The Surpassing Love of Christ

Perhaps nothing is more surprising in all creation than the love of Christ to his people. Our familiarity with the many passages of Scripture which refer to it sometimes makes us insensitive to the amazing magnitude of it. Words are strangely double-edged things. The more frequently we read them the less power over us they tend to have. Consequently we are always in danger of gliding over great doctrines unthinkingly and unfeelingly because we learn so quickly to take them for granted.

It is one of the tragic fruits of our fallen nature that we can grow in theological knowledge without growing in appreciation of what that knowledge means. The head may be full, while the heart is cold. Indeed, the oftener we study any doctrine the less sweetness it seems to give us.

Could any news be more exquisitely welcome than that God should love any man? Men are forever seeking good news. The saying of Christ ‘Each day has enough trouble of its own’ (Matt 6:34) applies to the torrent of bad news we hear and have to hear each day. Rare are the days of our life which do not bring us painful news of ‘wars and rumors of wars’, of famine and earthquakes, of crime, of theft, murder and violence.

The Bible’s message to us involves the breathtakingly good news that ‘God is love’. Such a statement, were we not made of stone, would be so welcome to us in this dark world of misery that we should run to trumpet it from the housetops, but we are deaf to that wonderful news. We must school ourselves to listen more carefully to this mighty piece of information. When we still our minds to hear the good news of God’s love, it beggars in all thoughts and swallows up all our fears. If God is love then every anxiety of believers is a lie. Over all the carnage of war and above the ghastly spectacle of human woe, over every helmet of the warrior and garment rolled in blood there is the rainbow of God’s covenanted grace. There is meaning to the most random events in life. There is a kind and wise Father in, through and over all things, even things filled with pain, suffering and death.

There would be comfort in the thought of God’s kindness even if such kindness were pity and nothing more. It would be comfort of a kind to think that God pities man’s plight even if He were powerless to prevent it. If this were all the Bible taught, it would fall far short of the ideal. But it would be worth something to an agonized humanity to look up amid the pain and suffering and to know that above the clouds sat a spectator-God who cared about, even if he could not cure, our maladies. For it is something to the wretched to know even of helpless onlookers who have sympathy and compassion.

But, blessed be God, our condition is greatly better than the case we have just imagined. The reality is that the God who pities both can, and wishes to, lift man above his miseries on earth. More still, he has acted in history, in the person of his Jesus Christ, in just such a way as to solve every problem, lift every burden, unloose every bond and remove every misery when we come trustingly to him. It is to rouse our witless minds to some appreciation of the immensity of God’s grace in the gospel that the prophets write in a style of seeming hyperbole. ‘Shout for joy, o heavens, rejoice, o earth, burst into song, O mountains! For the Lord comforts his people and will have compassion on his afflicted ones’ (Isa. 49:13). ‘Let the heavens rejoice, let the earth be glad, let the sea resound, and all that is in it, let the fields be jubilant, and everything in them. Then all the trees of the forest will sing for joy, they will sing before the Lord, for he comes, he comes to judge the earth. He will judge the world in righteousness and the people in his truth’ (Ps. 96:11-13).

Why else should these inspired writers call on inanimate nature to leap up in a chorus of song except to surprise us out of our inattention to the great goodness of God towards us in the gospel? Knowing our minds to be nine-tenths asleep to God’s love, therefore they try to startle us from our lack of appreciation.

Where shall we begin if we are to speak of the love of Christ? In marvelous kindness to us he looked past the fallen angels, leaving them forever in their sins, and laid hold of mankind, who were far lower in the scale of created excellence. Do not think that Christ needs our love, our fellowship or our devotion. As God he was eternally sufficient unto himself, and as the Son of God he had the fellowship of the Father and of the Spirit which is too great for words. When therefore he stooped to clothe himself with our weak humanity, he undertook an action of such love towards us that the whole angelic world must have gasped and stilled its wings in breathless adoration. O the love of a Christ who fills heaven and earth, yet puts on the garment of my manhood to bless me in himself!

But let us see Christ in his life on earth, the holy and great God-man, ‘trailing clouds of glory’, from the cradle to the cross. How patiently he ‘endured such opposition from sinful men’ (Heb 12:3). How patiently he corrects the errors of his own disciples! How affectionately he seeks them out in their lost state, calls them to himself in a variety of ways, comforts, teaches and prepares them for his departure and then prays to the Father to them (John 17). That they and all their number to come will triumph over every obstacle and arrive in glory at last! Indeed, he prays not only that they may arrive in the glory but, more than all abstract excellences, he prays as his last petition; ‘that the love you have for me may be in them and that I myself may be in them’ (John 17v26). Our Savior is not content that we should merely have heaven or love or glory. He wills that we should have him. For to a believer Christ is more than heaven and his presence better than crowns, thrones or jewels. Knowing this therefore, he swells our spiritual joy to bursting by ending his priestly prayer. ‘That I myself may be in them’ (v26).

‘Tis mystery all- th’ Immortal dies. Well does Charles Wesley state the awesome wonder we must feel when we view the cross of Christ, or rather the One who dies on the cross. The apostle Paul speaks of the four dimensions of Christ’s love, as love with length and breadth and depth and height (Eph 3:18). The proof of our small grace is our small gratitude to Christ for this, the supreme proof of his love towards us. But love is in every action, every word, every passion and every pang upon the cross. Not till he has carried his mediatoral task to the uttermost point of our need does he allow himself to relax in the sleep of death. But by then the cry ‘it is finished!’ is echoing and reverberating in every atom of the universe, not only in the rending of the veil and opening up of the Holy of holies, not only in the cracking of the graves of Old Testament saints, but in the remotest corners of this sin-cursed universe, in which now there is to be heard a groaning and travailing in birth till a rejuvenated universe at last appears (Rom 8:22, 2 Pet 3:10).

It must not be allowed to cross our thoughts that Christ’s love has now all been exhausted because the exhibition of it on Calvary was so extravagant. The same pure and perfect love is beating in his soul towards every one of his saints today as on the day of his agony and self-offering. It is this wonderful love which makes him ardent with desire for the day when his Bride shall be brought to him. Much he has loved her and much he has yearned for her to come into union with himself. Through all history he has watched her progress on earth and seen her faithfulness to him, often expressed in martyrdom and tears. He has loved to hear her voice and delighted in her confidences. Just as for her ‘to live is Christ’, so for him, as Husband of his Bride, to live, die, rise and intercede has been the church. No two beings shall ever exist for one another so completely as do Christ and the church. As he has died to have her eternally with him, so she in this world has gone ‘through fire and water’ (Ps 66:12) even through floods of torture and of blood for his sake. But the Church’s torments and sufferings have only proved the truth of the inspired word, that ‘many waters cannot quench love, rivers cannot wash it away’ (Song of Sol 8:7), for ‘love is as strong as death, its jealousy unyielding as the grave. It burns like blazing fire, like a mighty flame’ (v6). Christ and the church belong together in the eternal counsels of God, they will be together in the eternal ages of the world to come.

Let the believer think much and often of the love of Christ. By all right means let him stir up his thoughts of this mysterious Lover of his soul. Christ is more than a Savior. He is a Husband, flesh of our flesh and bone of our bone (Eph 5:30). It is a mistake to suppose that Christ has only repaired the harm done by Adam. He has done far more. Christ has done more for our good than Adam ever did for our hurt. He has raised us above angels to sit on his throne. He has lifted us to the highest level possible for created beings, that of eternal ingrafting into the God Man, If Satan’s lie ‘you will be like God (Gen 3v5) was the bait to drag us to hell. Christ’s obedience and blood have been the means both to lift us out of sin and well-nigh to raise us, were that possible, to be as ‘gods’ indeed. Gods, certainly, we are not and shall never be. But the love of Christ has exalted us to as close a nearness to that as it is permissible or desirable in any creatures to be.

There are many blessings for the believer in frequently recalling the love of Christ. Not the least of these is the flood of joy which it brings to his heart. Joy is good for us it unites all the faculties of the soul and generates fresh strength for service and for sacrifice it may be a part of the answer we are looking for in these days to the problem of ‘burn out’ and ‘break down’ among Christian workers. So long as we look at the wind and weather of our temptations or discouragements we shall sink beneath the waves. But a fresh sip of joy from the cup of Christ’s salvation will do much to send us about his work rejoicing. In so saying, of course, we do not mean to speak unkindly of any Christian whose health has been broken through excess of labours. But we do believe that a ‘felt Christ’ is one great need of the hour to counteract our miseries.

If our heart remains cold after we have thought of all the wonders of Christ’s love towards us, we must be ruthless with our affections and constrain to Jesus by a looking at the gulf between our blessings and our dezervings. Let us recall with deepest mortification that if Christ is my life, I was his death. If he is my righteousness, I was his damnation. As he is all my blessing, I was once his curse, his scourge, his ‘hell’. O what a contradiction of God I was when Christ found me and renewed the divine image upon my soul! O at what a distance from God I was when Jesus breathed life into me and bade me live in the near presence of his Father! So let every believer think and ponder often in his heart till the fire burns and the heart of stone melts in solemn appreciation of what we owe to him whose Name is above every name that ever shall be.

The believer whose heart feels the love of Christ will find he has at once a well-tuned harp with which to sing God’s praises. He has a Guest who will ‘eat’ with him (Rev 3:20), a Comforter who will visit him (John 14:18) a Friend who will treat him in this present life above the level of ‘servants’ and who delights to term us his ‘friends’ (John 15:15).

We began this chapter by suggesting that nothing is more surprising in all creation than the love of Christ. Perhaps we should add, however, the equally surpassing fact that so very few on earth appear to have any desire to know Christ’s love. But even that makes electing grace the sweeter.
[This slight abridged version of Chapter 10 of the book The thought of God by Maurice Roberts (The banner of truth trust) is published with the permission of the author.]