinfulness, it is because we are living and acting in contradiction to that love; when he redeems us it is because that love cannot in the end let us go and gives itself utterly to bring us back to itself.

—Tom Smail, Like Father, Like Son: The Trinity Imaged in Our Humanity (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2005), 155.