'He first loved us.' Properly and strictly speaking, that 'first' only
declares the priority of the divine love towards us over ours towards
Him. But we may fairly give it a wider meaning, and say--first of all,
ere Creation and Time, away back in the abysmal depths of an everlasting
and changeless heart, changeless in the sense that its love was eternal,
but not changeless in the sense that love could have no place within
it--first of all things was God's love; last to be discovered because
most ancient of all. The foundation is disclosed last when you come to
dig, and the essence is grasped last in the process of analysis.
So one of the old psalms, with wondrous depth of truth, traces up
everything to this, 'For His mercy endureth for ever.' Therefore, there
was time; therefore, there were creatures--'He made great lights, for
His mercy endureth for ever.' Therefore, there were judgments--'He slew
famous kings ... for His mercy endureth for ever.' And so we may pass
through all the works of the divine energy, and say, 'He first loved
us.'
It is no accident that there are but foregleams of this great thought
brightening the words and the thoughts of psalmist and prophet, saint
and sage, from the beginning onwards, while the articulate utterance of
the simple sentence was first heard from the lips of Him who declared
the Father, and stands in that part of the Book which, both in its
position there, and in its date of composition is the last of the
Apostolic utterances. 'God is love';--that is in one aspect the
foundation of His being, and in another aspect the shining ruby set on
the very sky-piercing summit of the completed process of the revelation
of that Being to man. 'He first loved us'; and thence, from that centre
and germinal point, streams out the whole train of consequences in the
divine activity, and in the divine self-revelation.
I need not ask you to contrast with this infinitely simple and
infinitely deep utterance all other thoughts of a divine Being--the cold
abstractions of Theism, the dim dreads of popular apprehension, the
vague utterances of any mythology, the clouds that men's thoughts have
covered over the face of this great truth--and then, to set by the side
of all these groping, these peradventures, these fears, these narrow,
unworthy ideas, the clear simplicity, the infinite depth of 'He first
loved us.'
But I may ask you to consider, but for a moment, the relation which all
the other perfection of the divine nature have to this central and
foundation one. There are all those pompous names, 'Omnipresence' and
'Omniscience' and the like, which are but the negations of the
limitations of humanity or of finite creatures. There are the more
spiritual and moral thoughts of Wisdom and Righteousness and the like.
These are but the fringes of the glory: I was going to venture to say
that the divinest thing in God is love. There is the central blaze; the
rest is but the brilliant periphery that encloses it. And that infinite
love stands to all these other attributes in the relation of being their
master and motive spring. They are Love's instrument, and in the divine
nature Love is Lord of all. They give it majesty; it gives them
tenderness. We may reverently say, in regard to the divine nature, what
the Apostle says about our humanity, that love is the 'bond of
perfectness'--the girdle which, braced round all the garments, keeps
them in their place. For round these infinite, innumerable, unnameable,
and named divine perfections, is that which brings them all into
symmetry and keeps them all in harmonious action--Love. He has wisdom,
and power, and eternal being, but He is Love.
But do not let us forget that whilst thus my text proclaims the ultimate
truth, these other attributes, as they are called, are all smelted down,
as it were, into, and present in, the love which is their crown. The
same Apostle, who has thus the honour of ringing out to the world the
good news that God is Love, declares that 'this is the message' which he
has to tell, that 'God is light, and in Him is no darkness at all.' So
the light of righteousness, as well as the lambent flame of love, burn
together on that central fire of the universe. We must not so conceive
of the love of God, as to darken the radiance of His righteousness, or
to obscure the brilliancy of that pure light which tolerates no
admixture of darkness.
May I venture a step further, and ask whether we are not warranted in
believing that in that which we call the love of God there do abide the
same elements as characterise the thing that bears the same name in our
human experience? The spectrum has told us that the constituents of the
mighty sun in the heavens are the same as the constituents of this
little darkened earth. And there are the same lines in the divine
spectrum that there are in ours. So if we can venture to say of Him, He
is Love, do not let us shrink from saying that then, like us, He
delights in the companionship of His beloved; that, like us, He rejoices
in giving Himself to His beloved; that, like us, but infinitely, He
desires the good of His beloved; and that, like us, He seeks only for
the requital of an answering love. All these things, the joy of the Lord
in man, the yielding of the Lord to man, the beneficent desire of the
Lord for the good of man, and the hunger of the Lord for the response of
love from man--all these things are affirmed when we affirm that God is
Love.
Our Apostle would concur heartily in the great text which was the theme
of a recent sermon. Paul said, 'God establishes His love towards us, in
that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us.' John says, 'Herein
is love, not that we loved God, but that He loved us, and sent His Son
to be the propitiation for our sins.'
So the Cross of Christ is the one demonstration that God loved us.
Looking to it we can say, with a great modern teacher:--
'So the All-great were the All-loving too,
So through the thunder comes a human voice,
Saying "Oh! heart I made; a heart beats here,
Face, My hands fashioned, see it in Myself;
Thou hast no power, nor mayest conceive of Mine;
But love I gave thee, with Myself to love,
And thou must love Me, who have died for thee."'