HATE TURNED TO
LOVE
"Lo, this is our God; we have waited for Him, and He will save us:
this is Jehovah; we have waited for Him, we will be glad and rejoice in His
salvation." Isa. 25:9
Thus God is known to man, and that after the method of
the original Divine intention through a Man Who is His express Image.
Redeemed man acts upon the same principle as fallen man in his search after
God, with a distinction and a difference both in method and in result. Man's
darkened understanding, still conscious of his need of a god, projected into
immensity himself, with the result that his conception of God was that of a
monster, because not only were the essentials of his nature, intelligence,
emotion, and will, magnified in the process, but their degradation. Restored
to God, man still projects Man into infinity, but not himself. It is now by the
magnifying of the Man Christ Jesus, Who by the Spirit indwells the believer,
that God is found. The intelligence of Jesus, characterized by
clearness, freedom from questioning, and unanswerable statement of truth,
surprises and startles the soul anew in every fresh understanding of it through
the Spirit's interpretation. And as these lines are projected from the wisdom
of Christ into infinity, the mind catches some conception of what the wisdom of
the infinite God is in its perfectly clear understanding of all things, so that
"in Him is no darkness at all."
(1 John 1:5) His freedom from perplexity
carried out into the immeasurable, aids man in his apprehension of that great
reason for the quiet calm of Deity, in the midst of the things which, coming of
their imperfect understanding, so trouble and vex the heart of the finite.
Every century of consideration of the Word of Jesus proving as it has, that His
teaching was not a deduction from appearances, but the uttering forth of eternal
principles in the speech of man, has given to men a new conception of the
authority of God, as based upon the necessity of the things that are.
Perhaps the utmost consciousness of
God, however, has come by the projection into immensity of what may still be
spoken of as the EMOTIONAL FACT in the Person of Jesus. In Him love proceeded
out of the necessity of its own might, and expressed itself in
self-forgetfulness to the point of absolute sacrifice, and that without regard
to any worth in the object upon which it was set. In Him moreover, love was
patient, optimistic, and powerful. No lack of response was sufficient to quench
its zeal, no degradation sufficient to extinguish its hopefulness, no
opposition equal to overcome its might. It was this revelation of His love that
made it possible for there ever to have been written the statement, so simple
and inspiring, so sweet in its constraint, so manifold in its beauty, that
heaven's music will be needed to express its harmonies, while earth's discords are
by it being changed towards the heavenly symphony, "God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that
whosoever believeth on Him should not perish, but have eternal life."
(John 3:16) It was surely with his
eye resting upon the Man of Nazareth, and his heart speaking of his
consciousness of the marvel of the love of the Perfect One, that Paul wrote his
classic passage descriptive of love. (1
Cor. 13)
And yet again, the action of the
will of Jesus as responsive forever to the supreme will of His Father, and
moving always under the impulse of love, has revealed forevermore the truth of
unutterable value, that the will of God operates not arbitrarily, but under
constraint, the constraint of the essential fact of His own nature, that of an
infinite and immeasurable love.
Thus Jesus the perfect Man,
standing before the soul in all His perfection, is the gateway through which
the mind passes out to a conception of God which arrests, subdues, and commands
the loyalty of the life. It is in His presence that man exclaims "Lo, this is our God; we have waited
for Him, and He will save us: this is Jehovah; we have waited for Him, we will
be glad and rejoice in His salvation." (Isa. 25:9)
To say this is to declare also the
difference in result. Man of old, projecting himself until he found an
enormity, learned only to hate and to fear his conception of God. Today, man,
projecting the perfect One finds infinite satisfaction in the revealed Father,
and his heart goes out in adoring love, and his life is spent in glad service.
Thus in Christ, man is restored to the knowledge of God by the enlightening of
his intelligence, and the presentation thereto of all the gracious facts, in
such way, and in such measure as he is able to bear, and capable of receiving.
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