(Third Sunday in Advent, 1831.)
TEXT: JOHN xvi. 27. “For the Father Himself loveth you, be cause ye have loved Me, and have believed that I came forth from the Father.”
THAT was a great word of the Saviour about Himself on which we lately spoke together, in which He represented Himself as from of old the one object of desire and longing to all the best part of mankind, to those who were nearest to God and had received most teaching from Him: but this is a still greater saying, in which He sets Himself before us as the real cause of the love of God towards us,—as He for whose sake alone, by virtue of our relation to Him, that is to say, on account of our faith in Him and love to Him, we became objects of the love of God, His and our Father. But it is He who can say of Himself what one would have been disposed to dispute in the mouth of any other, “If I bear witness of myself, yet my witness is true; for it was eternally clear to His own consciousness what He was to be to the human race to whom He had come. In all others this knowledge could only be gradually unfolded by experience; that is, by their obeying His word and actually fulfilling the will of God which He declared to them, that they should “believe on Him whom the Father had sent.” Therefore, as we count ourselves among those who have learned to love Him, and have attained to the faith that He came forth from God, let us examine His word by the light of our own experience and make it clear to ourselves, if. talking over it, how the Saviour is He for whose sake, if we love Him and believe in Him, we also are loved by God.
I. In the first place, every one will no doubt say to him self in contradiction of this, that if God is love, His love must reach as far as His omnipotence, and there must be a universal love of God. And certainly we shall feel bound to admit that this special love of which the Saviour speaks in our text is only an outcome of that universal love. As surely as the highest knowledge which we have reached through the Son of God is this, that God is love, so surely must we believe that every work of God’s hands is also an object of His love. Only, of course, dead things could not be objects of His love; nor could that which, though certainly alive, yet was incapable of any perception of Him, be such an object; but the spiritual eye of those who know Him soon becomes so clear as to all outward things, that they perceive that anything which we can only regard as inanimate and dead is really in itself nothing at all. That which we could imagine as having no kind of connection with that life which alone among created things is the image of God, would have no proper existence. But there is nothing that is not in some way allied to it. Everything endowed with mind, everything that can, even in a very imperfect and distant way, become conscious of God, everything that according to its nature can be reached by the beams of His love,—all these are certainly in themselves objects of that love. And so the ancient accounts in the Old Testament of the creation of the world are closed with the words, “And God: saw everything that He had made, and behold it was very good.” That was the breathing of love, the look of divine delight over all His works; and it reached as far as His almighty power had done in calling into being that which was not; but still all was good only as connected with that part of this created, finite being which could be the reflection of His own being; which was capable of knowing Him and of feeling after Him in His works. And yet when we reflect that the principal subject of that old story is this earth alone, the scene of our life and work,—that it notices only in so far as they affect this world, all the rest of God’s works, which our present knowledge shows us as being so much greater and of so much wider range; when we reflect further, that in this world man is the only intelligent being; with reference to whom everything is arranged, for whom everything is made that belongs to this world, or that has any bearing on it in other worlds;—with these things before our minds, oh, how can we understand the statement that God the Lord pronounced it all very good, when He saw not only man as the noblest work of His hands, appointed to have dominion over the earth; but just as clearly the fall of man, and all the loss to his spiritual life and work which sin would bring to this man and to the whole human race? We may surely say that if at that time God the Lord said of man and of the earth which was to be his possession, that all was good, it must have been because He had in view not only sin and the fall; but further,—and that not merely as included in His satisfaction, but as being the essential ground of it,—Him who was appointed to restore all things. Indeed it was only in reference to Him,—only because human nature was capable of receiving into union with it the Word who was to become flesh, therefore only because through Him man was to be brought back to God, into a closer and more intimate relation than had been possible before,—it was only in view of all this that God the Lord pronounced all good. And therefore already in this Word He made Himself known as the God who would have compassion on sinners, and who would overlook the times of ignorance, if only in those times He in whom God was already well pleased, should find in men the adherence, the faith, the love without which He could neither impart His thoughts to them nor bring them into perfect union with God. And thus this universal love of God is everywhere shown to man as to the creature made in His own image, in all his various conditions; this is the way in which the Scriptures throughout explain and make intelligible that love and compassion of God; that He has included all under sin and unbelief, that the promise might come through faith in Him in whom alone it would be made plain to all for what a glorious destiny God had created man. Therefore all that we are told of the special love of God and His delight in individuals concerns those who, according to His unsearchable plan, were appointed to stand in a closer earthly connection with Him who was to come. And so the nation from which the Saviour was to arise was His chosen nation; for this reason it was preserved and kept separate and again and again delivered from the distress into which it had brought itself by sin, in order that the revelation of God should be kept safe, and that from this nation should come the only-begotten Son of the Highest. And thus we must say that all mankind was from the beginning the object of the divine good-pleasure and love: nothing that was created in His likeness, nothing connected in any way with this created image of Himself, was excluded from His fatherly care; but no one was an object of God’s love and solicitude in himself and for his own sake.