The Love of God

I am not going to argue about it, I seek to enjoy it. I am not going to prove it, but to proclaim it. We will not discuss the menu, but sit down to the feast. For the soul is so subtly tempted to spend in controversy what ought to be used in appropriation. It is surely well that we should frequently put aside our attempted analyses of the bread of life, and should ‘’ taste and see how gracious the Lord is.” We must not always be in the laboratory; the laboratory is useless unless we meet the Lord as guests, and feed upon the rich provisions of His table. And therefore my purpose is a very simple one, however difficult it may be of achievement. It is to attempt to vivify that most tremendous commonplace, “God loves you.” If we could be sure of that, and live in it, the assurance would be a strange minister of personal redemption. It would give firmness to our thinking, nobility to our feeling, buoyancy to our steps, and it would transform the spirit of mourning into the habits of praise.

‘^ Grod loves you!” How shall I think about it? There are those who tell us we can form no conception of it. It belongs to a realm and climate which we have never traversed, and which are quite unknown. We can no more realise it than we can realise the boundless stretches of forest in the mid-west of America from the possession of a pineneedle, or the splendours of its gorgeous canyons from a square inch of coloured stone, or its multitudinous birdlife from one feather of a songster’s wing. Things are so vastly different in range and profundity between the human and the Divine that we cannot safely reason from one to the other. Well, if that be so, all pretended revelation of God is a mockery and a delusion. We may as well cast it out as rubbish to the void, we may as well close the doors and windows of our minds and make our judgments blind. Not so do I accept our position. I have no sympathy with those who disparage the nobilities of human life in order to magnify the nobility of God. We do not magnify His beauty by deliberately calling our own beautiful things ugly. We do not glorify the love of God by treating a pure mother’s love as tinselled jewellery, or as seedy and unworthy moral attire. We must reason from the best we know to what exists in God. And, therefore, quietly and confidently I accept the best and the fairest in human love as my implement, however poor it be, in my exploration of the glorious love of God. Human love is not as a dead feather, plucked from a dead bird, in its relation to the grandeur of a continent. It is a songster itself, and filling the air with song. Human love is not a bit of the furniture of the Homeland, it is a veritable bit of its life.

When, therefore, I want to think of the love of God, I do not reject the helpful suggestion of human motherhood, and fatherhood, and wifehood, and husbandhood, and childhood. Xay, rather do I listen to their music all the more eagerly, and in their lovestrains I hear “sweet snatches of the songs above,” faint echoes of the wonderful love of God. N’o, the love of our Father in heaven is not altogether unlike the love of all good fathers on earth. It is very like and yet very unlike; so like as to be akin, so unlike that it fills us with adoring wonder and praise; 30 like, as the vast organ and the harmonium are akin, and can express the same tune: so unlike that, as with the organ and the harmonium, one overwhelms the other in range and capacity, in height and depth, in length and breadth of musical glory. “God loves you,’^ and you have heard a bit of the tune in your mother’s love, in your father’s love, in the love of your husband, in the love of your wife, in the love of your little child. Human love may be only as a child’s earliest broken song in comparison with the Hallelujah Chorus, but it is akin.” Now Jonathan loved David; “” God loves thee.’’

If that be so, the Bible encourages us to think in a great and magnificent way of this love of God, of which we catch faint strains in human-kind. Let us remind ourselves how we are encouraged to think about it.

First of all, then, we are taught to think that God’s love is the most real thing in the universe. .What are the real things in the universe, the things that veritably abide? In other days men spake of the unchanging heavens and the everlasting hills. But even while they used the figure of speech, in their very hearts they knew that the very thing which had provided the symbol was in a state of flux and was passing away. Concerning those very heavens they said, ‘’ As a vesture shalt Thou roll them up, and they shall be changed.” Concerning those very hills they said, ‘’ At Thy presence they melt away.’’ Yes, even the things which provide our symbols of the permanent are themselves fading away. But the transiency of the material needs no emphasis. ‘^ Change and decay in all around I see.” We have only to return to the home of our childhood and look upon the broken circle of our friends; nay, to revisit a place after an absence of ten years gives us a startling revelation of the silent ravages of destructive time. It is certainly not in the material realm that we find the real and the permanent. Our painfully accumulated riches “take to themselves wings and fly away.” Where, then, shall we look for the real? Not again in human disposition. Even the noblest strains are fickle and broken. The songster is the victim of caprice, and has his silent moods. Discords afflict the harmony; sometimes the noblest music is like jangled bells, “out of tune and harsh.” Where, then, shall we look for it? In “the love of God.” There is nothing transitory about it, nothing fickle, nothing capricious, nothing shadowy, nothing unreal. God’s love abides, the permanent background in the moving play. We cannot awake and find it absent; and while we sleep it never steals away. It is the most real thing in the universe. It never changes; and God loves thee. ‘’ I have loved thee with an everlasting love.’’

And then we are taught to think that God’s love is the biggest thing in the universe. Let us think of some of the biggest things we know, and then we will lift our eyes upon one that is bigger than all. Well, first of all, there is sin. Take up the newspaper in these days when everything is dragged into a glaring publicity, when nothing is allowed to remain veiled or concealed. Read the accounts from the police-courts, or sometimes worse still, read the police-work done by the newspaper itself. Let the hideousness pile itself before our gaze. Then add to it the sin, often the blacker sin, of which the police can take no account. Think of the vice which is clever enough to keep within the circle of legal virtue. Think of the indecency which does not become obscenity. Think of the unfairness which does not break the law of theft. Think of the welltrinnned or suggestive gossip which guards itself from the law of libel. Think of the insinuations which are not indictments, and the enmity which is not scandal. Again, let the hideousness pile itself up like a mountain! Then let us go into our own heart. Firmly examine the range of our own sinfulness. Note the extent of our corruption. Mark how the rottenness infests some of our presumably finest fruit. Then exercise the imagination upon similar maladies in the lives of others; and then let the burdened imagination roam scout-like around the world. Again, I say, let the hideousness accumulate pile upon pile-! What then? God’s love is bigger still! Nay, God’s Book declares that human sin, amazing and gigantic as it is, yet, when compared with God’s love it is as a stone dropped in the immeasurable sea! “Where sin abounds grace doth much more abound.” And that God loves thee and me! Yes, bring out the big things: His love is bigger, even as the Himalayas tower above the rolling hills on the plain. Here is a big thing in itself, human hatred. Do we know anything deeper than malicious hatred? The hatred of an lago, or of a Pharisee for the Christ? Think of the hate which at this very hour, in all this land of ours, is pursuing its dark, subterranean work, devising ministries of mischief, plotting bloody tragedies of revenge, while in the open day it wears the garb of a gracious friend and an angel of light. A deep thing! Ay, deep indeed. Do we know a deeper? Only one, the love of God!

“0 love of God, how deep and great!
Far deeper than man’s deepest hate,
Self-fed, self-kindled, like the light
Changeless, eternal, infinite.”

His love is the biggest of all big things. And that God lovee thee and me.

And, thirdly, we are taught to think that the love of God is the mo3t personal, the most individual thing in the universe. Our God loves everybody as though each one were everybody and there were no one else to share it. Gods love is not a vague, diffused sentiment like a senseless, enveloping air, enclosing us all in an undiscerning embrace. God’s love is a conscious, intelligent, purposeful relationship, not concerned with a human abstraction called the world, but with individual men and women. If I may reverently say it, the word ‘* masses ‘’ could never be in the Divine vocabulary; not ‘’ masses,” but ‘^ children,” not ^’ race,” but “family,” not “my world,” but ‘^ my child.” That is the superlative wonder in the altogether wonderful evangel of grace — that the Divine love can concentrate on everybody, as though, I say, each one were everybody, and there was only one child in the Father’s house. And so it was altogether fitting, because altogether true, that the Apostle Paul dared to appropriate the evangel to his own heart and life, and to sing with blessed triumph, ‘* He loved me, and gave Himself for me! “And you and I can sing it; and you and I ought to sing it. ‘^ He loved me, and gave Himself for me!” And we ought to teach our children to sing it, and the children of the stranger, and prodigal men and women who are far out of the way. ‘’ He loved me, and gave Himself for me.” For it is a great moment, a solemn moment, greater and more solemn than the day of birth, or the day of marriage, or the day of death — greater and more solemn than all, when the soul becomes aware and assured of the love of Godj and sings as she goes, ‘’ He loved me, and gave Himself for me,” Yes, God’s love is the most personal, the most individual thing in the world, hungrily seeking out persons to laden them with sacred treasure, hungrily seeking out you to bring the sacred treasure to you. God’s love is personal, far more personal than your love for your child, even though you have only one; and God loves you and me. And I turn to the Book again, and I am taught that the love of God is the most sacrificial thing in the universe. Again let the eyes look round in quest of the finest human love engaged in holy sacrifice. Think of a mother and her frail and fragile child. Think of a wife pouring out sacrificial love upon a dissolute husband, or a husband pouring out sacrificial love upon his dissolute wife. Think of fatherhood searching highways and byways for a prodigal son, or a son scouring the dreary hills for a prodigal father. Think of miners risking life in sacrificial service. Think of all the radiant instances of glorious chivalry which so often shine upon our common life. Think of them! Exalt them! And then think that we are taught that in comparison with the sacrificial love of God these are only faint and dim. The very love we have is borrowed fire, a livis coal from the altar-fires of God. And our love, beautiful as it is, altogether gracious and glorious as it is, surpassingly precious as it is, is only as the genial fire on the hearthstone compared with the voluminous and overwhelming splendour of the blazing sun. He is “the Father of all mercies, and the God of all comfort,” living in love, living to love, delighting in sacrifice, withholding nothing from His children, “for He that spared not His only Son, but freely oflFered Him for us all, how shall He not with Him freely give us all things?”

And, lastly, we are taught to think of the love of God as the holiest thing in the universe. God’s love is inconceivably pure, so pure that the newlyfallen snow offers but a dim and sullied emblem of its glory. And just because God’s love is holy it aspires after holy ends. It is hungry for the loved ones to be holy too. It thinks less of pain than it does of sim And, therefore, it may resort to pain to get rid of sin. Holy love is not afraid of discipline, not afraid to wound if it may the more effectually heal. Holy love prefers to reprove rather than to neglect, to make the soul suffer rather than permit it to die. It is only when love loses its fires that its attentions become indifferent. The love of God abides, and while a single stain defiles His child the gracious crusade of holiness will persist. Just because God’s love is holy His loved ones will one day stand by “the sea of glass,” ‘^ clothed in white robes, and palms in their hands,” having gotten the victory over death and sin. And this holy God loves thee and me.

So lift up your hearts, the Lord loves you! This love of God, the most real thing in the universe, and the biggest, and the most personal, and the most sacrificial, and the most holy, rests upon you. Respond to it! Rejoice in it! Live and die in it.

“O love that will not let me go,
I rest my weary soul on Thee;
I give Thee back the life I owe,
That in Thine ocean depths its flow
May richer, fuller be!”