Jeremiah 31:3

Jeremiah 31:3

I. Divine love is a fact; there can be no doubt of the teaching of the Scripture on this subject. The God of the Bible is a God of love, He is a Father in heaven. He cares for us, He watches over us, He guides us, He saves us. This attitude of Divine love is the very core of the Gospel. It may be said to encounter two obstacles within us: our fears at times, and then, what seems the very opposite, our pride and self-confidence. (1) The instinct of conscious guilt is fear, and when the sense of sin is strongly awakened we are apt to turn away from God, and to feel as if God must hate us. But God never hates us. He hates our sins and will punish those sins. But in the very hatred of those sins there is the reality of Divine love. (2) Not only does our fear sometimes turn us away from the thought of God, but our self-sufficiency. We feel as if the powers of nature were strong in us, and the sense of sin dies down; we feel as if God would overlook our sins, and that we are not so sinful after all; we feel as if we might trust to His goodness, as if it were, so to speak, good nature. But this is equally inconsistent with true spiritual experience. "If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us."

II. God not only loves us; He loves us everlastingly. The fact of Divine love is not only sure in itself, it is never uncertain in incidence. Whatever appearance there may seem to the contrary, it is still there. The voice of God is not still because man does not hear it, and the love of. God is not gone because man does not feel it. It is still crying to us; it abides as an everlasting fact. "Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love."

III. The love of God is individual; it is personal; it is the love of one loving heart to another; it is no mere impersonal conception of supreme benevolence; it is the love of a father to a child, the love of a mother to a daughter; it would not be love otherwise, for it is a distinguishing idea of love that it discriminates its object. "With lovingkindness have I drawn thee."

J. Tulloch, Christian World Pulpit,vol. xxv., p. 209.

References: Jeremiah 31:3. Spurgeon, Sermons,vol. xxxiii., No. 1914; Ibid., Morning by Morning,pp. 60, 355; S. Martin, Westminster Chapel Pulpit,5th series, No. vii.; G. Brooks, Outlines of Sermons,p. 153.