4. There is nothing that so challenges the attention of the non- Christian peoples as the statement that God is love and that He loves them and desires their redemption and their present and eternal well-being. There is nothing that impresses them as this does. Missionaries say that people who were disposed to shut their ears to the message and to drive them away were profoundly affected by the story of God's love and mercy and goodness. When they heard a little they were eager to hear more. The story is so unlike anything they ever heard or imagined and so pleasing in itself that they are charmed by it. It is to them like good news from a far country, like rivers of water in a dry place, like the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.
^[ Friendship and love [he wrote to Professor von Wyss of Zurich] are the deepest springs of happiness in this world. And what else is the sum of Christianity than God's love in Christ, Christ for the world and we for Christ? The theology of the future must start from John's definition of God, " God is love." Just now we have set on foot in the Presbyterian Church a revision of the Westminster Confession. The Confession is too rigidly Calvinistic for my liking, a creed for the small number of the elect but not for the whole world for which the Saviour died.
We need a theology, we need a confession, that starts from the living person of Jesus Christ, the God-man and Saviour of the world. This is the burden of Peter's confession, the fruitful germ of all creeds ; this is a central fact and truth on which all true Christians can agree. We need a theology and a confession that is inspired and controlled, not by the idea of Divine justice, which is a consuming fire, but by the idea of Divine love, which is life
1 R. E. Hutton, The Crown of Christ, ii. 254.
iao EVERLASTING LOVE
and peace. Love is the key which unlocks His character and all His works. And this love extends to all His creatures, and has made abundant provision in Christ for the salvation of ten thousand worlds.1
Tf God is love, and I for one can never conceive that God shuts out any human being from that love either here or in the world to come. But I think that a man can, and often does, as we know, so harden himself in sin here that he shuts away the love of God from himself. Now, God never compels, so that it is possible that this process may go on hereafter. I cannot conceive God not trying to reach the soul, but I can conceive the soul getting so hardened and devilish that it may go on resisting for ever.2
I vexed me with a troubled thought,
That God might be A God whose mercy must be bought
With misery.
But there's no wrath to be appeased
In heaven above ; No wrath with bitter anguish pleased,
For God is Love.
No pleasure from our suffering
The Lord could steal, Or anguish of the meanest thing
He made to feel.
But on Himself the grief He took,
The pain and loss And shame of sin, and its rebuke
Upon the Cross.
For love rejoiceth not in pain
Of good or bad, But beareth all, and still is fain
To make us glad.
Love circles us with mercies sweet,
And guides our way, And sheds its light around our feet
By night and day.
1 The Life of Philip Schaff, 428.
2 Bishop John Selwyn : A Memoir, 256.
JEREMIAH xxxi. 3 121
O love of Jesus ! love of heaven !
O holy Dove, Teach all the ransomed and forgiven
That God is Love.1
II.
Love that Lasts.
" I have loved thee with an everlasting love."
The love of God is everlasting and changeless in contrast to that of other lovers. Elsewhere Jeremiah says, " All thy lovers have forgotten thee." Israel had had many lovers professing regard and offering service ; but what had their regard and service come to ? They were now cold, careless, perhaps even hostile. They had shown the appearance of love to Israel, not that they cared for Israel, but because they themselves were advantaged. Now, that is no true affection which changes when the thing loved ceases to gratify us. Yet this was all that the affection of these other lovers amounted to — a mere name of love, a feeling which, in the course of time, was to evince their own instability and bring shame to them. But God is a contrast to all this. He loves with an everlasting love. He loved Israel, not only in the days of prosperity and wealth and beauty, but in the days of downfall and despair. His thought penetrates through to the abiding worth of humanity. We do not slander human affection, or in any way underestimate it, when we say that man cannot love his fellow- man as God loves him. God it is who first of all shows man what love really is ; then man, having the Spirit of the Divine Father breathed into him, learns to love also. We cannot attain to any- thing which will give us the right to say with respect to duration that ours is an everlasting love ; but, as true Christians, we may have something of the quality of that affection.