TI " He loveth us." That covers past, present, and future. The love of our Redeemer stretches from eternity to eternity. It had no beginning, and will have no ending. It is unchanged, unmodified, untouched, either by lapse of time or variation of circumstance. Utterly inexhaustible, it flows incessantly in undiminished and undiminishable tide into the lives towards which it is directed.
Immortal Love, for ever full,
For ever flowing free, For ever shared, for ever whole,
A never ebbing sea.^
^ Dora Greenwell, The Patience of Hope (ed. 1894), 130. * Hector Mackinnon : A Memoir, by his Wife (1914), 181.
REVELATION i. 5, 6 9
II.
The Lov^ that has Made Us Free.
"And loosed us from our sins by his blood."
This work is described by two different words in A.V. and K.V. — " washed " and " loosed." These are twxufigures for one fact. There is but the difference of a single letter in the Greek, and not a letter of difference in the reality, though the point of view differs. The one word regards sin as defilement, the other as bondage. The one thanksgiving rejoices in our being purified, the other in our being freed. The same Divine act accomplishes both ends ; and at one time we may rejoice in the thought that the old foul self may be made clean, at another in the delightful consciousness that our chains are snapped, the dungeon walls broken down, and the slave is emancipated for ever.
1. The notion of hor.<]r^ ;(> underlies the metaphor of loosing a fetter. If we woul<l be honest with ourselves, in our account of our own inward experiences, that bondage we all know. There is the bondage of sin as guilt, the sense of responsibility, the feeling that we have to answer for what we have done, and to answer not only here but also hereafter, when we appear before the judgment-seat of Christ. Guilt is a chain. And there is the bondage of habit, which ties and holds us with the cords of our sins, so that, slight as the fetter may seem at first, it has an awful power of thickening and becoming heavier and more pressing, till at last it holds a man in a grip from which he cannot get away.
H Sin finds men out in the form of Temptation. Temptation is the result of constantly yielding. A constant doing passing into a habit — it really comes to be a predisposition to do what we have done before over again, and this is temptation. We have built up the muscle-fibre of temptation by constantly using it. Some day Tennyson's lines will be true, that our character is a part of all we have met. Look at the brain. It is made up, as you know, of countless cells and processes. If an intellectual process runs through our brain once, it leaves comparatively no effect. But say it over a hundred times, and a footpath is worn through the brain ; the hundred and first time will be easy. Say it a thousand times, and lo ! through all the cellular structure of
lo REDEEMING LOVE
the brain there is for ever laid a thoroughfare upon this one intellectual idea, and temptations and sins march to and fro in endless procession along the beaten track. Men do not commit two different kinds of sin. You have your own favourite sin, and I have mine, and as it grows the trick is intensified, the path more beaten still, and the end is Death. One thing kills a man, and if you are guilty of one sin, your doom is sealed. Therefore guard against making a thoroughfare. Decide once for all to close the thoroughfare by gates which shall last for ever. Let that evil thought never pass that way again. ^
2. But we have an Emancipator. " He loosed us from our sins." This proclaims not a mere cleansing, but a liberation; not the remission of penalty only, but the removal also of moral bondage. Sin's bondage is one of the strongest forces in life ; for sin, like a tyrant, subjugates memory, deteriorates moral strength, and increasingly destroys a man's power of resistance and action. And to such as are fast bound in its remorseless grip, this Evangel proclaims " liberty to the captives," such liberty indeed as befits and enables men to serve God " in holiness and righteousness."
^ I think I have never coveted happiness, but freedom of spirit I have earnestly desired, freedom from that burden which crushes joy and sorrow both — the mere dead weight of care and of remorse. And I believe God, who gave me this desire, has in some measure fulfilled it, and will fulfil it more in spite of my rebellion. The spirit of freedom, of peace, of a sound mind, is, I am sure, given to us. We are only to remember its presence and to walk in it.
The Spirit does make intercessions within us, with groanings that cannot be uttered, and if the sense of personal sins presses them out, they do extend, I trust, to the whole universe ; they are groans for its redemption and not for ours only. The word redemption, all the past which it implies, all the future which it points to, has for me a wonderful charm. I cannot separate the idea of deliverance from the idea of God, or ever think of man as blessed except as he enters into God's redeeming purpose, and labours to make others free.