The fact that we can call ourselves sons of God is a miracle of God’s great love to us. Love that goes upward from the heart of man to God is adoration. Love that goes outward from one heart to another is affection. But love that stoops is grace. And God stooped to us. This is the most stupendous fact of the universe. It reveals to us that our God is love.
You cannot find love in the forces of nature. There may be plan and determination, order and intelligence, but you cannot find love. There’s nothing in the movements of the millions of suns that fleck the universe, nothing that can come within the vision of telescope or microscope, that can indicate love in nature. You cannot put it into a test tube, measure it with a micrometer, synthesize it, or analyze it. Love is not to be found in the forces of nature. You think perhaps that you see it in a calm scene of natural beauty. You stand in the pine forest and listen to the softness of the wind in the branches. The sound is broken by the whir of a bird’s wing. The smell of the sea comes up on the breeze to help swell your heart. And then the wind changes. Clouds drive forward. The thunder roars. Lightning strikes the trees. Hail beats down the flowers. The sea beats against the shore again and again. Where is the love?
You passed down the street and your eye catches the warm light coming from a window. You glance into the room. What a the scene of comfort. A father sits in a big chair reading. Children play on the rug beside the fire. The mother sits nearby sewing. What a scene of love. Then suddenly, she rises and touches one of the little ones on the cheek. She glances at the father and speaks a word. He looks at the child, touches it, and then telephones for a doctor. The doctor comes, and then a nurse, and then the undertaker.
Where is love in the force with which we have to contend?
If we had no other evidence, we could never know that God is love. He could alter the stars in their courses and make them into fiery letters across the sky so that instead of being in the form of Orion or the Big Dipper, the letters would spell out the words, “God loves you.” But were there no other evidence than those starry letters, we would have a right to let doubt gnaw our hearts and to think that we were the unfortunate playthings of some fortuitous hazard and chance. But God has demonstrated His love. When we were dead in trespasses and sins, He came! Not grasping at the brightness of His glory, not shunning our lowly condition, but taking upon Himself the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men, and that was not all. Being found in fashion as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient unto death, even the death of the cross. Now, I know that God is not some far distant impersonal force! Now, I know that God is love!
Donald Grey Barnhouse
