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abideth faith, hope, conscience, these three; and the greatest of these is conscience." I suppose there are not fewer than twenty- five people here this morning who would have seconded the suggestion. There are others who would have substituted for this word love the word zeal : " And now abideth faith, hope, zeal, these three ; but the greatest of these is zeal." There are many who, if they had been there, would have substituted for the word love the phrase sound doctrine : " Now abideth faith, hope, sound doctrine, these three; but the greatest of these is sound doctrine." *
Why is Love the greatest ? There are many reasons.
1. Love is likest God. — Faith and hope, from their nature, are recipients, while it is of the nature of love to be communicative, and thus to be possessed of that higher blessedness which the Lord Jesus ascribes to giving before receiving. Faith and hope, too, are necessarily expressive, in all who exercise them, of imperfection and dependence, and as such can be attributed only to subordinate creatures. We cannot ascribe to God any- thing that resembles them. He who knows all things, and can do all things of Himself, has no room for relying on the testimony or aid of others. And He who is infinitely blessed in the possession of a Divine fulness cannot be said to hope, or to lack anything that could be hoped for. But love, on the contrary, is the attribute of superior natures. It is held by the highest creatures in common with their Creator. It belongs to the character of Him in whom all fulness dwells. Indeed it is His pre-eminent and crowning attribute ; and the more we attain of it, so much the more do we approach Him in His Divine excellence, so much the more are we fitted to share in His unutterable blessedness. "Beloved," saith an Apostle, "let us love one another ; for love is of God ; and every one that loveth is born of God, and knoweth God; God is love; and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth in God, and God in him."
Faith and hope belong to finite beings only, while love is not thus limited. It is an attribute of the Divine: nay, it is the very name of God. "God is not faith," says the commentator Bengel in his epigrammatic way, " and God is not hope, but God is love."
1 J. R. Thompson, Burden Bearing, 152.
446 THESE THREE
(1) It follows that love interprets God. — The quickest, the truest, the fullest interpretation of God comes through love. How do you know a man ? Do you know a man when you describe him by saying he is so many feet high, weighs so many pounds, his hair is of such a colour, his eyes are of such a hue, he is engaged in such a business, he lives in such a house ? Is that a description of the man? Is that the way you interpret and analyse a man? We begin to know a man when we find out the master passion of his nature, and we never know anything about him until we understand that. You may know ever so much about a man externally, you may know ever so much about him intellectually, but until you know what quickens it all, and colours it all, and directs it all, until you have followed the subtle windings of his soul, and know in what dispositions and purposes the man has his hidden life, you will never know him.
(2) And it makes us like God. — For to all the extent we possess and cherish it, we are like God, and partakers of a Divine nature. The possessor of it is not merely a passive recipient of good, a shrivelled, sordid abject, turning all his thoughts and desires inward on his own littleness ; he becomes, like his Maker, a pattern, a source of good; a centre of diffusive benevolence; a fountain whose streams irrigate the earth; a sun whose light and heat dissipate the rigours of night and winter, and dispense the blessings of day and summer.
2. Love is greatest because it is the end of redemption. — Love, we are told, is the end of the commandment. It is so, whether by " the commandment " we understand the Law or the Gospel. As for the Moral Law, what is its sum or substance but love to God and love to man ? And as for the Gospel, what is its grand design but to rescue men from a state of enmity against God and against one another, to restore them, not only to the Divine favour, but to the Divine image, of which Love is certainly the characteristic and prevailing feature ; and by writing upon their hearts that great law of Love, in which all the Divine statutes are summarily comprehended, to bring them into cordial sub- mission to the will of God, and to win from them a cheerful and thorough obedience to His commandments ? This is unquestion- ably the ultimate design of the Gospel. Finding men "without
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hope " and " without God in the world," living in enmity, distrac- tion, and alienation, it aims at raising them from their sin and selfishness to the love of God and of the brethren. As necessary means for the accomplishment of this purpose, faith and hope are of inestimable importance, bringing as they do the Gospel to bear upon us, with all its sanctifying and love-inspiring influences. But still, as being mainly means, they are sub- ordinate to the end or final result to which they are conducive ; just as the scaffolding, though necessary, is less valuable than the finished building that is erected by the use of it, or as the sowing of the seed, however indispensable, is of less consideration in itself than the reaping of the precious and abundant grain. Faith is the leaf, hope is the blossom, but love is the fruit of the tree of righteousness ; and here, too, the leaf and the blossom are for the sake of the fruit. Only we must think of these, not as giving place to each other in time, but as flourishing together on the same eternal stem. Faith may rely on the mercies and promises of God, and hope may anticipate their full and final enjoyment ; but love is that actual consummation of blessedness, begun on earth and to be perfected in heaven, to which these other excellent graces are subsidiary, and from their subservience to which they derive their chief importance.