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Fountain of Everlasting Love

Posted by on Apr 19, 2007 in Studies | 0 comments
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Finally, this prophetic utterance exhibits the intrinsic nobility of redemptive religion. It and it alone
represents Jehovah’s eternal love as the source from which it primordially springs, and from which
it perennially renews itself.

This divine declaration, “I have loved thee with an everlasting love” (31:
3), is by no means from Jeremiah’s standpoint the commonplace which our over-familiarity with
that attribute, not seldom at the expense of due regard for other attributes in the nature of God, has
made it. The prophet means to describe by this term something quite extraordinary, something wellnigh
inconceivable, a supreme wonder in that land of wonders which religion can never cease to be.

Love is to him the highest form of the spiritual embrace of person by person. To ascribe it to God in
connection with a creature is at the farthest remove from being a figure of speech.

It means that in
the most literal sense He concentrates all the light and warmth of His affection, all the prodigious
wealth of its resources, his endless capacity of delight, upon the heart-to-heart union between the
pious and Himself.

And what God for His part brings into this union has a generosity, a sublime
abandon, an absoluteness, that, measured by human analogies, we can only designate as the highest
and purest type of devotion.

It is named love for this very reason, that God puts into it His heart
and soul and mind and strength, and gathers all His concerns with His people into the focus of
this one desire. It is when speaking of this that Scripture employs its boldest anthropomorphisms.
Here nothing but the absolute and unqualified are in place. He who would give God less than this
total by a mere fraction would give Him nothing at all. In saying this we do not, of course, refer to
the imperfect performance, but to the principle that regulates the obligation.

The reason lies in the
nature and position of God as the Highest Good, the one supremely desirable reality, besides whom
and apart from whom it were folly to seek aught in heaven or on earth.

Strictly speaking such a state
of mind pertains only to the creature. God is the receiver, not the practicer of religion. And yet,
considering His absolute devotion to His people, we cannot but speak of it in terms of reciprocity.

In point of fact the occurrence of even the shadow of such a surrender to God in us is made possible
only by the marvel of its occurrence in God.

We love God, but can do so only because He loved us
first. Thus the supreme force of religion must issue from the disclosure of God’s sovereign love to
us. No other divine attribute, taken by itself, is deep and wide enough to engender and support that
movement.

The prophet was well aware of this, for he distinguishes love even from lovingkindness,
placing the former back of the latter. Kindness is a noble attribute; only, if we may apply to such
things our frail human language, it is not the first-born among the divine virtues.

“Chesed” is the
loyal, tender attachment practiced in daily intercourse by reason of some original, more ultimate
union preceding it. If the primordial love did not lie back of it, Jehovah’s kindness could never
be an assured possession of Israel.

Were kindness or mercy or longsuffering our reliance, then the
perfection of confidence would have to remain hopelessly beyond our reach.

Kindness carries the
necessity of ever-repeated renewal in itself. It is like a reservoir, full and rich indeed, but not like the
fountain except by grace of the fountain’s supply.

But, since the fathomless tide of the divine love
rises irresistibly underneath it, we know that it can never fail; but will prove at every point more than
equal to our needs.



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