July 15 Daily Devotional

Bible Verse

"In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only begotten Son into the world, so that we might live through him" (1 John 4:9).

Devotional

"God is love" was the great truth that Jesus came to make known. Hence God's love is clearly a revelation to man rather than a discovery by man.

Divine love was the last perfection of Deity to baffle the research of human wisdom. Other attributes might be dimly traced in creation. Glimmerings of God's wisdom, power, and goodness might be seen in the "things that have been made" (Rom. 1:20). But how God could love sinners, how he could redeem and save sinners, was a question to which nature's oracle returned no response. In the exercise of the vast powers with which his Creator has endowed him, man may discover everything but this. He sweeps the firmament above him with his telescope, and new constellations of surpassing glory arise before his view. He delves into the earth beneath him, and ancient and long-lost cities are unearthed. He works problems, and science develops new and startling wonders. But there is one discovery that he cannot make. There is one wonder surpassing all wonders—the most marvelous and stupendous—that he cannot unravel. Nature, aiding him in all other researches, provides him no clue to this. The sunbeam does not paint it upon the brilliant cloud. The glacier does not reflect it from its dazzling brow. The valley's stream does not murmur it in its gentle music. It does not thunder in the roar of ocean's billow. It does not sigh in the evening's breeze. It does not waft from the opening flower. All nature is profoundly silent upon a theme so divine and strange, so vast and tender, as God's redeeming love to man.

But the Son, leaving the bosom of the Father—in which from eternity he had reposed, and which in the fullness of time he relinquished—has descended to our world to correct our apprehensions and to dislodge our doubts. He came to calm our fears with the certainty of the wondrous fact that God is still mindful of man, and takes delight in man. He came to reassure our hopes with the truth that no revolt or alienation, no enmity or ingratitude, has turned away God's heart from man. Rather, he still loves him, and that he "so loved [him] that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish, but have everlasting life" (John 3:16).

Thus he came, his Father's representative, to declare him to man. And as he wrought his brilliant miracles of stupendous power, thus attesting the fact of his Godhead; and as he pronounced his discourses of infinite wisdom, thus unlocking the treasures of his grace; and as he traveled all laden with our sins to the cross, thus unsealing the fountain of his compassion; he could say to all who challenged the divinity of his mission, or who asked him for a vision of the Father, "Whoever has seen me has seen the Father" (John 14:9); "I and the Father are one" (John 10:30).

Behold the mission of the Savior to our world! He came to lift the veil and reveal the heart of God—that heart throbbing with a love as infinite as his nature, as deathless as his being. He did not come to inspire the love of God, but to reveal it. The atonement did not initiate the Father's love, but rather it expounded it. The love was already there. Sin had but clouded its existence. Rebellion had but arrested its flow. Struggling and panting for a full, unrestrained expression, it could find no adequate outlet, no appropriate channel in its course to man, except in the surrender and sacrifice of its most costly and precious treasure. The Son of the Father had to bleed and die before the love of the Father could embrace its object.

And now, O child of God, the veil is withdrawn, the thick cloud is blotted out, and your God stands before you all arrayed in inexpressible love. His heart is your divine pavilion. His bosom is your sacred home. "The only God, who is at the Father' side, he has made him known" (John 1:18).

O, love, how deep, how broad, how high,
how passing thought and fantasy,
that God, the Son of God, should take
our mortal form for mortals' sake!

(Anon., Latin, 15th century; tr. by Benjamin Webb, 1854 (text of 1871)

Be sure to read the Preface by Octavius Winslow and A Note from the Editor by Larry E. Wilson.

Larry Wilson is an ordained minister in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. In addition to having served as the General Secretary of the Committee on Christian Education of the OPC (2000–2004) and having written a number of articles and booklets (such as God's Words for Worship and Why Does the OPC Baptize Infants) for New Horizons and elsewhere, he has pastored OPC churches in Minnesota, Indiana, and Ohio. We are grateful to him for his editing of Morning Thoughts, the OPC Daily Devotional for 2011.