p. 91 | Wonderful Love

Publishing Committee · Battle Creek, Mich. · Aug 5, 1858

Wonderful Love.

"Behold what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God."—1 John 3: 1.

This love appears wonderful, when we consider what it did for the people of God before they became his people. "God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son," &c. That surely was no ordinary love that could bestow such a gift, a son! and an only begotten son! That was a miracle of faith and love in Abraham, that caused him to conceive the thought of the surrender of a son to Him who had perfect right to require it, and whom he was under every conceivable obligation to obey. What then was God's love, that he should not only conceive the idea, but really give his Son a sacrifice for those to whom he was under no obligation to show the least favor, for those who, instead of deserving the gift, richly merited his eternal displeasure.

Nor was it in any ordinary manner that he bestowed this gift. To have had a thought of his compassionate regard, to have shared an hour of his service for our benefit, would have been infinitely more than we deserved. But to share such thoughts of his love as brought him on a mission from heaven to earth, to have not only an hour, but more than thirty years of his most active, devoted service, and last of all to have him die for us, O, this was wondrous love!

"Amazing pity, grace unknown, And love beyond degree!"

And such a death as he suffered! All language is impotent, speech itself is dumb before the cross on which the Son of God is expiating human guilt. There is an eloquence in the fact itself that is overpowering, a grandeur of love that overawes nature, vails her noon, as with superior brightness the sun puts out the light of stars, and sends the earth reeling with faintness. Christ's prayer for his murderers while suffering the agonies of death they were inflicting, lifts a Pelion of grandeur, and places it on the Ossa of his love, before incomprehensible in the sublimity of its revealed greatness. That prayer "caps the climax" of the eloquence of divine love in its mighty pleadings to win back the alienated heart of man. O, sinner, if to that eloquence which subdued the solid rocks,—rocks unaffected by all the previous convulsions of time, if to this eloquence of God's love speaking through the death of his Son you can listen unmoved, if in all this there is nothing that can move your soul into a response of love to him who has so much loved you, then must we conclude that you are perhaps beyond all possibility of salvation. The very hardness of your heart interposes an insuperable obstacle in the way of your ever being saved. "He that loveth not, knoweth not God;" and them who "love not God and that obey not the gospel," Christ at his final appear—ing will come to "punish with ever-lasting destruc—ion from the presence of his Lord and the glory of his power."

To be unsusceptible of loving God, is to be incapacitated for heaven. There is no heaven without love,—love to God and love to man. Without this love, salvation, in the very nature of the case, is impossible. The soul whose affections are irrevocably alienated from God, is irretrievably lost. The soul that can not be awakened to love in view of God's amazing love to him,—in whom God's love does not awaken a reciprocation of love, according to the principle that "love begets love," can never be made to love God, for it is only through this overpowering manifestation of his love to the sinner, that God attempts, or that in the nature of the case it is possible to reach and win his heart. O then sinner, I beseech you to open your soul to the eloquence of God's love as it speaks to you from Calvary, as it is uttered in the dumb silence of a Saviour hanging, dying there for you, as it is uttered in that miracle of prayer, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do." If here your heart relents not,—if here you have no feeling, no tears of repentance to shed for those sins that nailed the Son of God to the accursed tree.—if here you feel not the chain of love's attraction drawing your soul to God, you will have no feeling, no repentance, no love any where. If you are incorrigible here, God himself will abandon all attempts to subdue you.—Baptist Register.