"...but God,
being rich in mercy, for HIS GREAT LOVE wherewith he
loved us, even when we were dead through our trespasses,
made us alive together with Christ (by grace have ye been
saved)" (Eph. 2:4-5).
"And as Moses
lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the
Son of man be lifted up; that whosoever believeth may in
him have eternal life. FOR 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 3:14-16).
There is a great weight
made to rest upon that little word "for" -
"FOR God so loved the world." We say
that John 3:16 is the heart of the gospel: but it is much
more than that, it is the heart of the universe. There is
back of all things in this created universe a heart; not
just a mind or a will, a design, a reason, a power, a
fiat, but a heart. We are familiar with the attempts to
prove there is a design in creation, that there is a mind
behind the universe, and that a will brought it into
being. That is all quite good and right; but we are not
so often asked to consider that behind it all there is a
heart - and more heart than anything else. The reason,
the will, the design, come from the heart. Everything
takes its rise in the heart of God. We have said much
about the thoughts of God, the counsels of God. The
nearer we get to the very centre of things, the more we
shall become affected by this fact, that right there in
the centre is a heart. It is a heart that we shall come
to eventually; not an explanation to satisfy our reason,
not a demonstration of power, but just a heart - but a
mighty heart: and when we use that word rightly, we
simply mean love. We speak of people being heartless.
That means that they are without all that love means.
Love is not the governing thing in their thoughts,
actions, and motives; they are strangers to love. Heart
then for us means love, and when we say that back of all
things and at the centre of all things there is a heart,
we mean there is love.
All the dealings and
ways of God with His own people will have a twofold
result - but mark well that this is with His Own, who
have come into some very real and vital relationship with
Himself in an inward way.
THE
TWOFOLD EFFECT OF GOD'S DEALINGS
(a) A
DEEPENING EXERCISE TO KNOW HIM
Firstly, a deepening
exercise to understand Him, to know Him. Think about
that. Is it not true that God's dealings with us and
God's ways with us have the effect of causing us to reach
out longingly for a knowledge, some better understanding,
of Himself; when things have got beyond us, nay, the Lord
has got beyond us. For all that we know, for all that we
may have learned, He has got beyond us now. He is too
deep, too hidden for us now; He is defeating all our
efforts and all our ability to understand Him. But we are
not just prepared to leave it there and throw up our
hands and say right away, "Well, I do not understand
the Lord, I do not know what He is after, what He means;
I give it up." Those in whom the Spirit of God is at
work find that, although they may be in such a position
as to be completely helpless and hopeless in the matter
of knowing and understanding the Lord, at this juncture
they find they HAVE to know, they MUST
know, they cannot just leave it there and give up.
Everything depends now upon knowing the Lord anew. And it
is a very big everything - far more than our life here on
this earth as mere human beings. If that were all, we
should cut it short and seek the way out through the
forbidden door. But we know that something very much more
is at stake than just the finishing of the tenure of our
days on this earth. Everything that matters over and
above this earthly life, all that we have said and
professed and claimed and hoped for, is bound up with
this crisis. There has to be a discovering of the Lord in
some new way. That is the first effect of the Lord's
dealings and ways with His Own.
(b) THE
RESULTANT KNOWLEDGE OF HIS HEART
The second thing, as
issuing from that, is the resultant knowledge - not in
the first place of His mind, not an explanation to our
reason, a solving of our problems, a satisfying of our
enquiries, but the knowledge of His heart. Any of you who
have known anything of a life with God can test it by
your experience. You have these deep crises, you come to
an impasse by reason of the ways and dealings of the Lord
with you, and the one thing, the only thing, to save you
is a new knowledge of the Lord. I ask you, has He EXPLAINED
Himself to you in the first place? Has He ever come
to you and said, "Now this is exactly why I have
taken you, and am taking you, this way" - and so
solved your problems and satisfied your mind? Has He done
that? Not in the first place. No, the first effect of
this deep exercise of your heart is the knowledge of His
heart; that is, arrival in a new way at the fact and the
reality of the love of God. We shall come to the wisdom
of God through the love of God. We shall come to the
understanding of God only along the path of the love of
God. Everything is revolving upon this pivot of the
universe - the heart of God.
Is that not proved in
many ways, and not least by spiritual conflict? Upon what
does spiritual conflict turn and hinge? Well, when we get
into the vortex of a great spiritual warfare, where the
pressure is almost unendurable, where everything is going
against us, when the heavens are as brass over us and our
prayers seem to get nowhere, when the Word of God seems a
sealed book, when adversity and disappointment follow on
in quick succession, what is the upshot? The upshot is
the love of God every time. When the evil forces create
conditions like that, and when the Lord is giving them so
much liberty for the time being, those forces are always
near to whisper about His love, to turn for us His love
into hate. "This is not His love, this is the
opposite of love!" Is that not true? You have only
to get right down, really down, to have that issue of the
love of God presented to you. The heart of the universe
is this matter of God's love.
THE
LOVE OF GOD THE KEY TO THE SCRIPTURES
Having said that, are
we not able with this key to unlock the whole of the
Scriptures? Is not this the key to the Bible? - for the
Bible is one continuous and growing revelation of this
central and basic fact, that love is the motive of all
things. What was the motive back of the creation, and of
man as the very centre of the creation? It was love. All
the rest of the Bible is an unfolding of God's love for
man. Man was made for the heart of God. It is a mystery.
The mystery deepens and grows as we go on; but there is
always a mystery about love, even amongst humans. Love is
a strange thing. Very often you cannot for the life of
you explain why some people love certain other people -
why it was that So-and-so fell in love with So-and-so; it
defeats every attempt to explain. Well, if that is so in
the human realm, the Divine is infinite in its range
above the human. To explain in terms of love why God,
with all His perfect knowledge, knowing the end from the
beginning, set His hand to make man, is not the easiest
thing. Indeed, I think we are at the depth of mystery.
You follow that through the Bible. As we proceed, we are
coming on to that again and again.
GOD
AND ABRAHAM - A HEART RELATIONSHIP
You can only explain
and understand the drama of Eden by recognizing that it
was a love matter between God and man, and that the
enemy's activity from then on to the end was, and ever
is, to cheat God of that on which His HEART is
set, to take from God the object of His love. From that
tragedy of the garden, you find God moving again in
sovereign love, choosing that which is called "the
seed." You see Him fastening mysteriously,
inexplicably, upon certain individuals. Let Abraham stand
out as a very strong and full example. God fastened upon
Abraham, and brought him into a relationship with Himself
which was a relationship of love. Mark the
progressiveness of God's dealings with Abraham as a
representative one in bringing that man right into His
very heart. Step by step, stage by stage, Abraham was
being brought more to the inward side of the heart of
God. I am not going now to trace those steps: they are
familiar to you. In His dissatisfaction and
disappointment with man, and yet in His hunger to have
man all for Himself (which was the first motivating
activity of God) God chose this man Abraham, brought him
in love to that relationship with Himself, one with His
heart in His disappointment over man and in His desire to
have man according to His own mind; right through those
successive stages to the final step - "Take now thy
son, thine only son, whom thou lovest... and offer
him" (Gen. 22:2). It was the last step of a
spiritual journey where finally, in one magnificent,
triumphant step of faith, Abraham went right into the
heart of God. "For God so loved... that he gave
HIS only begotten Son." He became one with
God's heart in its passion to have man. That is the
essence of John 3:15-16. So the end of that journey sees
Abraham as the friend of God, "Abraham my
friend" (Isa. 41:8). You can have all other
kinds of relationship without having that. You can be
parents and children; you can be husband and wife; yes,
you can be on the basis of any known relationship, and
yet not just come to that - "my friend." If a
man's son is his friend, or if a son's father is his
friend, you have something extra, the climax and the
crown of the relationship. And so with every other
relationship. Said the Lord Jesus to His disciples, "No
longer do I call you servants... but I have called you
friends" (John 15:15). Abraham, the
friend of God! Is it not perfectly clear that, in the
choosing of this seed, what God was after was a heart
relationship? It was a matter of God's heart. The climax
of all was not merely some world, some creation, some
race of very wonderful people objective to God upon whom
He had conferred many wonderful blessings and benefits,
that the universe could look on and say, "Well, God
thinks a lot of those people, He has done a lot for
them." That is all true, but something far more than
that is involved. The end which God has in view is a race
of friends, the expression of mutual love; God's love
begetting love, destroying that evil work when God lost
what He was after in the first place - a potential
friend. You cannot understand that; He is speaking in
human language, to express a Divine mystery; but the
Bible is full of it.
GOD
AND ISRAEL - LOVE THE ONLY EXPLANATION
From the
individual seed you come to the nation. Again the mystery
deepens. Why choose that nation, Israel, the seed of
Jacob? But here is the nation chosen. It would take us a
long time, but it would be well worth doing, to trace the
love of God in the history of that nation. We find
ourselves very near the heart of God when we touch
Israel. You think of all the words the Lord used, the
titles He employed, concerning that people. He called
Israel His child. "When Israel was a child then
I loved him" (Hosea 11:1). He called Israel His
son. "I... called my son out of Egypt"
(Hosea 11:1). He spoke of Israel as betrothed unto
Himself, His wife (Hosea 2:19,20 etc.); His daughter - "virgin
daughter of Zion" (Lam. 2:13 etc.) He spoke of
Himself as Israel's mother - "Can a woman forget
her... child... yea, these may forget, yet will not I
forget thee" (Isa. 49:15). Have you not read
the prophecies of Hosea? There, within a very small
compass, you have this whole story of God's love for
Israel in such terms of strength and passion and longing
and yearning and heart-brokenness as cannot be found
anywhere else.
"When
Israel was a child, then I loved him... I drew (Ephraim)
with cords of a man, with bands of love; and I was to
them as they that lift up the yoke on their jaws; and I
laid food before them. They shall not return into the
land of Egypt; but the Assyrian shall be their king,
because they refused to return to me. And the sword shall
fall upon their cities, and shall consume their bars, and
devour them, because of their own counsels. And my people
are bent on backsliding from me: though they call them to
him that is on high, none at all will exalt him. How
shall I give thee up, Ephraim? how shall I cast thee off,
Israel? how shall I make thee as Admah? how shall I set
thee as Zeboim? my heart is turned within me, my
compassions are kindled together" (Hosea
11:1,4-8).
That is
God speaking; and note the setting of that eleventh
chapter of the prophecies of Hosea. It is the time when
Israel's sin had filled the cup to overflowing, the time
when they had reached the climax of iniquity and
idolatry, practicing such wickedness as I would not dare
to mention here. It would be a scandal in the presence of
decent-minded people to say what was going on in the
streets of Jerusalem in the name of religion. It is at
such a time, when His wrath might most justly have been
poured out upon them, that God says about those people -
"How shall I give thee up?" You know the story
of Hosea's life - how he was commanded by God to go and
love and marry a harlot, all to set forth in the life of
the prophet the great truth that however deeply buried in
iniquity these people were, God loved them. Oh, the
mystery of God's love! Will you tell me it is not true
that the universe has at its very center a heart that
loves? Well, think again and go back to your Old
Testament.
GOD'S
LOVE EMBODIED IN HIS SON
We pass to the New
Testament, and what do we find? We find there that the
heart of the universe is now embodied and revealed in One
Who is God Himself incarnate. This One gathers up into
Himself - and far transcends - all the past. If
Israel has so direly sinned and so stricken the heart of
God, that heart has gone beyond Israel now. Here, in the
person of His Son, God is showing it is not only Israel
that is in His heart, but the whole world. "God
so loved the world". "...the Gentiles are
fellow-heirs" (Eph. 3:6). And then you
read the first chapters of Romans, and see the state of
the world. Horrible things are said about the state of
man in those chapters; and yet how does that letter break
out? It breaks out in a matchless revelation of the grace
of God, which is only another word for love. In
this One - His Son - the love of God, far transcending
all the wonderful revelation of it in the past, is now
embodied and manifested.
You can see the link of
the Lord Jesus with all the Scriptures of the past; and
let this be the key to them. It is not just that He was
foretold - though that is true: He was the theme of the
Old Testament writers and they were all pointing toward
Him. But it is something more than that. What have they
all been dealing with, what has been the substance, the
essence, of all the Old Testament writings? Is it not
God's love for man? The Lord Jesus embodies in Himself
all the Old Testament on that point; He includes
everything.
Oh, but
you say, there is another side to the Old Testament.
There is the awful story of God's wrath. Ah yes, but what
is God's wrath? Rightly understood, wrath, anger, only
exists because of love. There is no such thing as anger
or wrath if there is no such thing as love. In the fallen
creation, if we are angry, it is so often because of some
self-love. There is very rarely that crystal-pure essence
of wrath which is utterly selfless. We are angry because
in some way we are cheated or defeated or robbed;
something is happening to us, and we are angry. There is
very little of that pure wrath of God in this creation,
that which is apart from any selfish consideration
whatever, when we are angry in a disinterested, detached
way, angry with pure anger. If you can get that, then it
is that because you love so strongly, therefore you hate
so strongly. Wrath is only the other side of love. If God
is angry, it is His love in reverse expression. That
comes out at the end of the Bible. It is seen to be anger
because of all that Divine love means - the very NATURE
of God.
But to
return to our point. The issue of the Old Testament is -
"God so loved the world that he gave his...
Son." The Scriptures have all been pointing to that,
but it is love that is behind all. The Lord Jesus is the
succession of all that has gone before showing the love
of God.
THE
LOVE RELATIONSHIP OF THE SON TO HIS FATHER
You see
Him in His relationship to God His Father. Oh, if the
Lord Jesus does reveal God, how does He reveal Him? Well,
I do not see any fuller way in which He reveals Him than
in terms of love, through His devotion to the One Whom He
always calls "My Father." The Father says,
once, twice "This is (Thou art) my beloved
Son" (Matt.3:17; 17:5; Mark 1:11). He could have
said, "Thou art my loved Son," but He did not.
He said, "Thou art my beloved Son." It is not
making something out of nothing. Look at some words with
that little prefix. "Betrothed" - that is your
relationship of a troth to a person. "Besiege"
- the direct, immediate relationship of an investing army
to those invested. "Beseech" - there is
something more in beseeching than just asking. When you
beseech, you give yourself, you pour yourself out, you
let yourself go, you hold nothing back. And so,
"Beloved." The point is that God has come into
an immediate heart-relationship with this One, He has
taken Him into His heart, He has related to Him in terms
of love. His relationship with this One is not just that
He loves Him, He has given Himself to Him. He is "BE-loved"!
See the
relationship of the Lord Jesus to God's will. Oh, yes, it
was a blood conflict, even unto death, sweating as it
were great drops of blood, but His love for the Father
bore Him through. "The cup which the FATHER hath
given me, shall I not drink it?" (John 18:11).
"FATHER... not my will, but thine, be done" (Luke
22:42). This love relationship to His Father went down so
deep, was so tremendous. Words with us have become so
common as to be robbed of a great deal of their strength.
I was going to say, it was terrific, that love for the
Father, when you see what the Son went through. Do you
notice that when He had fought through the battle, that
battle of His relationship with the Father in terms of
love, from that moment He was so calm and steady and
tranquil that everything was going down before Him? The
battle is over, the situation is established. They come
to take Him, with torches gleaming in the night; with
sound of hurrying feet, of swords being drawn from their
scabbards; a traitor betraying a leader, a traitor who
has said, "I know where He goes, I know because I
have been with Him, I will take you to Him; and in case
you might mistake one of His disciples for Him, I will
give you a sign as to which is He, I will kiss Him."
Thus they came, with all the hatred that lay behind on
the part of the High Priest and the rulers; and He is as
steady as a rock, they fall back from before Him.
"Whom seek ye?" "Jesus of Nazareth."
"I am" - and "they went backward, and fell
to the ground." Again He says, "Whom seek
ye?" "Jesus of Nazareth." "I told you
that I am he"; "if you seek Me, here I am; take
Me, let these others go free." See how tranquil,
steady, rock-like, He was right to the last, before the
rulers, the High Priest, before Pilate. Oh, there is
something about triumphant love that settles a great deal
of conflict and hate and fever and anxiety, and makes you
very steady. That was the Lord Jesus.
THE
SON'S LOVE RELATIONSHIP TO HIS OWN
See His
relationship to His Own. It is summed up in one
word - "having loved his own that were in the
world, he loved them unto the end" (John
13:1). Perhaps He loved Judas. You notice that when Judas
led that band to Him, He did not look at him and say,
"Traitor! You scoundrel! You wicked man!" He
said, "Friend"! I think that was enough to send
Judas to suicide. "He called me friend, and yet He
knew what I was doing!" He loved His Own to the end.
And, knowing ourselves, shall we not agree that there is
a mystery about this love? Oh, yes!
I am going
to stop there, because at that point you have to go right
on from the persons here in the days of His flesh,
through the rest of the New Testament, and all the
teaching that was given to the Church, and so at length
to the Revelation, and you find it is all turning round
this one point - the love of God. I think I have said
enough to give some ground, at least, for believing it is
true. Oh, there may have been times in your experience,
and there may yet be - if you have not yet come there, do
not worry, go on with the Lord - when you wonder whether
you will ever again speak about the love of God.
Everything seems to argue to the contrary, and Satan has
struck such a blow as to have made your faith rock. What
the Lord is, I think, trying to say to us is this, that
that may very well be just the way to a new discovery
that it is all in love, and just the opposite to what the
devil is trying to say. "Whom the Lord loveth he
chasteneth" (Heb. 12:6).
Well, to
sum all that up again; at the centre of this universe is
a heart. That is God's side. Our side has yet to be
contemplated. But oh, it is wonderful, inexplicable love,
and I, for my part, am one of those who believe that if
only we could present the love of God aright, we should
never have to speak of the wrath of God in order to
persuade men - and even if we did, we should have to show
that His wrath is love in reverse.