Jeremiah 31:3 The LORD has appeared of old to me, saying, Yes, I have loved you with an everlasting love… I. THE GREAT SOURCE OF REDEMPTION — "everlasting love" — love without beginning, love without change, and love without end. 1. Everlasting love is love without a beginning. The eternity of Divine love is a subject which we cannot fathom, but we may look at it in relation to our own being. Go back behind creation, before the Divine will had generated a single atom of matter, and in that very we discover ourselves in a perfect, living, actual conception, subjective being was embraced, nourished, and delighted in by "everlasting love." The love of God is not an emotion of delight created by the appearance of comeliness, but delight itself; not an emotion excited by beauty, but beauty itself. There is a tendency in the human mind to thrust itself behind the birthday of time, and fall — where? Into the arms of "everlasting love." 2. "Everlasting love" is love without change. Man, in relation to the eternity of God, must be regarded as a whole. "Everlasting love" embraces that whole. Our first impulse is to regard it as encircling the pure and the innocent, but turning aside from the disobedient and simple. It is not so, for the Word says, "God so loved the world." Sin has transformed a paradise into a wilderness, a heaven into a hell, but sin cannot change "everlasting love." That explains it all. 3. "Everlasting love" is love without end. On every Mohammedan tombstone the inscription begins, "He remains," i.e., God. To-day we will write on every gravestone, The love of God remains. Ah, there are many gravestones besides those in the churchyard. You may imagine inscriptions like these: "To the memory of friendship"; "To the memory of parental and filial affection"; "To the memory of marriage sacredness and devotion." But those fires, which once burnt brightly, have gone out for want of fuel, or for something that is worse. Should there be an aching void or bitter disappointment because former sources of affection have dried up, let us not turn to the devil to supply their places, but let us turn to the "everlasting love" of God. II. THE METHOD OF REDEMPTION. "Therefore with loving-kindness have I drawn thee." We sometimes think that our Heavenly Father deals with us harshly, or unkindly. Yes, why the cross and not the crown? You see the child running in from the garden full of tears, and saying, "Something has hurt me." On examination it is found that a thorn is in one of the fingers. Then the gentlest of hands will endeavour to extract it. When she is doing so, the child will cry out, "Oh, mother, you hurt me." Ah, it is not the mother that hurts, but the thorn. When God takes out the thorn, we think that He hurts us. Not so, it is the thorn. Even God cannot take sin out of the heart but that it will give pain. 1. In dealing with the attractions of "everlasting love," we must bear in mind the fact that we can only be saved by attraction. Grace begins its work by transforming the heart into the image of the Son of God. One grain of the Saviour's love in that heart will leaven the whole. The sinner must be made willing to part with his sin. The power to effect this comes from God, but it can only be applied when the willing cry rends his heart, "Lord, save, or I perish." 2. Consider the particular form which God's loving-kindness has assumed in order to attract man to virtue. Under what aspects has mercy appeared unto men? We look back, and see an altar, and a victim, and a priest. But we soon learn that these are only types, yet, God's mercy pursued man in times of yore, and does now, and everywhere. To-day, it is not altar, victim, or priest; but the Son of God, in a body like our own, and bearing up under the vicissitudes of life. In Christ Jesus we have the picture of loving-kindness. Sometimes that picture is in words of sympathy, of love, of encouragement, and inspiration. "Never man spake like this Man." At other times the picture is in deeds, — the most gracious and marvellous. The sick are healed. The blind see. The deaf hear. The dead live. Is the picture overdrawn? (T. Davies, M. A.) Parallel Verses KJV: The LORD hath appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee. |
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