That is a strange expression, if you will think about it, that
'_God_ commendeth His love towards us in that _Christ_
died.' If you take the interpretation of Christ's death of which I
have already been speaking, one could have understood the Apostle if
he had said, 'Christ commendeth His love towards us in that Christ
died.' But where is the force of the fact of a _man's_ death to
prove _God's_ love? Do you not see that underlying that swift
sentence of the Apostle there is a presupposition, which he takes for
granted? It is so obvious that I do not need to dwell upon it to
vindicate his change of persons, viz. that 'God was in Christ,' in
such fashion as that whatsoever Christ did was the revelation of God.
You cannot suppose, at least I cannot see how you can, that there is
any force of proof in the words of my text, unless you come up to the
full belief, 'God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself.'
Suppose some great martyr who dies for his fellows. Well, all honour
to him, and the race will come to his tomb for a while, and bring
their wreaths and their sorrow. But what bearing has his death upon
our knowledge of God's love towards us? None whatever, or at most a
very indirect and shadowy one. We have to dig deeper down than that.
'God commends His love ... in that Christ died.' 'He that hath seen
Me hath seen the Father.' And we have the right and the obligation to
argue back from all that is manifest in the tender Christ to the
heart of God, and say, not only, 'God so loved the world that He'
sent His Son, but to see that the love that was in Christ is the
manifestation of the love of God Himself.
So there stands the Cross, the revelation to us, not only of a
Brother's sacrifice, but of a Father's love; and that because Jesus
Christ is the revelation of God as being the 'eradiation of His
glory, and the express image of His person.' Friends! light does pour
out from that Cross, whatever view men take of it. But the omnipotent
beam, the all-illuminating radiance, the transforming light, the heat
that melts, are all dependent on our looking at it--I do not only
say, as Paul looked at it, nor do I even say as Christ looked at it,
but as the deep necessities of humanity require that the world should
look at it, as the altar whereon is laid the sacrifice for our sins,
the very Son of God Himself. To me the great truths of the
Incarnation and the Atonement of Jesus Christ are not points in a
mere speculative theology; they are the pulsating vital centre of
religion. And every man needs them in his own experience.
I was going to have said a word or two here--but it is not
necessary--about the need that the love of God should be irrefragably
established, by some plain and undeniable and conspicuous fact. I
need not dwell upon the ambiguous oracles which--
'Nature, red in tooth and claw,
With rapine'
gives forth, nor on how the facts of human life, our own sorrows, and
the world's miseries, the tears that swathe the earth, as it rolls on
its orbit, like a misty atmosphere, war against the creed that God is
love. I need not remind you, either, of how deep, in our own hearts,
when the conscience begins to speak its _not_ ambiguous oracles,
there does rise the conviction that there is much in us which it is
impossible should be the object of God's love. Nor need I remind you
how all these difficulties in believing in a God who is love, based
on the contradictory aspects of nature, and the mysteries of
providence, and the whisperings of our own consciousness, are proved
to have been insuperable by the history of the world, where we find
mythologies and religions of all types and gods of every sort, but
nowhere in all the pantheon a God who is Love.
Only let me press upon you that that conviction of the love of God,
which is found now far beyond the limits of Christian faith, and
amongst many of us who, in the name of that conviction itself, reject
Christianity, because of its sterner aspects, is historically the
child of the evangelical doctrine of the Incarnation and sacrifice of
Jesus Christ. And if it still subsists, as I know it does, especially
in this generation, amongst many men who reject what seems to me to
be the very kernel of Christianity--subsists like the stream cut off
from its source, but still running, that only shows that men hold
many convictions the origin of which they do not know. God is love.
You will not permanently sustain that belief against the pressure of
outward mysteries and inward sorrows, unless you grasp the other
conviction that Christ died for our sins. The two are inseparable.