- CHAPTER 41: Love of the Unseen Is Possible

“Jesus Christ: when, having not seen, ye love” (1 Peter 1:7-8).
If Peter had said “whom having not known ye love” he would have spoken an impossibility, but the inspired pen of the apostle wrote accurately. There are laws of the mind which can never be violated; it is a tribute to the perfection of the Scriptures that they never create a situation contrary to those laws. It is not psychologically possible to love anyone we have not known in some measure of experience. “Lord, Thou alone seest and knowest the nature of a loving heart,” wrote Henry Suso, “and Thou knowest that no one can love what he can in no wise understand.”
That it is altogether possible to love persons we have not seen is proved in everyday experience. A blind mother, for instance, will cuddle her baby to her heart with all the shining-eyed delight of a normal, seeing woman. Yet she has not seen her baby. How can this be? The answer is that though she has not seen him she has experienced him in a dozen sweet and intimate ways. She has felt his soft, smooth skin, heard his whimpers and gurgles, smelled the gentle baby fragrances so dear to the heart of all mothers, felt the warmth of his little body against hers. She has known him, and because she has known him she can say, “Whom having not seen I love.”
But it is wholly impossible to love the unknown. There must be some degree of experience before there can be any degree of love. Perhaps this accounts for the coldness toward God and Christ evidenced by the average Christian. How can we love a Being whom we have not heard nor felt nor experienced? We may work up some kind of reverence for the noble ideals the thought of God brings to our minds; we may feel a certain awe when we think of the high and holy One that inhabiteth eternity; but what we feel is hardly love. It is rather an appreciation of the sublime, a response of the heart to the mysterious and the grand. It is good and desirable, but it is not love.
The command to love God with our whole being has seemed to many persons to be impossible of fulfillment. And it may be properly argued that we can not love by fiat. Love is too gentle, too frail a creature to spring up at the command of another. It would be like commanding the barren tree to bring forth fruit or the winter forest to be green. What then can it mean?
The answer is found in the nature of man and of God. God being who He is must have obedience from His creatures. Man being who he is must render that obedience. And he owes God complete obedience whether or not he feels for Him the faintest trace of love in his heart. It is a question of the sovereign right of God to require His creatures to obey Him. Man’s first and basic sin was disobedience. When he disobeyed God he violated the claims of divine love with the result that love for God died within him. Now, what can he do to restore that love to his heart again? The answer to that question is given in one word: Repent.
The heart that mourns its coldness toward God needs only to repent its sins, and a new, warm and satisfying love will flood into it. For the act of repentance will bring a corresponding act of God in self-revelation and intimate communion. Once the seeking heart finds God in personal experience there will be no further problem about loving Him. To know Him is to love Him and to know Him better is to love Him more.
Those who have dealt with the ugly problem of sin in their own hearts will find no difficulty with the doctrine of God and His present invisibility. They do not see Him, it is true, but they experience Him in a thousand inward encounters. They can say with true conviction, “Jesus Christ is He whom having not seen I love.”