|
Oh! what magnificence of love!
From Spurgeon's, "Christ's Marvelous Giving"
There was no necessity that Christ should
die, except the necessity of his loving us.
Ah! friends, we might have been blotted out of existence,
and I do not know that there would have been any lack in
God's universe if the whole race of man had disappeared.
That universe is too wide and great to miss such chirping
grasshoppers as we are!
When one star is blotted out it may make a little difference to
'our' midnight sky, but to an eye that sees immensity it can make
no change. Don't you know that this little solar system, which we
think so vast, and those distant fixed stars, and yon mighty
masses of nebulae, if such they be, and yonder streaming comet,
with its stupendous walk of grandeur - all these are only like a
little corner in the field of God's great works? He takes them all
up as nothing, and considers them, mighty as they are, and
beyond all 'human conception' great - to be but the small dust
of the balance which does not tip the scale; and if they were all
gone tomorrow there would be no more loss to him than as if a
few grains of dust were thrown to the summer's wind.
But that God himself must stoop, rather than we should die-
Oh! what magnificence of love!
Christ's dying to save sinners, and giving himself for the ungodly,
was a pure act of gratuitous mercy!
There was nothing to compel God to give his Son, and nothing
to lead the Son to die, except the simple 'might of his love' to
men. He would not see us die. He had a Father's love to us.
He seemed to stand over our fallen race, as David stood over
Absalom, and we were as bad as Absalom; and there He fled,
and said, "My son, my son! Would God I had died for you, my
son, my son!" But He did more than this, for He DID die for us;
and all for love of us who were his enemies!
|