Galatians 6:14 But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified to me… The real glory of the Cross, for a deep soul like that of Paul, consists in this — that it is the best revelation of the heart of God. It often seems much easier to get at the mind of God than at His heart. His mind is "writ large" for most of us in the nightly majesty and order of the starry heavens; but for His heart we search vainly in the bewildering labyrinths of external nature. As the intellect spells out each single word that tells it of the thoughts of God, the heart remains too often unsatisfied, and cries aloud with bewildered Job, "Oh that I knew where I might find Him!" Like some fainting and forlorn wanderer in a parched and arid desert, the heart still yearns for "the fountain of living waters," still cries aloud, "I thirst, I thirst." Unable to recognize its true God, its real Father, in those hard, unpitying laws which science reveals, the heart of man cries despairingly, like its great Lord on Calvary, "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?" Now the teaching of Christ's life and death is that God has a heart as well as a mind; that, notwithstanding all appearances to the contrary, love is the source and root of all things — stronger than hate, mightier than sin, more enduring than hell. Christianity dares to go down into the lowest hell of degradation, and preach the everlasting gospel to souls fast bound in the misery and iron of inveterate evil. In order to meet our very sorest needs, our religion reveals a Being who, needing nothing Himself, finds His deepest happiness in perpetually giving. Christianity boldly declares the naturalness of self-sacrifice in God; for this, surely, is the meaning of the declaration that "God is love." And thus entrenched for ever in the very heart of God, the Christian spirit is not dismayed either at the stony-hearted apathy of nature or the manifold activity of the powers of evil. Even as the Christian pilgrim sinks down fainting in. some cheerless wilderness, he is for ever heard exclaiming with one of old, "If God be for us, who can be against us?" (Alex. H. Craufurd, M. A.) Parallel Verses KJV: But God forbid that I should glory, save in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by whom the world is crucified unto me, and I unto the world. |
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