LOVE by Jos. Clarke

Pacific Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Oakland, California · Feb 12, 1880

LOVE.

By Jos. Clarke

THE value of love, a pure, a holy love, cannot be over-estimated. In the system of religion the Bible enjoins, love lies with faith at the basis; for true faith cannot exist without love.

The church at Ephesus (see Rev. 2:4) is rebuked for its having left its first love. In their opposition to error, there was evidently some abatement of their first love, and a penalty was threatened if they did not return to their first love.

Here we see that God highly values love, and it is said in 1 John 4:8 that "God is love." And we must infer that a morality or religion that is stiff in austerity, and selfishness, and covetousness, and that lacks this ingredient, love, is repulsive to God.

To the seventh church (the Laodicean) the True Witness says (Rev. 3:18), "I counsel thee to buy of me gold tried in the fire," that is, faith and love. (See Thoughts on Revelation, pp. 62, 64.)

Now a counsel given to buy the fine gold would intimate the idea that there was almost a total want of this greatly valued article in the seventh church; and if the first, or Ephesus church, was threatened with penalties for an abatement, how great the necessity for the last, or Laodicean, church in which so great lack exists that they must go and buy; not that all are wholly lacking, but there is so little that it is almost a failure.

This church is not invited to return to its first love; for its first love was not like that of the Ephesus church, pentecostal, reaching so high that it was full in God's sight; no, but it must be sought for. Have any fully attained to this love? JOS. CLARKE.