The Love of God by Milton C. Wilcox

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Apr 3, 1879

The Love of God.

By Milton C. Wilcox

The love of God has been likened to a “golden cord reaching from Heaven to earth.” But few there are that have a firm hold of this wonderful cord. Professed Christianity of the present day has lost its hold upon it, and has drifted far out of the course marked out in God’s word, and has failed to fulfill the conditions that would secure that love. “This is the love of God, that we keep his commandments,” says the beloved John. He had a firm hold of that cord of wonderful strength, composed of ten golden strands, let down from Heaven by the Lord. Wonderfully bright is this golden cord when kept in constant use. It is bright always to the sincere child of God; for “his commandments are not grievous.” But it is ever a dull and repulsive yoke to the unregenerate heart: for “the carnal mind is enmity against God; for it is not subject to the law of God, neither indeed can be.” Rom. 8:7.

To please this “carnal mind,” Satan has counterfeited this golden cord in many ways. Sometimes much of the same material (truth) of which it is composed is woven into the counterfeit, just to make it pass. Some of the strands may be of pure material, but the others are cords of sand; and if one only of these strands is false, it endangers our eternal salvation. “For whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in one point, he is guilty of all.” Jas. 2:10, 11. Satan, through the Papal church, has manufactured a cord in which the second strand has been torn out and the tenth divided, and the fourth is spurious. Yet false and misshapen as it is with the fourth strand thus counterfeited, ministers in the name of the Lord call on you to grasp it. If the wrecked mariner should question its genuineness and authority, its adherents would point to a few garbled texts of Scripture and a long list of spurious authors, and ask, in tones of thunder, “Do you dare to question these?” Should the seeker after truth still continue his investigation, and expose the fraud which the “father of lies” has given to the world as truth, their hands are raised in holy (?) horror, and “legislative enactments” are called for to compel people to believe “shining sand” is “gold tried in the fire.”

Those who cling to the counterfeits have their affections placed on the earth; not so with those who clasp the true. It raises them above all earthly things, and connects them with Heaven. Oh, how much better to have God’s love! Burdens are lighter, trials are purifying, everything is bright and glorious, and we “delight in the law of God after the inward man.”

MILTON C. WILCOX.