of the patient said softly, but earnestly, "George M , God
loves you; be assured of this — God loves i/oit."" """When the hurried visit was over, the young man's sister, coming in, found her patient in a tearful ecstasy not to be described. " What do you think? Mr. Irving says God loves me," cried the dying lad, overwhelmed with the confused pathetic ^ joy of that great discovery. The sudden message had brought sunshine and light into the chamber of death.^
4. "God so loved the world." The pearl of this wonderful statement is the measure it supplies of that eternal love which redeems sinful man. " God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son." It is the earthly way of describing the
* A. Maolaron. ' Mrs. 01ii»liaDt» The Life of Edward Irving, ii, 87t
198 THE AMAZING GIFT OF LOVE
sacrifice God makes of God, of His true and real self for man. Language could not more clearly or strongly declare the fact that God gives Himself, His essential self, to the temptation and toil, the suffering and anguish, of our limited and burdened life, that He may carry out His world-loving purpose.
^ The marvel of God's love for mankind grows as we learn the degree of that love. It is the degree of it that is apocalyptic. The Old Testament had attempted to disclose the graciousness of God, telling men that like as a father pities, so God pities. Exterior nature too had tried to make known God's healing and comforting power; abundant harvests telling of His affection, zephyrs breathing His soothing kindness, health-giving air and the recuperative tendencies within every normal body indicating that love is over mankind. But the degree of that love was never known to any man, however scholarly, until it was revealed when God out of desire to secure to man the highest possible good actually gave His Son for man.^
Winds weary with the old sea tune
Slide inland with some cloud, and soon
From woods that whisper summer noon
Weigh their wight wings with odour boon.
So I, long salted in our ocean drear
Of disbelief that Essence can be won
By any form of thought invented here,
Felt such a gush of joy about
My heart-roots, as if in and out
'Twas life-blood billowed; and as stout
As once we sent the battle-shout
Pitching clear notes against barbaric din, —
Oh, brother, my soul's voice against the rout
Of unbeliefs a man doth muse within,
Arising and protesting wild,
Spake, speaking out untruth defiled;
Spake, speaking in the truth exiled;
Spake, Little head and weary child.
Come home, God loves, God loves through sin and shame, —
Come home, God loves His world.^
I J. G. K. McClure, Supreme Things, 19. ' Richard Watson Dixon.
ST. JOHN III. i6 199
11.
Christ and the World. "He gave his only begotten Son."
The evidence of the love of God is the advent of God into the sinful and suffering life of man, bearing sin vicariously as His way of eradicating it from the heart and will of the sinner. " God," as St. Paul says, "was in Christ, reconciling the world unto himself." " It is a faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation, that Christ Jesus " — " the effulgence of the Father's glory and the very image of his person," uniquely and inexpressibly related to Him as " the only begotten Son " — He, and not a stranger, nor a seraph ; He, and not one of the ordinary sons of men — " came into the world to save sinners " ; to enter into contest with the awful power of sin; to make an end of it, and to bring in an everlasting righteousness.
Here, then, in the life of Jesus are the only unerring measures of the love of God. He spared not Himself from the suffering and agony and sacrifice necessary to save them, but in love of them bore it for them, to rescue them from the stupor and death of sin, and lift them to a share in His life. He who sees Jesus in Bethlehem as a babe, in Galilee as a working healer and wise teacher, in Gethsemane and on Calvary as the Just One dying for the unjust, sees the Father, and knows and understands a little of the way in which He mediates the redemption of a lost world.
1. Let us seek, first of all, to get rid of misconceptions in this vital matter.
(1) One of the most prevalent notions of God is this: that God is a hard, inexorable Being, who has been made mild and forgiving only by the death of Jesus Christ. This great Gospel text teaches just the contrary. It represents God as in love with men already before Christ came — with all men — with every man. " God so loved the world." And this is not any elect or select portion of the world, but the whole world of human beings that ever have lived, that live now or that ever will live on the face of the earth : not the world of the elect, but the world of sinners.
^ How can you appease love ? How can a loving God pro- pitiate Himself ? Eead this text with this thought of a propitia-