2. What, then, does the word " God " mean to us ? There is probably no question that goes deeper to the root than this. We are not specially helped, certainly not in our religious life, when we have admitted that there must be a Supreme Power which has created and sustains the visible world. Granted that is so, such a Power has little to say to us. We might acknowledge its existence as we acknowledge the existence of some far-off fixed star, and with just as much or as little practical result, just as little effect upon our thought and life. Not that God is, but what God is, is what matters to us ; nobody can be vitally interested .- in some far-off, great first cause, and we certainly are no better off — worse, if anything — when we hear or use such empty phrases as the totality of being, instead of speaking of our Father in heaven.
ii. God's Love.
1. A God who does not care, does not count ; if He is not interested in us, how — to say it boldly — are we to be interested in Him ? That is why, in practice, pantheism is hardly to be distinguished from atheism; you cannot worship a totality of being — you cannot pray to a nameless Power that is heedless of your welfare, not concerned in human joy or despair. No, the assurance which man's soul craves is that which bursts upon him in this declaration, " God so loved the world."
For a loving worm within the clod Were better far than a loveless God.
.JBfe created the world, not in order to escape the boredom of eternity, but from love ; He called souls into being, not for the purpose of conducting an endless series of aimless experiments, but in order that His love might have objects on whiclHo bestow
I90 THE AMAZING GIFT OF LOVE
itself ; He leads them, not through a gnat-like span of existence to the gloom of annihilation, but to the home of everlasting love. That conception — and it alone — gives us anything worth calling a religion ; and because Christianity insists upon and emphasizes this conception — God's love of the world and for the human soul — it is the absolute religion^-
^ If our endeavours, our struggles, our failures, our hopes, our aspirations, were nothing to the Eternal, what could the Eternal be to us ? Here is a human document which came into my hands only a couple of days ago. The writer says : " The conception of God that I now have is not the personal one that I had under the old belief. . . . Instead of living under the daily notice of God's favour or resentment, I find that ... we are but unnoticed units in all the vast millions of the universe. The result is that I am questioning the value of life." Can you wonder ? I do not wonder at all ! But if we feel that His eye is upon us, that our little lives mean something to His heart, that we matter to Him, and that His intention is for our good, then that very fact lifts our lives out of insignificance, makes the conflict worth waging, and enables the toiler, the sufferer, the witness for truth and right to say in the midst of seeming defeat and desolation, " And yet I am not alone, because the Father is with me." God loves the world : all faith which stops short of that lacks the element which makes it faith indeed.^
2. " God loves." Where, outside of Christianity, does anybody dare to say that as a certainty ? Men have hoped it ; men have feared that it could not be ; men have dimly dreamed and strongly doubted; men have had gods cruel, gods lustful, gods capricious, gods good-natured, gods indifferent or apathetic, but a loving God is the discovery of Christianity. Neither the gross deities of heathenism, nor the shadowy god of theism, nor the unknown somewhat which (perhaps) "makes for righteousness" of our modem agnostics, presents anything like this — "God loves."
^ It seems to us a simple and purely elementary truth that God is holy love, but how could we have known anything about it without Christ and the revelation made by Him ? Nature and history show us clearly the wise and mighty God, but where do they show Him as holy and loving ? ^
^ God is here set forth as a lover ; loving men, all men, every
» J. Warschauer. * R. Rothe, Still Hours, 107.
ST. JOHN III. i6 191
man. " God so loved the world." Let us then at once make an addition to the first avowal of the Apostles' Creed, and say : — " I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, and lover of the whole world." We sing, " Jesus, lover of my soul." We have equal right and warrant to sing, "God tlje Father Almighty, lover of my soul." ^
iii. The World.
This designation of the object upon which the Divine love rested and rests eternally is to be interpreted according to the usage of this Gospel, and that usage distinctly gives to the expression "the world" not only the meaning of the total of humanity, but also the further meaning of humanity separated by its own evil from God. And so we get, not only the statement of the universality of the love of God, but also this great truth, that no sin or unworthiness, no unfaithfulness or rebellion, nothing which degrades humanity even to its lowest depths, and seems all but to extinguish the spark within it that is capable of being fanned into a flame, has the least power to deflect, turn back, or alter the love of God. That love falls upon " the world," the mass of men who have wrenched themselves away from Him, but cannot wrench Him away from themselves. They never can prevent His love from pouring itself over them; even as the bright waters of the ocean will break over some grim rock, black in the sunshine. Thus the outcasts, criminals, barbarians, degraded people that the world consents to regard as irrevocably bad and hopeless are all grasped in His love.