2 Chronicles 20:7 Are not you our God, who did drive out the inhabitants of this land before your people Israel… Abraham thy friend. 1. Before Jesus came to reveal God to our race as he did reveal him, the Eternal One was known and worshipped chiefly as the Almighty One, or as the Creator of all things, or as the Divine Sovereign, whose rule we are bound to obey. Not exclusively; for he was known as the Father of men (see Deuteronomy 32:6; 1 Chronicles 29:10; Isaiah 63:16; Isaiah 64:8; Psalm 103:13). Here also he is spoken of as a Friend (and see Isaiah 41:8; James 2:23). But it is evident that it was only in a restricted sense, and by a very limited number, that God was thus apprehended. 2. It was Jesus Christ that revealed the Father as the Father of souls; it was he who taught us to address him as such, to think and speak of him as such, to approach him and to live before him as such. 3. It is Jesus Christ also who has enabled us to think and to feel toward God as our Friend. "I have called you friends," he said to his disciples (John 15:15). And he has so related himself to us that in him we can recognize God as our Divine Friend; as One of whom we may rightly speak, and toward whom we may venture to feel and to act as our Friend indeed. But on what ground and in what respects? On the ground of - I. RECIPROCATED LOVE; including, what all true love must include, both affection and trust. God loves us. He loves us with parental affection, as his children who were once indeed estranged from him, but are now reconciled unto him; as those who have become endeared to him, both by his great sacrifice for their sake, and by their seeking after him and surrender of themselves to him. And God trusts us. He does not treat us as slaves, but as sons; he does not lay down a strict and severe code of rules by which our daily conduct is to be regulated; he gives us a few broad principles, and he trusts us to apply them to our own circumstances. We, in return, love and trust him. Not having seen him, but having understood his character and his disposition toward us in Jesus Christ, having realized how great and all-surpassing was his kindness toward us in him (Titus 3:4), we love him in response (1 John 4:19). And in him, in his faithfulness and in his wisdom and in his goodness, we have an unfaltering trust. Thus we have the reciprocal love of friendship. II. CLOSE RESEMBLANCE OF CHARACTER AND SYMPATHY. There cannot be friendship worthy of the name where there is not this. Our character and our sympathies must be essentially alike, must be substantially the same. And so it is with the Divine Lord and those who worthily bear his Name. His character is theirs; his principles are theirs; his sympathies are theirs. What he loves and what he hates, they love and they hate. Towards all that to which (and towards all those to whom) he is drawn, they are drawn; that which repels him repels them. Here is the true basis of friendship, and even that distance of nature that separates the Divine from the human is no barrier in the way. Being so essentially like Christ as his true followers are, they are his friends and he is theirs. III. ONENESS OF AIM AND ACTION. Friendship is established and nourished by a common aim and by fellow-labouring. They who join heart and hand in any noble enterprise become united together in strong bonds of true companionship. It is so with our Master and ourselves. He is engaged in the sublime task of recovering a lost world to the knowledge, the love, the likeness of God; so are we. He has laboured and suffered to achieve that most glorious end; so do we. We are "workers together with him." His cause is ours; he and we are bent on the fulfilment of the same great purpose; and while he works through us and in us, he also works with us in this greatest and noblest of all earthly aims. "We are labourers together with God" (1 Corinthians 3:9); "We then, as workers together with him" (2 Corinthians 6:1). We are his friends. Let us: 1. Realize how high is the honour he has thus conferred upon us. 2. See that we walk worthily of such a lofty estate. 3. Take care that we never do that or become that which will make us forfeit so great a heritage. Let us be found faithful as the friends of God. - C. Parallel Verses KJV: Art not thou our God, who didst drive out the inhabitants of this land before thy people Israel, and gavest it to the seed of Abraham thy friend for ever? |
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