October 13

God is love. - 1 John 4:8.

WHEN John says, “God is love,” he means to intimate not only that love is God’s attribute, but that it is God’s character. Indeed, we cannot apply the word character to God precisely as we do to men. Among men, character is always the consequence of habit, as habit is frequently the result of previous disposition; and always the result of repeated action. But when we say that love is God’s character, we mean that he is peculiarly distinguished by it, and that all his perfections are, so to speak, so many parts and modifications of love. His wisdom is his love devising and arranging; his power is his love executing; his truth is his love fulfilling; his holiness is his love forbidding whatever would be injurious to us; his anger is his love chastening us for our faults and reducing us to reformation and repentance; and even his threatenings are the expressions of his love to us, as they are our guard and our warning, and are designed to prevent the very evils they denounce. God has written two huge volumes upon this subject: it would take up years and ages to read them through properly; all we can do, therefore, is to quote a chapter or a verse or two from each of them.

The first of these volumes is Creation. Creation is immense; but we fix upon our own world. “The sea is his, and he made it; and his hands formed the dry land.” “The earth is the Lord’s, and the fulness thereof,” and it is filled with his riches. “The day is his, and the night also is his;” he “makes the outgoings of the morning and the evening to rejoice.” He has “appointed the moon for seasons, and the sun knoweth his going down.” He has made “summer and winter.” And all these seasons succeed each other in a regular order, and are prepared gradually to melt into each other without any disruption, and all of them bringing forward their appropriate advantages and pleasures, so that “the year is crowned with his goodness.” Then, as Cowper says, look at “the sweet interchange of hill and vale, and wood and lawn, and land and water.”

Then we may observe how obvious it is that God intended not only to provide for our wants, but our gratifications; not only for our support, but our delight. Eating and drinking are essential to our support; but our God might have rendered our food and beverage as nauseous as medicines. He has rendered them agreeable, so that in partaking of them we never think of necessity, but only of gratification. Why the perfume and the breath of the rose and the lily? “Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these:” it can only be designed for indulgence. The apple-tree yields a fruit important to man, but God could have caused it to yield this fruit without the previous process of blossoming: this was intended to charm us before he enriched us.

But we must just glance at the other volume,-the volume of Revelation, which is much larger and nobler than the first. God has “magnified his word above all his name!” “Behold,” says God, “I create new heavens and a- new earth, and the former shall not be remembered, nor come into mind.”

“God, in the person of his Son,

Hath all his mightiest works outdone,”

sings our good Dr. Watts; and the apostle says that “God hath shined into our hearts, to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God, in the face of Jesus Christ.” And our Saviour himself said, “No man hath seen God at any time: the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him.” But general reflections impress little compared with facts and incidents. The one is like surveying a prospect from a high hill; the other is like descending into the vale and examining all the contents of the particular scenes and objects.

The Apostle John, having asserted “that God is love,” immediately mentions an instance,-a peculiar instance, from which the very angels fetch their fairest and fullest proof of the doctrine; for, said he, “Herein is love, not that we loved God, but that he loved us, and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins.”