p. 5 | God’s Mighty Detector

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Jul 9, 1912

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 39, No. 26.

God’s Mighty Detector

IT is good to love and be loved. It is good to talk of love; “for love is of God,” and “God is love.”

It is good to cherish and to manifest properly feelings of kindness, forgiveness, sweetness, and kindred graces. Love bears these as legitimate fruit, tho not always manifest at first. They are confirmatory evidences of living connection with the divine Source of life and light and power; but they are by no means first or conclusive evidence.

The real test of love is doing duty under difficulties, duty demanding sacrifice. Spurious and egotistical affection has a selfish basis. It desires to shape its own policy, seek its own ways of expression, and endeavors to bring the divine Spirit even to its pleasures and forms.

King Saul had something of that nature. He liked to demonstrate. Contrary to law, he must offer the sacrifice. (See 1 Samuel 13.) He must show to the people his great victory for God over the Amalekites, and his kindness in the distribution of “the best of the sheep, and of the oxen, and of the fatlings, and the lambs, and all that was good.” But the king and subsequent ages were taught the lesson, “Behold, to obey is better than sacrifice, and to harken than the fat of rams.” (See 1 Samuel 15.)

The real test of love is duty, and duty to God is obedience. Listen to the wise man: “Fear God, and keep His commandments; for this is the whole duty of man.” Eccl. 12:13. And John, the apostle of love, echoes the same thought repeatedly. “My little children, let us not love in word, neither with the tongue; but in deed and truth.” 1 John 3:18. What are among the proofs by which we may know that we are Christ’s?—“We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brethren.” Verse 14.

But how may we know that we love the brethren?—“Hereby we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and do His commandments.” 1 John 5:2.

And what is the love of God?—“For this is the love of God, that we keep His commandments; and His commandments are not grievous.” Verse 3.

This is God’s test of love for us. The first exercise of that love is preeminently Godward. “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God” is “the first commandment,” the great vital principle of character building; and we may count all other love spurious or perverted from a Christian view-point, which does not recognize this great fact.

Christ died to save men from sin, to win men to loving obedience to God, not in their way, but in God’s way; and he who knows Christ, knows that the way of God’s commandments—obedience to which is the expression of our love—is “not grievous.”