BULLETIN 175

The Beauty and Reality of Divine Love

It is not a matter of a man, like some  god, a lord estimating and choosing before all things, what he will, free in his ways. It was more like that at the first, when the  main points were so simply and amply covered - obey your Maker and LISTEN to His voice, or don't do that; instead listen to some usurping character, non-Creator, posing as if knowledgeable. They chose and fell.

The  Fall did more than that, indicate the way man set his sails; for it is now God who chooses, and He says so in John 15:16, Ephesians 1:4, for example. True, He chooses in terms of certain principles  (as in Colossians 1:19, John 3:16-17),keeping in mind that to negate God has always been part of the open design for man, so giving meaning to love.

The options are two: for or against Christ the eternally appointed, anointed Saviour, whose people are foreknown before  mankind was even made or thus able to sin; but it was not a determination by divine fiat, as if at the first step, all was predestined. Rather as in Romans 8:30ff., first came His foreknowing all, this an exposure, not a determinist direction that would annul the liberty of love itself. God is love and nothing annuls it, for alas, some desire at every level, to exclude Him, this coming before all else whatsoever.

You may  be found (as in Proverbs 20:27) as one of His by His discernment, therefore, way back in eternity (Jeremiah 1 makes such a point in particular), as inclined to desire, beyond any pathological lust, the God who created you, gave you a body with its specifications all to be written out in commanding DNA in reams in one place (at a time), that is in every nucleated body cell in a multitudinous set of directions to be given power of implementation when history arrived, for the earth.

Gave you a body - but also a mind and a spirit, many found as chosen by Him - emphatically by Him, and recognised by Him as distinct from those with a different inclination, summed in a company as one also. Torn from their natural habitat by ambition, love, obstreperousness or whatever bent, these followed another, ultimately the enemy of all goodness, which man to this hour finds active to seek to accuse, confuse and control him, from within. But God, without mere dictation, would have all (and says so just as emphatically - Colossians 1:19, Matthew 23:37, Luke 19:42ff.), even in the Person of His only begotten Son, the eternal word incarnate, weeping for those who statedly *would not" have His salvation.

God can penetrate beyond the superficial and the pathological in mind, heart or body (Hebrews 4:13, Luke 1:37), to know and to restore, for He is light as well as love, and darkness flees when He acts, baulked by nothing and nobody. Yet severely He excludes what is not love but force, from His salvation actions.

It is as in Psalm 110, as volunteers in the end of the matter, that those who are His are discerned by Him and  as truly seen by Him beyond the Fall, come to Him. Though they are no longer sovereign in endowment. yet all the drag and disruption of sin is divinely penetrated like a heavy mist and so the Lord supernaturally may restore limb in body or love in mind and spirit; but not by doing violence to the will (Matthew 23:37. John 3:19, Isaiah 48). Indeed, He gives  vivid lament at their refusal of His offer. The nature of fallen man neither dictates nor through divine restraint, is dictated to; but those who are His are known, foreknown not by works (Romans 9:11) but divinely discerned disposition of the heart; and He chooses them, fulfilling such scriptures as I Timothy 2 and John 15:16 and 21ff..

The sinner is not in charge, as fallen, of the sovereign choice of God. The Almighty God is, and knows His own when they enter His fold, as foreknown. These He recognises and so enables to come freely. It is worth repeating that this seen in Jeremiah 1, especially. Nor is the foreknowledge of God subject to man or his limitations and imitations, the mortal acting the part of some potentate. It is as in John 1:14, Christ came from His eternity with all the realities of deity, and those who receive Him,  these have the authority to become children of God; and this whole amazing parallel does not rely on man or any part of him, but on the brilliant light of the intense love and desire of God. It is in neither extreme misinterpretation that the truth of this matter lies; but rather through and in the word of God in its depth and composure. He has told us. That is not only what we know, but how we know.

Again let us say it as in John 1:9-13: As to those who receive Christ, as seen in John 1, neither their salvation nor their regeneration depend on any feature or function in man, and that includes will. These two are the work of God, who both knows and superintends all.

God acts very lovingly with man (John 15:21-23), and it is His word which teaches us - all of it, His, not our own systems, so apt to become selective and sovereign in themselves.