Christ's Eternal Love for His people
"The LORD hath appeared of old unto me, saying, Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee." -Jeremiah 31:3 [KJV]
There
can be no new thought in the mind of God. New thoughts, new feelings,
new plans, new resolutions continually occur to our mind; for ours is
but a poor, fallen, fickle, changeable nature. But God has no new
thoughts, feelings, plans or resolutions; for if He had He would be a
changeable Being, not one great, eternal, unchangeable I Am. All His
thoughts, therefore, all His plans, all His ways are like Himself,
eternal, infinite, unchanging, and unchangeable.
So
it is with the love of Christ to the Church. It is eternal, unchanging,
unchangeable. And why? Because He loved as God. Never let us lose sight
of the glorious Deity of Jesus. He loved her in eternity as the Son of
God, prior to His incarnation. That was but the fruit of His love. We
can, therefore, assign no beginning to the love of Christ, for it
existed when He existed, which was from eternity.
Neither
can we put any end to that love, for it can only end with Himself; and
as He had no beginning, so He has no ending. His love then is as Himself, which as it knew no beginning shall know no end. O what a mercy
it is for those who have any gracious, experimental knowledge of the
love of Christ, to believe it is from everlasting to everlasting; that
no incidents of time, no storms of sin or Satan, can ever change or alter that eternal love, but that it remains now and will remain the same to all eternity!
-preacher J.C. Philpot (1802–1869 A.D.)
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