How precious also are Your thoughts unto me, O God!"
I have loved you, My people, with an everlasting love.
With unfailing love I have drawn you to Myself. Jeremiah 31:3
Here we have an everlasting thought of God, "in the
beginning, before ever the earth was." Believer, travel back in imagination
to the ages of the past. Before the trance of eternity was broken by any
visible manifestation of power—before one temple was erected in space,
before one angel waved his wing, or one note was heard of seraph's song—when
God inhabited alone these sublime solitudes—then there was a thought of you,
and that thought was—Love!
Think of the sovereignty of that love. He says
not, 'You have loved Me with your poor earthly love, therefore have I drawn
you.' No, no! It is from nothing in you—no foreseen goodness on your part.
Grace is the reason of all He has done—"God who is rich in mercy for His
great love with which He loved us." "I will have mercy," is His own
declaration—on whom I will have mercy." "Jacob," (that cunning,
scheming, crafty youth,) "I have loved."
Manasseh, (that miserable man who has defiled his
crown, dishonored his throne, and deluged Jerusalem with blood,) "I have
loved." That dying thief—fresh from a life of infamy, breathing
out his blasphemies on a felon's cross—"I have loved." And why,
let each of us ask, am I not a Cain or a Judas? Why am I not a
wrecked and stranded vessel, like thousands before me? Here is the reason;
"Yes, I have loved you." Before you had one thought of Me, yes, when your
thoughts were those of hatred, rebellion, enmity—My thoughts towards you
were thoughts of love!
And that Sovereign love, as it is from everlasting, so is
it to everlasting—endless in duration—enduring as eternity. The love
of the creature is but of yesterday—it may be gone tomorrow—dried like a
summer-brook when most needed. But the love of God is fed from the glacier
summits—the everlasting hills. We may estimate its intensity, when the
Savior could utter regarding it such a prayer as this, "That the love with
which You have loved Me, may be in them."
Oh, amid the often misgivings of my own doubting heart,
with its frames and feelings vacillating as the shifting sand, let me
delight to ponder this precious thought—the long line of unbroken love—every
link love—connecting the eternity that is past with the eternity to come—God
thinking of me before the birth of time—even then mapping out all my future
happiness and heavenly bliss—and standing now, with the hoarded love of that
eternity in His heart, seeking therewith to "draw" me!
It is "the exceeding riches of His grace in His kindness
towards us through Christ Jesus"—the moral gravitation-power of the cross,
by which His true people have ever been drawn. "I, if I be lifted up from
the earth, will draw all men unto Myself." Draw me, Lord, and I will run
after You. Show me Your loving-kindness thus enshrined and manifested in
Your dear Son. Constrain me to love You in Him, because You have first
loved, and so loved, me."
How priceless is Your unfailing love! Both high and low
among men find refuge in the shadow of Your wings. Psalm 36:7
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