Lecture XXXII

LOVE GOING FORTH TOWARDS WHAT IS SEEN

THERE is very close and compressed reasoning here. The steps in the process, the links in the chain, are not all patent or obvious on the surface; some intermediate bonds of connection need to be supplied. Thus, the assertion (ver. 12), “No man hath seen God at any time,” seems intended to answer by anticipation a question that might be put, as to the omission of love to God in the preceding verse (ver. 11). Otherwise it is, so far as one can see, irrelevant. “Beloved, if God so loved us, we ought also to love”—God;—that is what we might naturally expect to be the logical inference; but it is not so; it is “we ought also to love one another.” And why? “Because no man hath seen God at any time.” Therefore, love to one another is made the test of “God dwelling in us.” And it is so, all the rather, because it is “the perfecting of his love in us” (ver. 12).

Two general principles are here indicated as regards this divine love; I. It must have a visible object; or, in other words, it must be real and practical, and not merely ideal and sentimental. II. It is thus not only proved but perfected; it has its free course and is consummated.

I. Love, if it is to be a sufficient and satisfactory test of our “knowing God and being born of God,” must have a visible object; it cannot otherwise be verified to our own consciousness as real. In a sense, it may be said even of God’s own love, the love which is his nature, that it thus verifies as well as manifests itself. It goes forth towards created beings; it seeks created beings towards whom it may go forth. A visible created universe is its object: and so also, in a peculiar manner and degree, is a visible new created church. Only in its exercise toward such objects can its true character, its communicative and self-sacrificing character, be thoroughly brought out.

It exists, no doubt, and is in exercise, before all creation, the first creation as well as the new. In the mystery of the Trinity, in the ineffable fellowship of the three persons in the one divine essence, from everlasting, “God is love.” There is love; felt love; inconceivable mutual complacency; love in exercise, mutually interchanging and reciprocating endearments;—there is such love implied in the very nature of God as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. In particular, from before all worlds, the Father thus, in the Spirit, loves the Son, “dwelling in his bosom.” But it is love, however exercised, that is resting and not giving; it is the repose rather than the activity of love. If it is to be manifested as a love that gives, that is active, that actually magnifies or benefits its object, it would seem that there must be creation.

Indeed it is only in creation that the Son himself can become practically the object of this love. If God, because of his love to him, has “appointed him to be heir of all things,” the “all things” of which he is to be “heir” must be made; made by him and for him. There must be “goings forth” on his part from the Father; there must be, on the Father’s part, “the bringing in of the first begotten into the world.” Then, and only then, when he appears as “the beginning of the creation of God,” “the first born of every creature,” is the Son in a position in which he can receive gifts from the Father, or in which he can have bestowed on him the inheritance of all things. The Father’s love to him may now take the form of bountifulness, liberality, lavish giving; it may now express itself in deeds. And, overflowing from him to the creatures called into being by his hand and for his sake, especially to those who, being made in God’s image, can know his nature, this divine love finds vent in those tender mercies which are over all his works. So, in the beginning of the creation, God in his Son loved the goodly universe of which his Son had become the head; with a love to him and to it that could never weary of bestowing favours. So, when this earth was made, in whose habitable parts the Son as the eternal Wisdom rejoiced; and when this race of ours was formed, the sons of men, with whom were his delights: “God saw everything that he had made, and behold it was very good.” His love then filled our cup of innocent and pure happiness to the brim, if only we had been content to hold it straight.

Thus, for a season, one quality of the love which is God’s nature, which God is—its simple bountifulness, its being “ready to distribute, willing to communicate,”—had room to expatiate, and if I may dare to say so, to indulge and enjoy itself, in the teeming earth, and in man, its godlike proprietor and lord, for whom he bade it bring forth all its fulness.

But there is a quality of this love for which that first creation provided no outlet; a quality more wonderful than all its bountifulness; the quality for whose exercise the fall gave occasion. To creatures innocent and pure, God, for the love he has to his Son, by whom and for whom they are made, may give all sorts of good things, the good things with which earth is stored, and better things still if they will but obey his word. To guilty creatures alone can he “give his Son to be the propitiation for their sins.”

Still, however, it is now as always to the visible creation, to what he sees and whom he sees, that God’s love goes forth in exercise. The objects of it are seen.

Seen! And how seen? Can it be said now, “God saw everything that he had made, and behold it was very good”? To bless and benefit a world and a race seen by him in that light, might be almost said to be self-gratification, rather than self-sacrifice. But it comes to be self-sacrifice when its objects are seen to be corrupt and vile; guilty and deserving only of wrath; polluted and unclean; with nothing to attract, but everything to repel; alike unloving and unlovely. To continue to love creatures thus seen;—not only so, but to love them with a love that does not spare his own Son,—a love that, when law and justice demand a victim, will rather that he should be the victim than they;—that is a manner of love implying something else and something more than bountifulness. And that is God’s manner of love to those whom he now sees, to “the world lying in wickedness.”

Now our “loving him whom we have not seen,” never could be a test of our having in us this “love which is of God.” If the thing to be proved is the identity, in kind or nature, of our love and God’s love:—its being with the very same love with which he loves that we also love;—that never can be proved by an appeal to our love to him. It must turn upon the consideration of his love to the world, and the likeness of our love to that.

Mark here only one point of difference between God’s love to us and any love we may have to him; look at the object in either case. On our part, when we love God, the object is the all-good, the all-amiable. Nay, more. It is the God who “first loved us.” When he loves us, he loves the evil, the unamiable. And he loves us with a love which does not grudge the surrender of his own beloved Son to our state and our doom, that we in his Son may become acceptable and well-pleasing in his eyes. Even if, therefore, our love to God were all that could be desired, all that could be looked for, all that our knowledge of his glorious excellency and our experience of the riches of his grace might well be expected to call forth; still it would not suffice for proof that our love is God’s love; that we love with the love which is of God; that we love as he loves.

This accordingly seems to me to be the true sense and import of that statement of the apostle, often misunderstood, which, however, when rightly apprehended is very suggestive: “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” One is apt to think that there is here a disavowal or denial of our love to God altogether; in which case the reference must be to our unconverted state. Or else it must be such a disparagement of our love to God, even in our converted state, as would represent it to be nothing in comparison with his love to us. Both of these thoughts are no doubt true. But I am persuaded that there is a deeper meaning in the statement; more appropriate to the context; more to the purpose of the argument. It is assumed that we love God. And much is made of that, as we may soon see, in what follows. But it is not our loving God, however sincerely and warmly, that can prove our love to be the same with his. Were we loving him even as the angels love him, were we loving him even as the Son loves him, that would not suffice. It would still be love on our part of a very different sort from that love of his; having a very different kind of object, and acting in a very different way. The Son himself proved his oneness with the Father, in respect of the love now in question, by his voluntarily coming to seek and to save the lost. The angels prove theirs by the “joy that there is among them over one sinner that repenteth,” and by their being “all ministering spirits, sent forth to minister for them who shall be heirs of salvation.”

“Herein then is love,” “the love which is of God,” the love whose reproduction in us is to be tested;—“not that we have loved God,”—which, thanks to his grace, we do; not by that, even though it were all that it ought to be, which, alas! it is far from being;—“but that he loved us;” that he loved us when we were yet sinners; that he saw us then, and pitied us, and “sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.” That is the model, the exemplar, the pattern, of the love which is to test our being “born of God.”

Two things are thus apparent. In the first place, this love in us, if it is to verify itself as being God’s very love, must be love, not to the unseen but to the seen; to a world that is seen; to men and women in it that are seen; to one another, to our brethren, to our fellow-men, as seen. And, moreover, it must be love to them, seen by us as God sees them. The objects of love must be the same to us as to God; and seen to be the same; seen in the same light; from the same point of view. “No man hath seen God at any time;” but God has always seen, and always sees, every man; he has seen, and sees you. And, seeing you such as you are, he has loved you. Do you love your brother, your neighbour; seeing him, I do not say as God sees him, but as God has seen and sees you when he loves you? There must be identity in the object of this common love, God’s and yours; you and he must love the same object, the same person. But that is not all. He is, both to God and to you, visible; he is seen. And as seen by God and by you he must be the same; the same in your eyes, in your judgment, in your esteem, as he is in God’s. Or, as I have hinted, it may serve the same purpose, and be more profitable, to put the matter thus: he must be seen by you as you are seen by God when he loveth you. He must be the same in your eyes, in your judgment, in your esteem, as you are in God’s. That will do as well.

Who is it who is the object of your love? One seen, of course. But is he seen by you with God’s eye, or with the world’s eye; or with the eye of your own natural prepossession, your own natural liking? I am far from saying that this last kind of love is always necessarily wrong. But it is not “the love which is of God;” which identifies you as “born of God, and knowing God.” Is he to you what he is to God? He must be either one whom God with most intense compassion pities, and yearns in his inmost bowels to save; or one whom God welcomes and embraces, not because he is naturally amiable, but because in him the Son of his love sees of the travail of his soul and is satisfied. In either view, is he the same to you that he is to God?

But I must press the question further. Does what you see in your fellow-men cool or quench your love to them, more than what God sees in them cools or quenches his love to them? All that is unattractive, all that is unamiable, all that is repelling in them is seen by him as well as by you; seen by him infinitely better than by you. Does it affect him as it affects you? Does it hinder him from loving them, as it seems to hinder you? Still further I must press the question. Is it the same thing, or the same sort of thing, seen in them, which draws God’s love to them, that commends them also to your love? What is that? Either it is the misery, be it splendid or squalid, of a doomed soul, or it is the broken heart of a child of God. These call forth the love of God; these alone; these always. Do they always call forth yours? Wherever a sinner still in his sin is seen, does your heart go forth towards him in earnest longing and striving for his salvation, as does the heart of God? When the poor prodigal returns, and is clasped in forgiving arms, is your sympathy with the loving father or with the jealous brother? Or, to bring the question home again to your personal experience, is it because you see other men as God sees you that you love them? You see them, too many of them, alas! in the same state and of the same character that were yours when God seeing you loved you; polluted, as you were polluted; perishing, as you were perishing. Do you love them on that account, as on that account God loved you, when he had pity upon you? Again, you see them, some of them, like yourselves now, by his grace, dear in God’s sight as his ransomed and saved ones. Do you love them on that account, as on that account God loves you?

For, secondly, this love in us must be the same with God’s love, in respect of its character, as well as in respect of its objects. It must be what we have seen that that love is, communicative and self-sacrificing. Our love to God cannot be of that nature. We cannot impart anything of ours to him; we cannot sacrifice anything of ours for him; he is beyond the reach of any loving offices of that sort from us. “He is our Lord; our goodness reacheth not to him.” If our love is his love, it must be proved to be so by its going forth in active service, not to him whom we cannot see, but to those whom we do see; God’s creatures, to whom his own love goes forth; the love manifested in creation’s bounties, the love manifested in redemption’s grace,—in his “sending his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”

And here, in point of fact, is the real practical test. Love, when its exclusive object is unseen, is sometimes apt to become ideal, shadowy, and merely sentimental. Even when God himself is, or is imagined to be, its object, it has not unfrequently taken that form and aspect. Meditative musing on the nature of God, the rapt gaze of solitary contemplation, the fixed eye of secluded devotion filling itself with great thoughts of the divine majesty, excellency, and beauty, has had the effect of begetting in the soul a certain mingled emotion of solemn awe and melting tenderness, which is apt to pass for divine love. It is akin to the feeling which the hero or the victim of an affecting tale may call forth; though deeper far and more intense. In real life, in church history, this kinship has been but too terribly exemplified. Love to God has been spiritualised and sublimated, as it were, into a passion; such a passion as may, and must, end in one of two ways; either in a sort of mystical and rapturous absorption of the human in the divine, or in a still more dangerous substitution of the human for the divine.

But, short of that extreme, there are tendencies against which sensitive natures, of an emotional and impulsive character, must be on their guard. There is the tendency to put imagination in the room of reality. For instance, it is far easier to smile or weep over a narrative that must consist of the sayings and doings of unseen, because imaginary, actors and sufferers, than to go out among the real parties in life’s drama, and meet in close contact their actual cases. Hence the meaning, in another view of it, of this solemn intimation, brought in at this stage, and in this connection: “No man hath seen God at any time.” There is, there can be, no safe way of proving that we are born of God and know God, except our loving what is seen. No love to the unseen can suffice; nay, love to the unseen alone may almost be made too much of; it may become deceptive and delusive, or unwholesome and unsafe. Our love, if it is to be God’s very love in us, must be love like his, to what is seen by both alike; to real, actual, living men, seen by us as by him. In that channel, our love to the unseen may always safely run. For—

II. In this human love, in our thus loving one another, the divine love has its consummation or perfection. “If we love one another, God dwelleth in us, and his love is perfected in us.”

It is a very solemn position which we are thus called to occupy. In us God’s love is to be perfected. We are to be the means of its being perfected; the instruments and agents in effecting that result. Not only so. In us it takes end; in us it is finished. Nothing beyond us remains; no chance, no opportunity, of any manifestation of God’s love, that can be at all available for the world lying in wickedness. That love has reached us, and it should, through us, reach the whole world. If not, it cannot otherwise avail. “His love is perfected in us.”

There is indeed another sense in which these words may be understood. They may mean that God’s love, the love which is of God, the love which is his very nature, reproduces itself in us perfectly, only when, with his own very love, we love one another. That is true. But the inspired meaning here is, I think, somewhat deeper. It seems to indicate that our love to one another, if it is indeed of the same sort with his love to us, the love manifested in his sending his Son to save us, is really on his part the last act, the crowning or final exercise, of his love. It is as if he told us that his love was exhausted in begetting or reproducing itself in us. And it may well be so. No higher instance of love is possible than his sending his Son; no stronger sort of love can be imagined. And if that very love passes from him to us; having the same objects and cherishing towards them the same affection; if we love one another as God loves us; is not his love perfected in us? What more can be done to let it have “its perfect work”?

Ah, then, what responsibility is ours! What an office or duty is laid upon us! To perfect, to complete, the manifestation of God’s love for the saving of the world! Through us, his love, the very love manifested in his sending his Son to be the propitiation for our sins, is to pass on to our fellow-men. We are, as it were, in his stead. Nay, he is himself in us. He who is love dwelleth in us; he who dwelleth in us is love. It is not so much we who love, as God who loveth in us. It is his own very love that has now in us its full expression, if we love as he is love. It is ours to see to it that it is and shall be so.

The subject is not ended; but I pause, and offer some practical inferences that may well be pondered.

1. Very plainly the love to one another here enjoined is of such a sort that none but a child of God can be capable of it, or can feel it. None other, in fact, can comprehend what it is. We must first be ourselves the receivers of it, before we can be the dispensers or transmitters of it; before it can have its perfect work in us towards others. We must be taught by the Spirit to know what we are, as seen by God, when we are the objects of his love; what we are, in his sight, when he loves us with a saving love. We must be made by the Spirit experimentally to feel what manner of love it is that, instead of being repelled, is attracted, by our unloveliness; that instead of smiting us, lays the stroke on his own beloved Son; that now, in him, lavishes on us all saving benefits and blessings. This then clearly is our first concern; to see to it that this love of God is really ours; embraced by us; apprehended and appropriated by us; enjoyed by us richly.

2. This love which is of God, when perfected in us, must contemplate its objects in the same light in which they are seen by God. It is comparatively easy to love the lovable, to love them that love us. If we look only at men’s amiable qualities, if we surround ourselves with a circle of friends, all decent, worthy, and upright; if, shutting our eyes to what they are before him who searches the heart, and judging according to the outward appearance, we perceive only what is fair and charming in their winning ways; if, in a word, keeping out of view their spiritual state and character, we dwell exclusively on their natural gifts and graces;—if it is thus that we love them, our love is not God’s love perfected in us. For to be God’s love perfected in us, our love must see its objects as God’s love sees its objects. What we see in them of guilt and sin, of enmity against God and insubordination to his law, must be offensive to us as it is to him. Men estranged from God, whatever may be their other excellencies, must be to us what they are to God. Then, and only then, can we test the identity of our love with God’s love. Then, and only then, can we have some idea of what it is to love those whom God loves, with his own very love; his love, not of indifference to evil or complacency in evil, but of deep compassion to the evil-doer and earnest longing that he may be saved.

Hence the Lord says, “Love your enemies, do good to them that hate you, pray for them that despitefully use you and persecute you.” In that way, and only in that way, can we prove ourselves, by our family likeness, to be the children of our heavenly Father. So are we perfect, in this way of loving; according to the command: “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.”

For it is not absolute or general perfection that is here meant; perfection in the wide and universal sense of that term. The command, so understood, would be irrelevant as well as impracticable. It is perfection or completeness, thorough simplicity and uprightness, as regards the particular grace referred to; according to a use of the word very common in the Old Testament Scriptures. The perfection indicated is the perfection of honesty or righteousness in loving our “seen,” as God loves his “seen;” loving our enemies with the very love with which our Heavenly Father loved us when we were his.