IN MEMORY OF MY DEAR BROTHER,DAYO OGUNDELE WHO WENT HOME TO BE WITH THE LORD ON SATURDAY 8TH OF MARCH 2014. LOVE - THE BASIS OF ALL GODS DEALING WITH MAN Everything that happen to us is coming from Gods unchanging love for us. We love him, because he first loved us (1 John 4:19). Many Christians experience difficulties later on in their lives, because they were never clear on this point initially. Right at the start of our Christian life we need to get this foundation strongly laid. Only so can we proceed further. When God created this earth, and put man upon it, His intention was that everything in it should live and move in an atmosphere of love. Even the obedience that He sought from man was not the obedience of slavery but of love. Since there can be no love in the true sense of that word where there is no freedom of choice, God endowed Adam with a will that was free to choose, even though it involved the great risk of a wrong choice - of man disobeying Him. At any cost God would have a relationship with man that was free. He never wanted slavish service from man. He did not want it then, and He does not want it today. Right through the Bible we see this picture of love governing all Gods dealings with mankind. In this connection, let us look at the first two references to the word love in the Bible. The first mention of any subject in the Bible is always a great help in studying that that subject, and we may expect therefore to find much profit as we look into these two passages. The first mention of love is in Genesis 22:2 where Isaac is called Abrahams only son whom he loves. The offering of Isaac on the altar that follows later on in the chapter is a clear picture of Calvary where God the Father gave His only Son as an offering for our sins. Accordingly the love referred to in verse 2 is a picture of God the Fathers love for Christ. The second mention of the word love in the Bible is in Genesis 24:67 which tells of Isaacs love for Rebekah - a husbands love for his wife. Here we have a clear picture, as the rest of the chapter also beautifully shows, of the love of Christ for His church. In the New Testament these two concepts are brought together by the Lord in John 15:9 - As the Father hath loved me (with the love of a father for a son depicted in Genesis 22:2) so have I loved you (with the love of Christ for the sinner that finds its parallel in the love of a bridegroom for a bride illustrated in Genesis 24:67). Thus even in the typology in the Old Testament, this thought of Gods intense love for man is reflected. Let us therefore look at Genesis 24 and, in this faint picture provided by the relationship between Isaac and Rebekah, see some of the characteristics of the Lords great love for us. When God seeks to show us how greatly He loves us, it is very significant that He uses the husband-wife relationship as an example. The union between husband and wife is the most intimate of all earthly relationships. While it would be unwise to carry the parallel too far, the Divine choice of this illustration, confirmed as it is by such New Testament passages as Ephesians 5:21-23, serves clearly to underline the very personal intimacy that the Lord desires to have with each one of us, and that He desires that we should have with Him. In Genesis 24, we may see a kind of allegory of the Divine search for such a relationship with man. There Abraham may be seen as a figure or type of God the Father, Abrahams servant as a type of the Holy Spirit and Isaac as a type of God the Son, while Rebekah takes her place as a type of alien, unredeemed man in the far country whom the Holy Spirit seeks to win to Christ. In the attitude of Abrahams servant (who on this mission was representing both Abraham and Isaac) and the attitude of Isaac towards Rebekah, we may discern characteristics of the love of Christ for us. First of all, we see in verses 22 and 53 that Abrahams servant gives gifts to Rebekah out of the riches of his master. This gives us an insight into the heart of God. When He comes to us, He does not come demanding, but giving. As a good husband will want to share all he has with his wife, so does the Lord desire to share all He has with us. Many of us have the idea that if we surrender ourselves fully to the Lord, He will make so many demands upon us that our lives will become miserable. Even though we may not say so in as many words, yet this is the reason why we shrink from an unconditional surrender to the Lord. Yet Jesus has clearly told us that the real thief who comes to take away what we have is the Devil (John 10:10). But how few believe this. If we really believed that the Lord Jesus has come to give us all that He has, there would be no reserve at all in the surrender of our lives to Him. A story is told of a pastor who once went to visit a poor old lady in order to bring her a gift with which to pay her rent. He went to her house and knocked at the door, and waited, and knocked again. But there was no response, and so at length he went away. A few days later he met her on the street. I called on you the other day with a present, he told her, but found the door bolted and could get no answer. Oh, said the old lady, I am sorry. I was inside, but I thought it was the landlord who had come to collect the rent. So I didnt open the door. Brothers and sisters, the Lord Jesus has not come to collect the rent! He has come to give us all that He possesses. He wants to bring us wealth unimaginable. How foolish it is not to open the door to Him. How foolish it is not to surrender our lives to Him utterly. Look again at Abrahams servant. Another feature of the story is that, even knowing she was Gods choice for Isaac, this man did not compel Rebekah to go with him. He respected her free will, and only when she herself was willing did he take her (verses 54-59). That too is characteristic of the love of Christ for us, as we saw briefly at the outset of this chapter. God respects mans freedom of choice. The love of God is without compulsion. He will never force you to do anything. Men in the world - yes, and even Christian leaders - may exert pressure upon you to do many things against your will, but God - never. (And in passing, may I say that any man who seeks to be like God will follow Him in this.) The Lord will never force you to read your Bible, or to pray, or to witness for Him. God never forces any sinner to turn to Him, neither will he force any believer to obey Him. In His instructions to Moses about the Tabernacle, God told him to receive offerings only from those who gave them willingly (Exod. 25:2), and this principle recurs in the New Testament (2 Cor. 9:7). Indeed it runs through the entire Bible. God does command obedience to Him, but He never forces anyone to obey. He will always respect the free will that He Himself has given to man. What need is there, then, for you and me to be afraid of a love like this? When Rebekah finally arrived at Isaacs home, Isaac himself was out in the fields praying (verse 63 mg.) The journey that Abrahams servant had made to fetch Rebekah had been a long one, about 600 miles each way, and he must have been away for around two months. As the time drew near for his return, Isaac would have been waiting with rising expectancy, wondering when his bride would arrive. Each day he would have looked eagerly out through the tent door for the awaited caravan; each day he would have gone out into the fields and prayed to God that she might come soon. Then one day he saw the camels coming. What joy must have filled his heart! Ah, but this is only a faint picture of the eagerness with which our beloved Lord now awaits us in heaven. This is an amazing fact but a true one, that even though we are so sinful and defiled and often rebellious too, yet so great is the love of the Lord, that in heaven He is waiting for us with longing expectation. There may be eager desire in our hearts to meet Him, but far, far greater is His desire to receive us and to share with us His glory. Even though God is completely self-sufficient, yet His self-chosen longing to dwell with mankind is another theme that runs right through the Bible. How grieved He must be when men doubt His love, in spite of all the proofs He has given of its reality and its greatness. Right through the history of the nation of Israel God sought to impress upon them the enduring nature of His love. He loved them with an everlasting love (Jer. 31:3; Deut. 4:37). He told them that the response that He sought was their love in return (Deut. 6:5). But they were just like us. They constantly doubted His love. And yet God kept on loving them. When they complained that He had forgotten them, He replied in those tender words of Isaiah 49:15: Can a woman forget her sucking child that she should not have compassion on the son of her womb? Yea, they may forget yet will I not forget thee. A mother may not think of her grown-up children all the time; but if she has a child on her breast, there is hardly a moment of her waking hours when her thoughts will not be upon that child. When she goes to sleep at night, her last thought is about that baby sleeping beside her. If she wakes in the middle of the night she looks at her child again, to see if all is well. When she finally wakes up in the morning, her first thought is again about her sucking child. Such is a mothers care for her little one. Even so, God says, does He care for His own. The book of Hosea also stresses this. The painful experience that Hosea went through in his own personal life was a parable of Gods attitude to Israel. His love, it tells us, endures as does that of a faithful husband to an unfaithful wife. The Lord has also placed the Song of Solomon in the Bible to picture this great truth of the faithfulness of the divine Lover to His wayward bride. Our faith needs to be founded firmly upon this fact - that all of Gods dealings with us are based upon His love. The words He will rest in his love in Zephaniah 3:17, have been translated: He is silently planning for you in love. Do we realize that every single thing that God allows to enter into our lives comes from a heart that is planning for us in love? Every trial and problem that has come into your life and mine has been planned for our ultimate good. When He ruins our plans, it is in order to save us from missing His best. We may not be able to understand it all fully on earth. But if we recognize that there are no second causes, and that everything comes from the hands of a loving God, it would take away all the worries and fears and hard thoughts that normally plague us. It is because believers are not firmly established upon this truth that these anxieties and cares arise in their minds, and they remain strangers to the peace of God that passeth understanding and the joy unspeakable and full of glory of which the Bible speaks. The ministry of the Lord Jesus Christ was very often a corrective to the false conceptions that even religious people of His day, well read in the Old Testament scriptures, nevertheless had about their God. Everything about Jesus, His healing the sick, His comforting words to the sorrowing, His loving invitation to those burdened with sin, His patience with His disciples and finally His death on the Cross, all showed the loving nature of the heart of God. How often He impressed upon His disciples that their heavenly Father loved them and cared for their every need. How often Jesus rebuked them for doubting their Father. If earthly fathers knew how to provide for their children, how much more would their loving heavenly Father provide for them (Matt. 7:9-11). The parable of the prodigal son was also intended to show them Gods great forgiving love towards his wayward, rebellious children. By irresistible logic, by parable and by personal example Jesus sought to correct the erroneous views that His generation had about God. In His final prayer before He went to the cross, He prayed that the world may know of Gods love (John 17:23). May God imprint deeply and eternally upon our hearts these assurances from His Word of the truth of His infinite and unchanging love for us, for faith in God can grow on no other soil but this.
Posted on: Tue, 11 Mar 2014 09:58:02 +0000
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