Daily Devotionals

Devotional: January 12th

THE MANIFESTED LOVE OF THE CHRIST .

It is high as heaven; what canst thou do? Deeper than Sheol; what canst thou know? The measure thereof is longer than the earth, and broader than the sea. - Job 11:8-9

We have no measure by which we can translate into the terms of our experience, and so bring within the grasp of our minds, what was the depth of the step which Christ took at the impulse of His love, from the Throne to the Cross. We know not what He forewent; we know not, nor ever shall know, what depths of darkness and soul-agony He passed through at the bidding of His all-enduring love to us. Nor do we know the consequences of that great work of emptying Himself of His glory. We have no means by which we can estimate the darkness and the depth of the misery from which we have been delivered, nor the height and the radiance of the glory to which we are to be lifted. And until we can tell and measure by our compasses both of these two extremes of possible human fate, till we have gone down into the deepest abyss of a bottomless pit of growing alienation and misery, and up above the highest reach of all unending progress into light and glory and God-likeness, we have not stretched our compasses wide enough to touch the two poles of this great sphere - the infinite love of Jesus Christ. So we bow before it: we know if we possess it with a knowledge more sure and certain, more deep and valid, than our knowledge of all but ourselves; but yet it is beyond our grasp, and towers above us inaccessible in the altitude of its glory, and keeps beneath us in the profundity of its condescension.

And, in like manner, this known love passes knowledge, inasmuch as with all our experience of it, our experience is but a little of it. We are like the settlers on some great island continent - as, for instance, on the Australian continent, for many years after its first discovery - a thin fringe of population round the seaboard, here and there, and all the great reach within, the bosom of the land, untraveled and unknown. So, after all experience of the love of Jesus Christ, we have but skimmed the surface, but touched the edges, but received, filtered as it were, a drop of what, if it should come upon us in fulness of flood, like a Niagara of love, would overwhelm our spirits. So we have within our reach not only the sorrow of limited affections which bring gladness into life when they come, and darkness over it when they depart; we have not only human love which, if I may so say, is always lifting its finger to its lips in the act of bidding us adieu; - but love which will abide with us for ever. Men die; Christ lives. We can exhaust men; we cannot exhaust Christ. We can follow ether objects of pursuit, all of which have limitation to their power of satisfying, and fall upon the jaded sense sooner or later, or sooner or later are wrenched away from the aching heart. But here is a love into which we can penetrate very deep and fear no exhaustion; a sea, if I may so say, into which we can cast ourselves, nor dread that like some rash diver flinging himself into shallow water where he thought there was depth, we may be bruised and wounded, but we may find in Christ the endless love that an immortal heart requires.

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