God’s Love for Man
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burden of sin. He who had been one with God, felt in His soul the
awful separation that sin makes between God and man. This wrung
from His lips the anguished cry, “My God, My God, why hast Thou
forsaken Me?”
Matthew 27:46
. It was the burden of sin, the sense of
its terrible enormity, of its separation of the soul from God—it was
this that broke the heart of the Son of God.
But this great sacrifice was not made in order to create in the
Father’s heart a love for man, not to make Him willing to save. No,
no! “God so loved the world, that He gave His only-begotten Son.”
John 3:16
. The Father loves us, not because of the great propitiation,
but He provided the propitiation because He loves us. Christ was the
medium through which He could pour out His infinite love upon a
fallen world. “God was in Christ, reconciling the world unto Himself.”
2 Corinthians 5:19
. God suffered with His Son. In the agony of
Gethsemane, the death of Calvary, the heart of Infinite Love paid the
[14]
price of our redemption.
Jesus said, “Therefore doth My Father love Me, because I lay down
My life, that I might take it again.”
John 10:17
. That is, “My Father
has so loved you that He even loves Me more for giving My life to
redeem you. In becoming your Substitute and Surety, by surrendering
My life, by taking your liabilities, your transgressions, I am endeared
to My Father; for by My sacrifice, God can be just, and yet the Justifier
of him who believeth in Jesus.”
None but the Son of God could accomplish our redemption; for
only He who was in the bosom of the Father could declare Him. Only
He who knew the height and depth of the love of God could make it
manifest. Nothing less than the infinite sacrifice made by Christ in
behalf of fallen man could express the Father’s love to lost humanity.
“God so loved the world, that He gave His only-begotten Son.”
He gave Him not only to live among men, to bear their sins, and die
their sacrifice. He gave Him to the fallen race. Christ was to identify
Himself with the interests and needs of humanity. He who was one
with God has linked Himself with the children of men by ties that
are never to be broken. Jesus is “not ashamed to call them brethren”
(
Hebrews 2:11
); He is our Sacrifice, our Advocate, our Brother, bearing
our human form before the Father’s throne, and through eternal ages
one with the race He has redeemed—the Son of man. And all this that