1.
PRECIOUS love! Having its source in eternity, it led Him, the Lord Jesus, into this world of wretchedness and sin, right onward to the cross.
It was there, at the cross, He took the sinner’s place, and endured, in all its terror, the awful consequences of that place, ―even the sinner’s distance and the sinner’s stroke.
It was there, too, He drained to the very dregs the bitter cup; exhausted for His people, the power of death and judgment; bare their sins in His own body on the tree, washing them away in His own blood; and died, the Just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God.
Contemplating all this, how truly may the believer exclaim, “Who LOVED me, and gave himself for me!”
“That hitter cup, He drank it up,
Left but the Love for me.”
2.
The love that led Him to the Cross is a present, as well as a past love; and the knowledge of this sustains His people, however tried, in their journeyings through this poor world.
It was this character of His love that sustained the sorrowing family of Bethany, when they sent to Jesus, saying― “Lord, behold, he whom thou LOVEST is sick.”
“Now Jesus loved Martha, and her sister, and Lazarus. When he heard therefore that he was sick, he abodes two days still in the same place where he was.” How strange the need for such a “therefore” must have appeared, in connection with such a love! But these sisters had yet to learn that delays, with Him, are not denials. “The glory of God” necessitated His delay in responding to their call, and it became a means of exhibiting to them the fact that―
“HIS LOVE is as great as His Power,
And knows neither measure nor end.”
Oh, sweet the rest it gives to know, deep down in the soul, that Jesus loves us; loves us now; loves us every day, every hour, every moment, has His heart set upon us, and loves with an unceasing, and an unchanging love.
“We know it, by a sweet experience, now;
Yet shall explore
Its breadth and length, its depth and height of grace
For evermore.”
3.
“Jesus Christ, the same yesterday, today, and forever.”―Hebrews 13:88Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever. (Hebrews 13:8). “Who shall SEPARATE us from the love of Christ?”―Rom. 3:35.
Having very briefly glanced at some of the past and present aspects of His love, we here come to the fact of its eternal durability.
What a glorious moment will that be, when “tribulation or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword,” and all other wilderness sorrows, shall have forever ceased; and when, too, in its widest and fullest sense, will be learned, that we are more than conquerors through Him that loved us; for the love that sought and found, will know no rest until it has us in its own glorious presence eternally!
What a Saviour! What a salvation!
“Father, I will that they also whom thou hast given me, be with me where I am.”
“I will come again and receive you unto myself, that where I am there ye may be also.”
“And so shall we ever be with the Lord,
“Through God’s eternal day.”
Dear reader, will you be there? N. L. N.