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God Is Love

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Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Dec 23, 1875

FromReview and Herald, Vol. 46, No. 25.

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God Is Love.

By Mammon

THE UNIVERSE DESIGNED TO DISPLAY AND ENJOY THE LOVE OF GOD.

“God is love:”—and the true theory of the universe is, that it is a vehicle or medium constructed expressly for the circulation and diffusion of his love. Full of blessedness himself, his goodness burst forth, at first, into a celestial creation, replenished with bright intelligences, invested with the high prerogative of approaching as near to the Fountain of excellence as created natures can, to derive their happiness immediately from himself, and to derive it to the full amount of their capacity for enjoyment.
But Heaven, with all its amplitude, was too confined for Infinite Love; he must enlarge the sphere of his beneficence; again his unconfined goodness overflowed, and this terrestrial creation appeared—an enlargement of Heaven. . . . By creating, at first, one common father of the species, he designed that each individual should feel himself allied to all the rest, and pledged to promote their happiness. And by rendering us necessary to each other's welfare, he sought to train us to an humble imitation of his own goodness, to teach us the divine art of benevolence—to find and fabricate our own happiness from the happiness of others. . . .
He meant every heart and hand to be a consecrated channel for his love to flow in. Had his great idea been realized, the world would have exhibited the glorious spectacle of a whole race in family compact; clothed in a robe of happiness, with charity for a girdle; feasting at a perpetual banquet of beneficence; hailing the accession of every new-born member as the advent of an angel, an addition to their common fund of enjoyment; and finding greater blessedness than that of passively receiving happiness in exercising the godlike prerogative of imparting it—a whole order of intelligent beings, having one heart, and one mind, a heart beating in concert with Heaven, and diffusing, with every pulse, life, health, and joy, to the remotest members of the body. The mere outline of the scene, as sketched by God in paradise, called forth audible expressions of his divine complacency; on surveying it from the height of the excellent glory, he pronounced it good, and the light of his countenance fell upon it.—Mammon.