34. God's Government an Embodiment of Love

God’s Government an Embodiment of Love To sum up all these principles: God’s moral government is His holy love in active operation through His holy will, to the end that holiness, and therefore perfect happiness, might be the eternal lot of those He gave to Himself, that He might forever pour out upon them His infinite love. The moral government of the universe is therefore not a set of rules imposed on man by the arbitrary will of God, but a moral necessity for the happiness of man, growing out of the loving and holy nature of God. Between the nature of God and the moral law there is an eternal identity. He did not set up the moral law with no reference to the moral nature and craving for happiness He gave to man, and then arbitrarily force it on a race whose nature and needs it did not fit, with the demand that they fit themselves into it; neither can He repeal or change it to the slightest degree, as though it were something less than perfect, thus permitting change or being capable of improvement; for it is wholly fitted to accomplish His will to happiness for every one who submits to it. In its nature as law, it is such an expression of God’s will, motivated by His love, as can neither admit of change, or of less than absolute conformity to its last jot and tittle, without at once abruptly and completely ending all possibility of reaching the goal of happiness which He purposes for man. On this basis alone, therefore, God must rest all He does, as He prepares to rescue from slavery to their own wills those who are willing to be rescued. And reason requires us to assume that His love will move Him to restore to man at least as much as he lost by sin, provided it can be done in a way that will not affect to the slightest degree the unhindered accomplishment of His purpose of love to all the rest of His universe.

There are myriads of sinless angels around His throne. His love for them must maintain that condition in His moral universe which will keep permanent the well-being and happiness they already have. That there are also sinful beings in the universe, the race-wide experience of man gives sad and painful evidence. And so God’s love must also find a way to make possible again the well-being man has lost through sin. When His love, therefore, acts to maintain the perfect welfare of the sinless, such action must, in the nature of things, take the form of justice. For justice is simply maintaining that condition which God’s love demands should be maintained for the happiness of those who rely on Him for their welfare. And when His love acts also to secure the welfare of sinners which they lost through sin, just as certainly the action must take the form of mercy. For mercy is the doing of that which love, the same love which acts also in justice, demands should be done, to restore their welfare and happiness to those who have gone out of His will, and are in the realm where the goal is perfect ill-being and misery.

Thus the full-acting expression of God’s love, with both sinless and sinful beings in His universe, cannot escape taking the form of both justice and mercy. The operation of both these expressions of love must also be universal. That is, God’s love must take in, in its operation, every moral being in existence. For since God’s moral government is what He wills, being constantly maintained through all the universe, and since that which He wills is the unceasing expression of His holy love toward all in the universe, both sinless and sinful, His love must therefore seek the welfare of each moral being in His universe, without respect to character, and thus it cannot escape being universal in its purpose and outreach.