Oh, the immensity of the gift! John Eady, The Love of God, Its
Objects, Gift and Design, 1865. For God so loved the world that
He gave His one and only Son. John 3 16 For surely it is not
angels He helps. Hebrews 2 16 God did not spare
angels when they sinned, but sent them to hell, putting them
into gloomy dungeons to be held for judgment. 2 Peter 2 4 If
God loved this world, this world of fallen men, and not the world
of fallen angels, then his love must be sovereign in its essence. For man was not the only sinful
being in his dominions. Beings of higher nature, and
having their position in heaven itself, were mysteriously involved
in the guilt and doom of apostasy and expelled from their bright
domain. And yet, Though they dwelt in
heaven, they are not summoned back to it. No pardon is offered
to them. No means of redemption are provided
for them. No mediator has taken on him
the nature of angels in order to make atonement for them. They
are left to the endurance of eternal death and damnation.
ever sinning, ever suffering, while pardon and restoration
have been proclaimed to the human family, our weak and erring race,
so nearly allied to the ground on which they tread, so proud
in their debility, and so impious in their thralldom. Would it
not have been a more reasonable plan, so to speak, for God to
have saved these lofty angelic exiles, and call them back to
the heaven in which they once lived, and for which they were
created, than to select this distant and miserable world of
ours, and by an abnormal and mighty process to purify and
refine its wretched and earthly outcasts, for a realm of existence
to which they are strangers, and to which they would never
have been able to penetrate. The reasons inducing the infinite
wisdom to make this sovereign choice—to redeem man, and not
the fallen angels—we may neither search nor discover. This preference
of fallen man to fallen angels as the recipients of divine love
can only be resolved into a mysterious exercise of divine sovereignty. He has loved fallen men on earth
and not fallen angels in hell. Both might have been punished
with eternal penalty And neither the one nor the other could have
complained of the justice of its doom. On the other hand,
both might have been forgiven and redeemed, and both would
have equally felt its salvation due to Jehovah's tender pity. Nay, though fallen angels in
hell had been redeemed, and all the fallen men on earth had been
left in their sin, Though only the demons, the first transgressors,
had been saved, and brought again to the solemn presence, before
which they once bowed, the bright myriads, with which they once
mixed, and the hallelujahs, which they once choired. while this
sinful world of ours was left to pine and groan hopeless and
helpless. One shudders to contemplate this
dreadful alternative. Who would have dared to impeach
the God of Grace, who has the right to give as He pleases,
when none have any claim on His bounty? But, O let His name be
extolled, earth has not been passed over, it has been selected
in His sovereign regard. Hey, God so loved the world! But the fervour and mightiness
of this love arrests our attention. God so loved the world, loved
it with such ardour and indescribable generosity, loved it so that
he gave his only begotten Son, O the immensity of the gift,
a divine gift from a divine giver. The grandeur of His love may
be seen in its results. If you can measure the gift,
you may gauge the depth of the love which bestowed it. Thus
have we considered the amazing fact that God has loved this
guilty, rebellious, and insignificant world and selected it to be the
object of His tender mercy. Nay, that He has so loved it
as to make provision for its deliverance in the gift of His
Son, that bright and matchless display of His lovingkindness. Herein is love, not that we loved
God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the atoning
sacrifice for our sins. 1 John 4, 10.