By H. A. Wilson
Taken from Grace and Truth Magazine 1923
Men's conceptions of love depend
upon their knowledge of God. In Christian
lands where the Gospel is preached in its
power and purity we find many who hold high and
noble conceptions of love, but in non-Christian
countries we find that true love is an unknown thing. There
even the pure and wonderful natural affection
which God has planted in the hearts of parents for their
children, and in the hearts of husband and wife each for the
other is to a large extent debased and degraded until
it almost ceases to be. Even in our own country where we
are so blessed with the light of the Gospel men and
women who care nothing for spiritual things have
debased their ideals of love until they
are nothing more than lust. Men who know a God of love reflect His 5 love in their thoughts and
deeds, but men whose conceptions of God are low and degraded themselves live on a low and degraded
plane, and know nothing of the pu/e and holy sentiment called love.
These indisputable facts make it clear that the supreme revelation of
love will be found in the clearest
revelation of God. It is Jesus, the Son of God Who in His Person and work most clearly reveals
God to us, and it is Jesus Who is
the supreme revelation of love.
Following this clue we are led at once to the Cross, for the Scriptures declare that "God commendeth His love toward us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us" (Rom. 5:8). It was on the Cross that
Jesus most clearly manifested
God's love, and it was on the Cross He became the supreme
revelation of love. Four facts which are stated in John
3:16 show the character of this revelation, and at the
same time show why in Jesus we find the revelation
of love which transcends any to be found in all the
universe, and in all time and eternity.
I. JESUS IS THE REVELATION OF
GOD'S LOVE
"God loved."
The teaching that God loves men
is peculiar to the Christian
revelation. All pagan religions
have their gods, and all pagans
do service to these gods, but their service is a service
of fear. There is no idea in the minds of these
worshippers that their gods love them and are willing and eager
to do them a kindness. Rather they are to them beings
of lust, and cruelty, and partiality, whose anger must be
appeased and their desires satisfied lest they should do
their worshippers an injury. They are beings whose favor can
be curried by gifts and who can be wheedled into
granting a kindness to their devotees if they are faithful
enough in their service. So these poor, sin-blinded people
serve their gods day and night in mortal fear of the
wrath of their gods, seeking slavishly to appease them and to
gain their favor. This attitude of fear characterizes
all the religions which are. purely pagan and also to a large
extent all the great religions of China, India and
other idolatrous religions.
The same pitiful ignorance of
God's love also pervades the Mohammedan religion
which is quite different from the idol worship of the
orientals in that it is a
monotheistic religion. Some have blindly and
foolishly called Mohammedanism "a stepping stone to Christianity"
on account of its monotheism, but their sad mistake may be easily
appreciated when one considers
their conception of God, and its absolute destitute of any
recognition of His love. Mohammedanism definitely teaches that God took a lump of clay and broke it into
two parts; that of one part He made men and said, "To heaven with them
and I care not," and that
of the other part He made men and said, "To hell with them
and I care not." "One Mohammedan writer in a book which is much esteemed in Turkey names as the attributes of God, life,
knowledge, power, will, hearing, seeing and speech. He also says, 'If all
the infidels became believers He
would gain no advantage; if all
believers became infidels He would suffer
no loss'."1 Here we find no hint of the love of God,
and it is only fair to say that this teaching is
representative of all Moslem
teaching, for throughout their whole
system of theology God is represented as a distant,
cold, and heartless being.
Nor do we find any more exalted
conception among the myths and traditions of the
Greek and Roman gods and other gods of antiquity.
These gods were said to love men, but their love was always
represented as a selfish thing, and many of the love
stories of the gods which were current among their
devotees are not fit reading for one who wishes to maintain
purity of thought. On the contrary, they, like the stories
of the Hindu gods, are vile and impure.
It is not hard to understand why
human conceptions of God's love should be so
distorted and poor when we consider that the thought of the
love of God is foreign
even to the minds of many who
have been blessed in hearing the Gospel. Many
professing Christian men and women today regard God as a
great ogre, ever present, though invisible, scrutinizing
with unpitying eye their every word and deed, and only
watching for some occasion to criticize them and work
them harm. Some even have so meagre a conception of
God's love that while they will admit that He gave
Jesus to die for them, they insist that they must do good
works or He will still judge them and condemn them forever.
While it is true that God must judge sin, surely such
thoughts of Him, though far too common, yet are entirely
a misrepresentation of His character, for He has a warm
heart of love, and will not even condemn the unbeliever without doing everything possible to save him, much less His own children whom He has begotten in the travail of His soul.
It is only in the Word of God that we find any revelation of the tender and gracious love of God, and there it is always connected with Jesus and His death on the Cross. It was not in His life that Jesus revealed the love of God most clearly, for while that life was wonderful and blessed, filled with thoughtful and kindly deeds, such deeds are not unknown in other lives. No it was on the Cross where He became the willing victim, suffering God's wrath against our sin that He became the supreme revelation of God's love. There God showed forth His love to a guilty and hell-deserving race. On the Cross Jesus became the supreme revelation of love, because He there revealed a supreme love, — the love of God.
II. JESUS IS THE
REVELATION OF AN INFINITE LOVE
"God loved the world."
This love we cannot fully understand, for it is infinite, but we
may learn much about it as
we stand in the shadow of the
Cross and permit and there to show us the magnitude
of the love which He thus revealed. God speaks in
Eph. 3:17-19 both of our inability to fully comprehend
His love, and also of the knowledge which we may receive.
He there leads the Apostle to pray for the Ephesian
believers that they "may be able to comprehend with all
the saints what is the breadth and length and depth and
height and to know the love of Christ
which passeth
knowledge." Consider for a
moment the height of God's love.
As we have seen, it is as high
as Heaven itself, for it
proceeded from the very heart of
God, and led Him to
send His only begotten Son to give Himself for the
souls of men. The depth of God's love who can fathom? It is
deeper than the lowest hell, for Jesus suffered the
full measure of God's wrath as He hung upon the Cross,
pouring out His soul unto death. The breadth of God's
love is such that it
encompasses the earth and
embraces the soul of every man. "God loved the world." The
length of. God's love can be measured only by
eternity itself, for in His love He provided eternal life
for all who would receive His gift. O! how great is the
love of God. Yes, we see its length and breadth and
depth and height, but in the glimpse which we get of it
we realize how hopeless it is for us to try to know it.
It is too great for us. It passeth knowledge.
But perhaps it will help us to appreciate the supremacy of God's love just a little better when we consider that He loves the unworthy and unlovely — that His love extends to the worst of sinners. In Ephesians 2:4-5 God speaks of "the great love wherewith He loved us, even when we were dead in trespasses and sins." This is very expressive, for if there is anything which is repulsive to us it is a putrid corpse, and in God's sight sin is just as repulsive. But such are the creatures toward whom this marvelous love has been manifested. We are sinners, all of us, and in our sins we are naturally dead before God. This love is a love which reaches not only to the so-called respectable people of this earth, but also to those who are outcasts of society and who are called by men "the very dregs of humanity."
A Christian woman, laboring among the moral lepers of London, found a poor
street girl desperately ill in a bare, cold room. With her own hands she ministered to her, changing her bed linen, procuring medicines, nourishing food and a fire, making the poor place as bright and cheery as possible, and then she said, "May I pray for you:
"No," said the girl, "you don't
care for me; you are doing this to get to heaven."
Many days passed, the Christian
woman unwearingly kind, the sinful girl hard and
bitter. At last the Christian said:
"My dear, you are nearly well
now, and I shall not come again, but as it is my last
visit, I want you to let me kiss you." Then the
pure lips,
accustomed to prayers and holy words, met the lips
defiled by oaths and unholy
caresses — and then, my friends,
the hard heart broke.
This Christian woman lid
glimpsed the love of God, and that love was reflected in
her. Such is the love which Jesus revealed on the Cross.
Such love men know only as He teaches them to know it.
III. JESUS IS THE REVELATION OF
A SACRIFICIAL LOVE
"God so loved the world that He
gave His only begotten Son."
But the fact which most clearly
shows the pre-eminence of God's love and the
supremacy of Jesus as a Revealer of that love is
the sacrifice which God made in giving His only begotten
Son. Real love is a costly thing. It will lead the
one who loves to pay any price which is necessary to save
its loved one from suffering or to provide happiness and
contentment. That is the kind of love which God has.
Loving as He did He was willing to pay any price in
order that He might spare the souls of men the awful
agonies of hell, which they merited on account of their sin.
He was willing even to give His only begotten Son if
He might by so doing give to us eternal life and
happiness in His presence. O, unworthy, sin-blinded creatures
that we are, ever to sin against such a love as that!
Think of it! God loved us so much that He was willing
for His Son, the most cherished treasure of Heaven and
the One nearest and dearest to His own heart, to
suffer the unspeakable agonies of the Cross. And Jesus,
our blessed Lord, shared in that love so fully that He
was willing to suffer the blazing, devastating fires of
God's wrath against sin in order that we might not perish
but have everlasting life. God's love for the world cost
Him His only begotten Son and it cost Jesus a suffering
which no man can possibly conceive.
Without a question we will be
overcome with the realization of what God's love
really means when we stand in His presence and
understand it as we cannot now. What a price He paid for our
salvation! What a love His must be to make Hun willing
to make that sacrifice! When God gave Jesus to die upon
the Cross, when our sins were reckoned unto Him, and
when God was compelled to turn His back on His
Son because of our sins, Jesus cried out, "My God! My
God! why hast Thou forsaken me?" What a cry that
was, and what an awful agony must have wrung it from
His lips. He was able to bear the excruciating physical
suffering of the Cross, and of the torture to which He was
subjected before, without a murmur. But when our sins were
placed upon Him, and when He found His soul
swallowed up in the darkness of hell, and God's face
hidden from Him His heart was broken and this great cry of
anguish burst from His lips. Let us not think that the
heart of God in Heaven was not moved by that cry. No,
the heart of the Father was torn
with the same agony and
suffering which was expressed on earth by the Son of
His love. We have talked much of the cost to Jesus
of the suffering of the Cross, and rightly so, but let
us remember also that it cost the Father just as great
suffering as the Son endured. "God so loved the world that He
gave His only begotten Son." Human mind cannot fathom
the depths of love expressed in such a sacrifice,
and human language at its best is powerless to describe
it. God does not attempt to do so. He merely states the
fact in the most simple language, so that even a child
can lay hold upon it. But, O! what an infinity of meaning
lies in those few simple words concerning the great
sacrifice of God's love!
IV. JESUS IS THE REVELATION OF A SAVING LOVE
"God so loved the world that He
gave His only
begotten Son, that whosoever
believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting
life."
The fact of God's love
transcends human thought; it is too great for human
minds to grasp, even though it has been revealed to
us: its expression in the sacrifice of Jesus confounds
even the imagination of men's hearts with its wonder,
but, thank God, we can lay hold of the gift of His love
provided at such a cost. W^e may benefit by it, for the
love which God brought to light in Jesus is a saving love.
The purpose for which that sacrifice was made and for
which that revelation was given on Calvary's Cross was
that God might save us. It was done '"that whosoever
believeth in Him should not perish but have everlasting
life." Let us fairly and frankly face what these words
mean to us. We are sinful and hell-deserving
creatures. In spite of our pitiful attempts to
conceal our sin and to appear better than we are, yet deep
down in our hearts we are bound to admit that we cannot
hope to appear approved to God in the day when He must
judge the secrets of men s hearts. We cannot even
conceal to good advantage from our friends the secret sins
and faults of our lives. How much less, then, can we hope
to deceive God as to our real character? We know, for
the Holy Spirit convicts us of it, that we deserve
nothing but the wrath of almighty God. But O, thank God!
He is not willing that we should suffer it, and He
has provided a way out. Let us not deceive ourselves.
God must judge our sins. He cannot pass over them
and ignore them, for He is just and righteous. But He
comes to us today with the good news that those sins are
already judged. Christ has already been punished for them.
"God sending His own Son in the likneness of sinful
flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh" (Rom. 8:3).
"He was wounded for our transgressions, He was bruised
for our iniquities: the
chastisement of our peace was
upon Him; and with His stripes we are healed. All we
like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his
own way; and the Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of
us all' (Isa. 53:5-6). Yes, dear friend, Jesus suffered
the full measure of God's judgment upon our sins. He was
judged in our stead. In this way God so provided that
it is not necessary for us to perish in His judgment,
but on the contrary we may have eternal life if we will.
But 'now are we to receive this
wonderful gift? How are we to benefit by this
marvelous love? These are the
questions which must be upon the
heart of anyone who fairly faces the revelation of
God's love given in Christ. Ah! herein is one of the
brightest rays which gleams from the Cross of Christ and
illumines the love of God. God's love is so great that He has not
only purchased eternal life for us at the cost of His
Son, but He has also placed this priceless treasure in easy
reach of all mankind. "The gift of God is eternal life
through Jesus Christ, our Lord" (Rom. 6:23). What must we do to
get that gift? Nothing! All God asks is that we
receive it. All we can do is just to believe His Word, to
trust Him for salvation. O! friend! If you have not
already done so, look up in simple faith, without seeking
for any feeling, without attempting to present any merit,
and humbly confess your sin and need of a Saviour. Just
confess, with the simple faith of a little child, "I
believe that Jesus died for my sins. I accept
Him as my
Saviour." "Is that all?" you ask. Yes, friend, that is all.
"He that believeth on the Son
hath everlasting life; and
he that believeth not the Son shall not see life; but the
wrath of God abideth on him" (Jno.
3:36).
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1) Zwemer, quoting Sell.
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