68. How the Cross Uncovers God's Love

How the Cross Uncovers God’s Love But if the cross perfectly uncovers the hate of man for God as it shows up his heart of sin, it also uncovers as perfectly the love of God for man, as it flows forth from His life of holiness. God so loved that He gave His only begotten Son—freely, gladly, joyously gave Him into all these foreknown experiences of infinite suffering; the Son so sharing the Father’s love for man that with joy He eagerly endured the cross, that He might thereby uncover the infinite lengths to which God’s love will go on behalf of those He loves. And so—amazing beyond words!—the cross by which man told out how much he loves sin and hates God, is made to be the very means by which God tells out how much He hates sin and loves man! This is love! Nothing less is. The only love that is native to man has to be drawn out by the attractions of its object. But God loves man though there is nothing in him to attract and everything to repel; when there is no reason why He should want man’s fellowship, and every reason why He should want him banished forever from His presence. God alone has the kind of love which goes out toward the utterly unlovely and unloveable, for it proceeds by a mighty power and from a fathomless well resident in Himself. Only such love can be commended, so “God commends his love in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). None but God can love like that! The coming in of sin, therefore, instead of thwarting God’s love, furnished the perfect occasion for revealing, to its complete uncovering, that sacrificial self-giving, to those wholly unworthy of it, which has been from all eternity the potential attitude of His holy life toward all moral beings. Just as poverty furnishes opportunity for pity, misfortune for kindness, and suffering for compassion, so does man’s sin furnish God the supreme opportunity for the utmost expression of His holy love. No mother can show her heart to the full except in the presence of such need in her children as calls forth her sacrificial suffering to the full. And so God is able to reveal the infinite depths of His love, when man’s descent into the bottomless abyss of sin opens the way for His descent into that abyss of sacrificial suffering which He endured in Christ on the cross, that He might bring man up and out. Nothing but such love could ever have sent God into conditions so revolting to infinite purity. The suffering of the cross was not primarily physical, nor mental, for it was the infinite anguish which wrenched the love of God to its very center. If a sword pierced the heart of Christ’s mother, nothing less could come to the heart of His Father. The whole Trinity made a sacrifice together; they did not merely accept it. The cross therefore becomes the eternal presence-chamber of infinite love and perfect holiness, and the central truth in the biography of God. It is God speaking in a language men can never fail to understand. When He says in words that He is love, men can fail to grasp it. But when He says it in that supreme and all-inclusive act of the cross, it becomes too unmistakably plain to miss it. In the cross His love becomes so utterly simple that a child can receive it, and yet it remains so immeasureably profound that neither angels nor men can ever scale its height, sound its depth, nor measure its length and breadth. The cross is the climax of all moral truth, the culmination of all philosophy, the consummation of all wisdom.