God's love and the atonement

From Redemption accomplished and Applied by John Murray:

No treatment of the atonement can be properly oriented that does not trace its source to the free and sovereign love of God...

The love of God from which the atonement springs is not a distinctionless love; it is a love that elects and predestinates. God was pleased to set his invincible and everlasting love upon a countless multitude and it is the determinate purpose of this love that the atonement secures...

Truly God is love. Love is not something adventitious; it is not something that God may choose to be or choose not to be. He is love, and that necessarily, inherently, and eternally...Yet it belongs to the very essence of electing love to recognize that it is not inherently necessary to that love which God necessarily and inherently is that he should set such love as issues in redemption and adoption upon utterly undesirable and hell-deserving objects. (9-10)