How Deep the Father’s Love for Us

What This Song Teaches Us About God

Most songs about the cross focus on what Jesus endured. This one focuses on what the Father chose — He chose not to spare His own Son. The reason is love for people who did nothing to deserve it. That’s the “how deep” the song is asking about.

The song also takes us to the moment when Jesus cried out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Theologians describe this as the moment when Jesus — who had never experienced a second of separation from His Father — experienced that separation on behalf of everyone whose sins He was bearing. The anguish of the cross is not evidence that God is absent or cruel. It is evidence of the love and compassion He shows to His people. The final verse responds to all of this not with achievement but with sober gratitude: the singer’s only boast is that Jesus knows their name and chose to go to the cross for them.

Scripture Connections

• Romans 8:32 — “He who did not spare his own Son but gave him up for us all, how will he not also with him graciously give us all things?” — the direct theological source for the song’s opening question.
• Matthew 27:46 — Jesus’s cry of dereliction from the cross, which the song references as the Father turning His face away.
• 1 John 4:10 — “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins” — the ground of the love the song celebrates.