GOD'S LOVE by B. L. Aldrich

Seventh-day Adventist Missionary Society · Oakland, California · Nov 25, 1880

GOD'S LOVE.

By B. L. Aldrich

REVELATION is scarcely needed to teach the evident truth that God is love. But many things are plainly shown by nature which men in the blindness of sin stupidly fail to perceive, as, for instance, when all creation plainly exposes the existence of an invisible creator, a highly cultivated people like the Greeks, absurdly conceived of him as a hewn block of stone. So men universally remained in ignorance of his love, thinking him to be malignant and revengeful, until the Bible came to eradicate from their minds this strongly rooted notion.

The fact that there is any creation at all is proof that God is love, for this principle is creative; it is the original force which starts existence. Hate annihilates. If the universe can be compared to an immense tree with branches suspending the golden fruit of worlds, the seed from which that tree sprang was love. Neither revelation nor nature, however, teaches that God loves all things, nor absolutely all men. He does not cherish any fondness for Satan; he is not specially yearnful toward the Neros nor the Phillip Seconds of Spain, and he evidently did not think much of Annanias and Sapphira.

It is not natural to destroy what one loves. No man treads on the worm that crawls in his own heart. Revelation tells us that God is angry with the sinner every day, that he will surely punish the wicked, burn them up like stubble, pull them up root and branch, and make them as though they had not been.

The basis of all correct and beneficial Christian teaching is the conditional and not the unconditional love of God toward humanity. "God so loved the world." This expression has an adverbial modifier. Its correlative is "that he gave his only begotten Son," and the effect was that whosoever believed on him (Christ) might not be still unloved, and consequently perish, but have everlasting life. It is then through the Mediator, for the sake of the Mediator, and in view of the saints of the future, that God loves men. The same love which created Adam, beautiful and sinless, also embraces its second great triumph in the persons of the pure and perfect.

A mind capable of lovely ideals does not depend on present forms to encourage its affections. The woman often invests the object of her love with excellences originating in her own conceptions, as the moon seems to smile on a world wrapped in her own incontinent splendor. So God loves his own conceptions, and only those in sympathy with them and with the means by which only they can be obtained can ever be the objects of his absolute love. To go where the light originates we must walk in its beams, and, to get to the condition of that being that God "so loved," it is necessary to go on in the hallowing presence of Christ and under the bright influence of the Holy Spirit. All outside of these are the objects of divine wrath and retribution.