It is well-nigh impossible for us fallen creatures to believe a mere fragment of what the Bible tells us about God’s love for us. We are so unloving ourselves, and so saturated with unbelief, that we are slow of heart to believe all the revelation as to how God feels towards us. Our Creator has had to devise the most extravagant ways and means to awaken in us a faith in His love and to win us to a perfect confidence in Himself and His most affectionate care for our welfare.  

The full statement of God’s love for us fairly stuns our understanding, and seems too good to be true. We have heard of instances where persons traveling from the city to the lonely mountains, conversed with the old settlers who knew nothing of the great modern inventions. When these untaught backwoodsmen have been told of recent inventions, how you can talk through a wire to people a hundred miles away, or by a phonograph listen to the voice of a man years after he is dead, or by the X-ray see the bones in a man’s body, and other such wonders, the ignorant mountaineers have denied the whole account as a fool’s dream, and as being things beyond all possibility.  

This illustrates that deep-seated incredulity that human nature has concerning the wonders of Divine love, and the supernatural things revealed in Scripture concerning the possibilities of religious experience, and the answers to prayer, for soul, body, and temporal things. Our faith has to take preliminary steps to appropriate the boundless love of God. This is like the working of the mind of a child who by steps apprehends the ocean by first seeing a little pond of water, then a lake, and then is told that the ocean is like that lake, only so large that the sailors cannot see the shore, and it takes days and weeks to cross over it.  

Those of us, who by the new birth have come into the family of faith, have learned something of God’s love for us, which has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit.  

Let us creep up to the shore of that infinite, shining ocean of Almighty and uncreated love, and find a kneeling place on the hard white sands of Scripture statements, and look far away over the shining waters. By counting over the ways in which we are loved we seek to awaken in our own poor hearts a return of love up to our measure, “for the love wherewith God hath loved us.”  

1. God loves us with a creative love. This is a kind of love of which we can have no adequate conception, for it lies outside the functions and capacities of ourselves as little creatures. The creation of something out of nothing never can come within the limits of our power. Creation is the sublime solitary prerogative of Almighty God. We cannot understand the feelings that a Creator must have toward a helpless creature, which by His fiat He has lifted out of nothing, and which He sustains every instant with a continual act of preservation, which must at every moment be equal to the act of creation.  

With what fondness and tender endearments of affection, a Creator, Whose nature is love, must brood over the creature that has been fashioned out of the energy of His own right hand! This is a species of love forever above the range of our experience, and that glows in the happy solitudes of the Creator’s heart. As our Creator, God has feelings for us for which we have no measurements, and no analogies upon which to build a comparison, or to form a conception.  

Men talk about inventing things, but in reality we invent nothing, for our so-called inventions are only discoveries of adaptations, and qualities, and utilities, of material forces which were invented by the Creator, and hid in His works from the beginning. It is impossible for us to form a conception of anything without first having something already created as an analogy, upon which to base our imaginations.  

For instance, no man could ever have formed a conception of a fish, living and propelling itself in the water, without first knowing of such a creature. But after once seeing a fish, we can imagine numberless kinds, and sizes, and colors, and motions, of fishes far different from any that exist. Thus the feeling of love that God must have for us as coming out from His creative goodness is a sort of love different in kind from any feeling that we can have, and to which we have no proper clue for understanding. The nearest approach to it is that indescribable feeling a true mother has for her little infant, but even that is not the same kind of love, for it is a creature feeling for a creature, and the continued existence of the infant is not suspended every instant on the will of the parent.  

2. God loves us with an eternal love. The Holy Ghost spake through Jeremiah, “Thus saith the Lord, I have loved thee with an everlasting love.” Only think of it, before the worlds were made, out from the eternal past, God looked upon us with His foreknowledge, and saw us as we are at this moment, floating on the immensity of His creative power, and fastened His love upon us!  

When Napoleon reviewed his troops from the Pyramids in Egypt, he said to his soldiers, “At the top of those Pyramids, forty centuries are looking down upon you.” Sublime as his expression was in the eyes of men, it is nothing to be compared to the true soldiers of Jesus Christ, who can look up to the giddy heights of an eternal past, and say that there flows down upon us a stream of eternal love. We cannot begin to comprehend it, and it is simply to be believed, that I, a mere atom in the immensity of creation should have in some sort had a place in the mind of God from eternity.  

All the acts of God inside of the Divine nature are of eternal necessity, such as the generation of the Son in the bosom of the Father, and the procession of the Holy Spirit from the depths of Divine love. God cannot be otherwise than He is, and is essentially three Persons in one Being, as the begetting Father, the only begotten Son, and the proceeding Holy Spirit. But outside of the Divine Being, all of God’s actions are perfectly free. His first free act, as Paul tells us, was His purpose of the incarnation of His Son, and the next free act was His love for us, that we might be conformed to the image of His Son, and be blameless before Him in love. From the very beginning, God has been planning and thinking most loving purposes concerning us, and embracing us in the gentle hand of His foreknowledge, and the beautiful creation around us fashioned in the geological ages gone by, was but the building of a cradle for us little infants to rock in, and lining it with a thousand conveniences, so tenderly adapted to our wants.  

Surely if we look back at that mighty current of foreknowledge and fore-love, that streams down upon us from God’s eternal past, our hearts should kindle with a warmer gratitude and affection for Him.  

3. God loves us with all His heart. There is nothing scanty, or limited in His affection for the creatures which He has made to show forth His glory. The commandments that God gives to us spring essentially from His own blessed nature. When He says, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength,” it is simply what He Himself is doing toward us. His love for us amounts to a Divine predilection, and possesses like a passion, all His life and perfections.  

His love for us is more than mercy, more than wisdom, more than justice, more than knowledge, more than power, because it uses all of God’s attributes in the behalf of our creation, preservation, salvation and glorification. God’s love for us is so boundless, so incessant, so all-mastering, that everything else in Heaven and earth must give place to it. To satisfy God’s love for us, His own dear Son must be surrendered, and incarnated, and pass through humiliation, and through multiplied and most exquisite suffering and shame, unknown to any other creature; the Holy Ghost must be given, grace must be pushed with all speed, countless multitudes of bright strong angels must fly, and work and watch over us for thousands of years; wisdom must be taped to carry forward gigantic schemes of providence; Jesus must weep, His blood must flow; the Holy Ghost must groan; all because God loves us so much, that all His perfections and attributes must be mustered in our behalf. Truly God loves us with every part of His infinite nature.  

4. God loves us personally, in our individuality. He does not lump us in the gross, nor as atoms in a mass, all grouped together. God never loses us in the bulk of other creatures, but, with all the immensity of His Godhead, carries each one of us, with all that goes to make up our individual lives just as distinctly, and separately, and tenderly, in His loving attention, as if we were the only creatures that He had to care for. Personality is the crowning fact in all the universe. In all the religions invented by the devil, like Pantheism, the aim is to ignore personality, and deal with creatures in a conglomerate mass. Hence Brahminism teaches the absorption of the individual soul ultimately into an unconscious state. Modern Christian Science, which is simply the refined worship of demons and ancient Brahminism with an English face on it, denies the personality of God.  

The things that God loves most, the devil hates most. Nothing is more precious to God than the everlasting, distinct personality of His creatures; but Satan and tyrants look upon men as only a bulk of “dumb driven cattle” to serve their greed and ambition.  

God loves and prizes us in our individuality to such an extent that He has filled us with ten thousand private marks, in our souls, and bodies, and lives, and experiences, that never will be duplicated in any other creature. It is a constant astonishment to my mind, how God can make hundreds of millions of human beings, and no two of them just exactly alike; no two faces, no two voices, no two pairs of eyes, nor pairs of ears, nor pairs of hands, nor pairs of feet, nor two sets of teeth in all the millions of men. In the structure of the bones, and sinews, and the wrinkles in the palm of the hand, and on the foot; in our individual walk, in the way we each learn our letters, or think, or talk, or write—in every part of soul, and body, there are peculiarities written in each individual, that never have existed, and never will exist in any other individual.  

God could give an angel a description of our right thumb, or the particular way that we weep, or smile, and without any other mark to tell us by, that angel could fly from Heaven, and pick us out from hundreds of millions of other creatures with unerring precision. I stand bewildered at this inexhaustible fertility in the creative mind of our God. Any man who can look at these facts, and be an infidel, must be a consummate fool, who has sold his common sense to the devil.  

God has so fashioned us that we each have a deep, secret world in our inner hearts, of thoughts, and loves, and yearnings, into which no fellow creature can perfectly enter. Our God is the only One Who can go to the bottom of our inner selves, and know all the hidden chambers of our being, and the only One Who can meet all the requirements of our separate individual personality.  

5. God loves us constantly. Our fellow creatures love us when we seem lovable, or worth loving. Creature love, in the nature of things, is soon exhausted; it soon breaks down, and gets discouraged. The love of a mother will come as near to the love of God in holding out, and keeping up through all sorts of life’s vicissitudes, as any other love known on earth. But all mothers do not love alike, and the best of their creature love has a limit. Right where human love has run its race, and broken down—fatigued and exhausted—the love of God comes up fresh and full, bounding and radiant, with a sweet cheerfulness, as if it had just begun. Oh, how the love of God, year after year, has followed us through the wilderness of wandering, over the wild mountains of wayward foolishness, through cold stormy nights, and has listened for our cry for help!  

Did you ever notice how the love of God hunts down poor sinners, through the gaieties of youth, the passions or ambitions of middle life; through the thorny paths of crookedness, and wickedness; through dissipation, and utter wreckage of health, and home, and character; through prisons, and poverty, and abandonment? Oh there is nothing in all the world like the love of God!  

Why is it that God loves us so, and that His love pursues us so constantly, right in the face of the thousands of wrongs and insults that we have given to it? It is because God created us out of love for us, and gave us an everlasting personality, more sacred to Him than all the gorgeous worlds that float about us, and because He wants our love in return. Even when sinners forever settle it, that they will be in league everlastingly with the devil, still God loves His own creation, and that part of a man which came from God will be loved by Him to all eternity.  

6. God loves us with a crowning, rewarding love. It is impossible in the true sense, for God to ever owe us anything. On the other hand, we owe Him everything, for as the Apostle says, “What have we that we did not receive?” As little children give gifts to their fathers, with the very money which their fathers give them, so the very love and worship that we give to God are from the created capacities and the grace that He first gives us. There are three wonders to God’s love for us; the first is, that He should create us out of nothing and endow us with such marvelous gifts and faculties; and the second wonder is, that His love for us should lead Him to redeem us at such enormous cost from an awful fall; and the third wonder of His love is, that He should invent a way to pay us for our little services to Him, and give us such stupendous rewards for such little things as we do and suffer for Him.  

If we resist a temptation, or spend an hour in prayer, or give money to the poor, or speak a kind word to a soul, or read thoughtfully the Bible, or meditate upon God’s perfections, or bear a little reproach for Jesus, or do any little thing for Him, He seems to be eager to reward us for it. He gives us such sweet blessings, such tokens of favor, as if we had really befriended Him, when the fact is we have only been seeking our own salvation, and all the while have owed Him a debt ten thousand times greater than we could possibly pay. God loves us so well that He seems to invent excuses for blessing and rewarding us. Even a cup of cold water, given in His Name, is to have a reward. How easy it is to think about God, and yet Malachi tells us, that when Christ comes to make up His jewels, there will be much reward for those “who thought upon God’s Name.”  

So many times our dear Savior uses the word “great” in connection with coming rewards, so that for a few sufferings, for a few tears, for a few toils, which in reality are essential to our own welfare, Jesus says “great is your reward in Heaven.” It looks as if God was beside Himself in love for us. Just see, out of His love He gave us this wonderful existence, and then gave us grace to repent, to believe, and to love Him in return, and out of His love gave us the sanctifying Spirit, to live and labor for Him; and then out of His love He contrives to reward us, with honors, and glories in the ages to come. He gives us the love to love Him with, and then rewards us for loving Him with His own love. Did you ever see the beat of it in all the world?